In fact, software for a job like recruiting is going to be used by people who only spend a few hours a month hiring people. For them, the process of reviewing applicants or taking in interview notes is a side job. Something they cannot afford to be trained for separately or do day-after-day, often enough to become experts with a complex tool.

The tools business users have for tasks like that ought to be pretty, simple, self-explanatory and yes, even fun!

We will be talking more about our design concepts and the way we solve complex problems with simple user interfaces. As a teaser for future posts on the topic, I’ll share with you a presentation delivered by our UI/UX queen in a web conference last weekend.

The post Business software UIs don’t need to be ugly appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Its purpose, to communicate the facts about a person’s qualifications and experience, is already being served much better by LinkedIn profiles or online application forms. But strangely enough, the tools we use for hiring are little more than a fancy process for moving resumés around. In some companies it’s email, attachments and the dreaded excel file. In others you’ll find “hiring solutions” that look a lot like a resumé database with a smattering of workflow management in the mix.

Choosing the right person for your team can be a fascinating exercise. But most of the time we put into it ends up being wasted into managing the process and shuffling through information that’s poorly presented. It should be spent reviewing facts and making informed decisions. If you remove the tedium, hiring would be easier, quicker and smarter, because you’d focus on what matters.

We spent over 5 years hiring dozens of people for a fast-growing company. Hiring became our second job. We tried everything from email to advanced hiring software. We still haven’t found an applicant tracking system that focuses on simplifying the most time-consuming task: browsing, screening and managing candidates.

So we built our own.

Everything you need. Nothing you don’t.

We put a premium on simplicity, choosing the features that matter the most. Precisely because we’re not trying to be everything to every company, we can afford to skip the complexity of too many options and too many features that most companies don’t need.

We put all our focus on finding the right candidate. The hard part of hiring ought to be choosing the best candidate from a good shortlist instead of building that shortlist in the first place. Workable will help you spend more time with your shortlist candidates and less time screening the ones you don’t need.

We believe that efficient communication can replace complex workflows, so we built a tool that allows you to easily collaborate with comments and notifications, concepts that any Facebook user is already familiar with.

We know that hiring is a second job for most people involved in it, so we made an interface that’s easy to use and good looking – so it feels a little bit less like work.

We are convinced that hiring should be simple. We made it Workable.

The post It should be simple. Now it’s Workable. appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Workable is designed to be simple to use so getting started is really easy.

1. Sign-up with your LinkedIn credentials. Don’t worry, it’s 100% safe, you are directly authenticating with LinkedIn’s servers (it’s similar to the ‘login with facebook’ button you’ve seen on many websites) so that we can automatically pick up your name, title, company profile, etc.
2. Create your company account by importing your company details directly from LinkedIn.  It’s quick and easy. If your company doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile, select the option to create your Workable company account from scratch and fill in the relevant details.
3. From the Workable Dashboard you can get on with setting up everything you need to start hiring: customize your careers page, create and publish new job openings, invite team members to join Workable and much more.

Who is this for?

Workable helps companies improve the quality and efficiency of their hiring by simplifying the most time-consuming task: collecting, browsing, screening and managing job applications. If your hiring involves a lot of email, PDF attachments and the hassle that comes with them, theWorkable applicant tracking system will make your life a little bit easier.

Is this ready for action?

Absolutely! You can start hiring right away. We are still ironing out a few kinks here and there, but all the core features are bug-free and fully functional.

Tell us what you think

The whole point of running a beta is to hear from people using it and discover ways to improve our software. We’re here to help you make the most of your experience hiring with Workable, so send us an email at support@workable.com and we’ll be glad to help with anything you need.

Ready to take it for a spin? Start here.

The post Help us re-invent hiring appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

We wanted better hiring software, so we made our own.

1. I should not be managing documents and emails. A computer should be collecting, organizing and showing me job candidates the way I browse people on LinkedIn or Facebook.
2. I should not be decoding a million different resume styles that basically contain a few standardized pieces of information. A computer should show candidate facts to me in a readable, uniform manner.
3. I should not be deciphering long documents to extract simple information such as “let’s add up this person’s years of work experience”. A computer should be calculating and summarizing these for me.
4. I should not have to be fishing out answers to simple questions such as “does this person have a degree in a technology subject”. The applicant should be ticking my requirements when he applies.
5. I should not be wasting time with irrelevant applicants. My applicant tracking software should show me the 3-4 most important things like current employment, highest education degree and keyword matches, in a compact way, so I can quickly discard the obvious negatives.
6. I should not be jumping through hoops to get my job done. A pretty, uncomplicated interface should show me all I need to know about each candidate, alongside other candidates, and help me quickly screen with minimal effort.
7. I should never again use email to share notes or discuss candidates with my colleagues. My hiring tool should let me add notes to candidates just like I put comments on Facebook or a forum. The same tool should show me a notification when someone mentions me in a comment or takes action on a candidate in my hiring pipeline.
8. I should not be scoring, grading and categorizing. I should have simple options to reject or shortlist someone. I’m not here to assign relative values to people. I’m just choosing which ones I want and which ones I don’t. If there’s testing to be done, it should be automated. If it can’t be automated, it belongs to an interview.
9. I should not suffer archaic interfaces and arcane options. It should be as easy to use as Facebook or LinkedIn. And pretty.
10. In other words, I should be doing the clever bits, and software should do the tedious part.

Are you as frustrated as we were with some of the above? Maybe you should try out our Workable hiring software

The post A manifesto for better hiring software appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

At the heart of Workable is your recruiting pipeline. It’s an effective way to track and manage your candidates, from the moment they apply to the moment you decide to invite them in for interview.

If you’re part of a hiring team, when you log in to Workable, the dashboard will show a recruiting pipeline for each job you’re working on. Today we changed the way the recruiting pipeline looks.

Until now, your pipeline showed the total number of candidates in each stage. Now, the number you see is the number of qualified candidates per stage, i.e. we don’t count the people you have reviewed and disqualified.

We made this change to help you focus on what needs to be done, and make faster progress with your recruiting. The new pipeline has less visual clutter and lets you quickly identify the stages with candidates that need attention.

You will also find two new tallies at the top-right corner. The first one shows you the total number of candidates, including the disqualified ones. The second one indicates the number of active candidates in the pipeline, in other words how many are still in consideration.

Why change something that worked?

We’ve thought about this change for a long time. It’s always good to think twice before changing something that gets the job done and people are happy with. On the other hand, as more and more people use Workable, we see new behaviours that make us change our perspective about the ideal user experience. Pick a random feature you love in Workable and you can bet that it’s been changed 2-3 times, adapting to how people use it, until it got the shape that you now find so intuitive.

We’ve received feedback from many of you and observed how the majority of Workable users are approaching recruitment. We keep hearing variations of “the first thing I need to know when I log in is where to go to make progress.”

Hiring managers want an easy way to spot unreviewed candidates, so they can go straight to making decisions about who to advance and who to drop. Internal recruiters want to home-in on batches of candidates that must be scheduled for interviews and spot the ones that are missing feedback.

This inbox-zero approach, will help you always focus on doing stuff that moves you towards a decision. It reduces the time you spend looking for things to do, and speeds up your time-to-hire. We hope you’ll enjoy working with it and, as always, we’re open to hear your feedback.

Find out more about the pipeline and see how you can create a custom recruiting pipeline, tailored to your company process.

Note

This change has not affected your candidates’ status or pipeline stage in any way, nor has it removed or hidden any candidates. We only changed what numbers we show you on the dashboard, to help bring to attention the information that matters the most in day-to-day use.

The post Inbox-zero recruiting appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Research shows that a third of all candidates who declined a job offer did so because they’d already accepted an offer somewhere else. So speed matters.

Accuracy and attention to detail also matter. Offer letters are formal documents, which carry financial and legal obligations. They should be clear and comprehensive in terms of content. Making a mistake or an omission could damage your relationship with your prospective employee and your company reputation. By standardizing your job offer process and your format—using templates for each job rather than producing them ad-hoc—you can ensure the right information is included in every job offer.

Get offers out faster

Workable’s Offer Letters and Offer Approvals feature is designed to keep your Offer Acceptance Rate (OAR) healthy. It streamlines and automates key stages in the process, making it quicker to write, approve and send your offer. It also includes e-signatures, making it easier for candidates to accept, and your hiring team to keep track of the details.

Here’s how:

A library of offer letter templates

With our new Offer feature it’s easy to build up a library of templates for every role. Upload your own template or use one provided. All you need to do is decide on the unique information you want to include in each offer. Choose from a list of variables, such as start date or salary, to customize every document automatically. These are displayed as placeholder text, and will be automatically replaced with the appropriate data per candidate. Once saved, your templates are available for key members of the hiring team to use for successful candidates in the future.

Live status tracking on a candidate’s profile makes it simple for the hiring team to follow the progress from offer to acceptance. By glancing at the timeline see the current status of an offer (pending approval, sent, accepted, declined) and receive automatic notifications when the status changes. With real-time updates you can react quickly if an offer’s declined; review your original offer, submit it for approval and send a counter offer.

E-signatures

Integrated e-signatures make it simple for candidates to accept—all it takes is two clicks. As well as saving valuable time (reducing back-and-forth emails) it also makes for a stronger candidate experience. Once signed, a copy of the document is available on the candidate’s timeline. You can also choose to include a company e-signature on your offer document.

Optimized for mobile

Chances are your preferred candidate is also someone else’s ideal hire and likely to receive multiple offers. Using our Offer feature candidates can read and sign your offer document from any device (desktop or mobile). So wherever they are when you send your letter (in the office or on the train) they can accept quickly and easily.

Automated offer letter approval workflow

When you’re juggling multiple offers for different hiring managers getting fast approval is a challenge. Workable’s Offer Approval feature is designed to support larger companies with complex workflows. By automating the job offer approval process it shortens the time it takes to get an offer to a candidate. Just create an approval workflow for each template and add the people you need to sign-off each offer. Approval requests will then be sent automatically to each approver. This means hiring teams are free to focus on other tasks while the approval process runs its course.

Restricted access rights

For large organizations, there’s the option to save templates so that only people associated with specific departments and locations have access rights to the content. Thus increasing levels of privacy and control.

Get the content right

Offer letters set the tone for the ongoing relationship between your company and your future employee. As an official document, a good offer needs to tick a number of different boxes. From showcasing your company’s brand and culture to accurately reflecting all the relevant job details, getting the content right is key if you’re to move quickly and seal the deal.

Having a library of offer document templates ready to go means that anyone in your hiring team can make an offer confident that all the right information has been included. And because the format is standardized, your hiring team’s approach will be consistent across all of your job offerings.

When you’re ready to make an offer just select the correct template for the job. Then add in the details unique to each offer (for example, the salary offered). Every offer letter comes with a pre-drafted covering email, which your hiring managers can edit to further personalize their approach.

Building a positive candidate experience

Directly linked to recruiting performance, the candidate experience you provide can mean the difference between an offer being accepted or declined.

By managing the entire job offer process within your recruiting software, candidates will receive seamless and timely communication from the moment they apply to the day they start their new job with you. This represents a big tick when it comes to building a positive candidate experience. And enhancements designed to speed up the job offer process (e-signatures, mobile optimization) show you’re serious about securing their talent and want to make it as easy as possible for them to accept. Another tick in the box.

Get started

If you’re already using Workable find out more about how to use our Offer Letter and Approvals feature.

Not using Workable yet? Sign up for a demo and see how this new feature and others will work for your organization.

The post Fast-track your job offer process with Workable’s recruiting software appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

You’ve created a shortlist and interviewed the most promising candidates. And now you’re ready to make your hire. Your best candidate appears well-qualified and a great fit. But are they who they say they are?

Background checks remove chance from the equation. They reinforce your hiring decision and make sure your next employee is someone you can trust. But they can take time to process. Which could mean your preferred hire gets snapped up by someone else. Trusted Employees runs customized and compliant background checks at speed. It takes 60 seconds to find out the most pertinent facts, and 1-3 days for a complete set of reports. Which means you can move quickly, and with conviction, to secure your preferred hire.

Trusted Employees helps businesses hire the right talent using the latest technology and rigorous data quality standards. It offers a range of solutions to suit the diverse screening needs of small, medium and large-scale organizations, in the US and Canada. Its comprehensive employment background screening services include: criminal records searches, drug testing, identity checks, and more. The checks are accurate and always 100% FCRA-compliant.

Manage the background checking process within Workable

We know that life is easier when all the tools you use for hiring work together seamlessly. Our integration with Trusted Employees empowers you to manage the background check process within Workable. Once you’ve set up the integration, you can select the applicants you want to background check, choose the background check report type, and let Trusted Employees take care of the rest!

More integrations coming soon

We’re always working on new integration partnerships so that everyone’s hiring tech stack syncs together (you shouldn’t have to be a systems implementation expert to have a great experience across all of your hiring tools). If you’re a Workable user and have a tool you’d love to see integrated with Workable, let us know! If you’re a software provider, why not find out more about our Developer Partner Program and get involved?

The post Speed up background checks with our Trusted Employees integration appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The Developers’ API

Today we are excited to announce the launch of our latest APIs for providers of Skills/Behavioral Assessments, Coding Challenges, Background Checks, and Video Interviews as well as multiple updates to our existing APIs that make it even easier for providers of HRIS/onboarding and Sourcing solutions to build integrations directly with Workable.

In conjunction with this API release, we’ve also created a new Developers site where customers and vendors can find the resources needed to build these integrations. Whether you’re a Workable customer who wants one of your external services to build a custom integration, or a provider who wants to enable your services for interested Workable customers, we invite you to review the documentation.

Launch partners

As excited as we are about announcing these updates, we are even more excited to announce our initial partners who will be releasing their integrations in Q2 2017.

Assessments

CriteriaCorp is a leading provider of online pre-employment aptitude, personality and skills tests. The partnership brings the power of their intuitive testing platform, HireSelect® , to Workable customers. The integrations allows customers to quickly identify top talent by deploying assessments directly through the Workable Platform, and viewing test results right in the Candidate Timeline.

Video interview

Conducting video interviews has become an essential tool for many employers and Workable customers who use Spark Hire or HarQen will now be able to coordinate these interviews and review the recorded sessions from inside their Workable account.

Coding challenges

Recruiting great technical talent can be one of the biggest challenges companies face. Codility makes assessing coders a breeze – even for those without a technical background. Their integration with Workable will enable recruiters and hiring managers to seamlessly use Codility assessments and interview tools within the Workable interface.

Sourcing

Without great candidates in the pipeline it’s impossible to make a great hire. With our updated and improved APIs for managing external candidates, Workable customers can now integrate with the sourcing tool of their choice including our latest partners: Hired and Yborder. Workshape already integrates with Workable, as recently announced.

HRIS/Onboarding

A new employee’s journey is just beginning when an offer is accepted. The critical activities that occur between accepting an offer and their first day can be the difference between an employee hitting the ground running or being left bogged down in paperwork in their first days. Workable customers can start the onboarding process and create a new employee record the moment a candidate has been hired via the Onboarding integrations with Sapling and Click Boarding and the HRIS integration with bob in the UK.

As you can see we’ve been very busy behind the scenes at Workable to create an ecosystem that brings all of your most valued tools recruiting tools into the our platform. Continue to watch this space for more partnership and integration announcements in the near future. Solutions providers who are interested in building an integration of their services for all Workable customers can apply to be an official Workable partner via our Developer site.

The post Announcing the Workable Developer Partner Program and developer APIs appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

You can select a trigger (for instance “anytime you get a new candidate”) and an action (“send a personalized email through Gmail to each new applicant) to make a zap.

Here’s some simple zaps we’ve made:

1.   Gmail
   Trigger: Create New Candidate in Workable
   Action: Gmail Sends Email
   Usecase: Send a personalized email to every candidate who applies for a position
2.   Slack
   Trigger: Create New Candidate in Workable
   Action: Slack Sends Message
   Usecase: Receive a notification in Slack when a new candidate applies to a position in Workable
3.   Hipchat
   Trigger: Create New Candidate in Workable
   Action: Hipchat Sends Message
   Usecase: Receive a notification in Hipchat when a new candidate applies to a position in Workable
4.   Google Sheets
   Trigger: Add New Row in Google Sheets
   Action: Workable Creates New Candidate
   Usecase: Upload candidates from your Google Sheets into Workable
5.   Google Contacts
   Trigger: Create New Candidate in Workable
   Action: Google Contacts Creates New Contact
   Usecase: Create a contact from new applications to your positions in Workable
6.   Typeform
   Trigger: Add New Submission in Typeform
   Action: Workable Creates New Candidate
   Usecase: Create your own application forms in Typeform and have submission create a candidate in Workable
7.   Zapier
   Trigger: Forward New Email to Email Parser
   Action: Workable Creates New Candidate
   Usecase: Create a new candidate in Workable by forwarding your conversation with them to Zapier Email Parser
8.   Mailchimp
   Trigger: Create New Candidate in Workable
   Action: Mailchimp Adds Subscriber
   Usecase: Add a subscriber to your ‘New Job Alerts’ mailing list in Mailchimp each time a candidate applies to a position in Workable
9.   Gravity forms
   Trigger: New Submission
   Action: Workable Creates New Candidate
   Usecase: Create your own application forms in Typeform and have submissions create a candidate in Workable
10.   Gmail
    Trigger: Gmail New Email
    Action: Workable Creates New Candidate
    Usecase: Create a candidate in Workable by tagging an email from a candidate

Zapier integrates with more than 400 different web apps, which means most recruiters or hiring managers are bound to be able to find at least a few ways to use it to work smarter, not harder. To get started on your own zap, check out the full list on Zapbook.

Now do it yourself

• Define a trigger: The first event that instigates another action. The trigger might be something like “Send a new email in Gmail” or “Create a new candidate in Workable.”
• Define an action: An action is what happens after the trigger. It might be something like “Create a Contact in Google Contacts” or “Get a message in Slack.”
• Ensure your Zap works and then you are set. Zapier will await the trigger and complete the actions you’ve set up.

Need a little help? Check out our support section on our most popular zaps.

The post New Workable-Zapier integration saves time with automation appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

We’ll talk through each integration here, but as always, if you’re already using Workable, let us know if you need help.

1) LinkedIn Recruiter System Connect (RSC)

As part of LinkedIn’s Preferred Partner Program, this integration brings a host of advantages to Workable:

Accurate, up-to-date candidate data
If a candidate or prospect updates their profile on LinkedIn, it’s now reflected immediately inside Workable. See when the situation has changed for prospects in your Talent Pool or recruiting pipelines and reach out with a timely email.

Effortless collaboration
Your entire hiring team now has more access to candidate information – regardless of which tools they use.

Inside Workable, you’ll be able to:

• Import limited LinkedIn profile data to create and refresh records
• See your InMail conversations and notes from LinkedIn Recruiter
• View applicant’s LinkedIn profile via live LinkedIn profile widget, which appears next to your candidate data

Inside LinkedIn Recruiter, you’ll be able to:

• Identify previous applicants and the disposition reasons
• Filter and prioritize past candidates who applied and were uploaded to Workable

An improved candidate experience
With everyone on the hiring team up-to-date, communication with candidates improves. Nothing is lost just because someone is out of the office or on vacation. Everyone remains up to speed, and can communicate from the place that suits them best, whether that’s LinkedIn or Workable on the desktop or mobile.

2) Apply with LinkedIn

Apply with LinkedIn makes it fast and easy for candidates to apply to open positions on your careers site. It improves applicant conversion by enabling candidates to start an application using their LinkedIn profile data.

When complete, their details are gathered as a candidate profile in Workable. Should the application remain incomplete, the potential candidate will be surfaced as an ‘Apply Starter’ in Recruiter.

LinkedIn Apply Starters
75% of people abandon job applications for all sorts of reasons. LinkedIn Apply Starters makes it simple for a candidate to share their LinkedIn profile before completing the application – just in case something comes up. What’s more, you can build your candidate database with candidates who have shown that they are interested in your company.

It’s known that reaching out to these candidates is 2x more likely get a response than the average candidate.

3) Easy Apply

Finally, in the spirit of improving candidate experience we’ve also integrated with LinkedIn Easy Apply. This enables the increasing number of mobile job seekers to search for jobs and complete their application using their LinkedIn profile.

LinkedIn Easy Apply adds an apply button directly to your job ad on LinkedIn. The key benefits are:

• 2x more applicants per job
• A reduction in the number of candidates that drop off on mobile

Preparing for the new year

Consider this an early gift for the holidays. We’re excited about launching this, especially now. New year provides a fresh new start for many, and chance to rethink their situation. People search for jobs, switch jobs, and are more open to new opportunities. Take some time to explore these features and get ready for a very busy new year!

…And if you’re not using Workable yet, schedule a demo to see these features in action.

The post Workable launches three new integrations through the LinkedIn Preferred Partner Program appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Today we’re excited to announce our latest integration partner, Namely, an all-in-one HR, payroll and benefits platform.

We know that valuable time is lost to manual data entry. This integration helps bring that to an end. Connect your Namely account to Workable and an employee profile is created automatically in Namely as soon as a candidate is moved to the ‘Hired’ stage in Workable.

The data transferred into Namely includes:

• Photo or avatar (depending on your account settings)
• First name
• Last name
• Personal email address
• Job title
• Start date
• Candidate resume
• LinkedIn url (depending on your social profile privacy settings)
• User status

Find out more about setting up the Namely integration. We hope you find this useful – look out for more integrations in the future.

The post New release: a partnership with Namely appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The information exported from Workable creates a new employee profile in BambooHR and includes the following details:

• Photo or avatar (depending on your account settings)
• First Name
• Last Name
• Job Title
• Department
• Personal Email address
• Personal phone number
• Gender (EEO enabled accounts only)
• Ethnicity (EEO enabled accounts only)
• Candidate resume

Setting up the BambooHR integration

Integrating your BambooHR account with Workable only takes 5 minutes. Depending on your company preferences, you can set up to auto-export data as soon as you move a candidate to the ‘Hired’ stage of your Workable recruiting pipeline, or you can allow members of your hiring team to export this data manually. Find out more about setting up the integration in our support center.

Not using BambooHR? We have other partnerships and integrations planned, so do watch this space and let us know if there is an integration you’d like us to consider.  In the meantime, the detailed candidate report allows you to export candidate data from Workable as a CSV, into the HRIS system of your choice.

The post New release: a partnership with BambooHR appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

“That is why we liked FbStart and why we were one of the first companies to support the program. It offers timely and sensible assistance to mobile startups in a very pragmatic way” said Workable’s CEO, Nikos Moraitakis moments after the announcement of the FbStart program today at f8 in San Francisco.

Recruiting is one of the biggest challenges startups face. In those small, often overworked teams, every hire is critical and tools like Workable can go a long way in getting it right.

All startups admitted in FbStart will have free access to the same technology used by hundreds of hyper-growth companies like Intercom, Vend, Declara, Invision and Transferwise, who rely on Workable to build great teams.

We can’t wait to see new and exciting companies flourish with the help of FbStart, and we’ll be all the more proud knowing that Workable is part of their success.

To find out more about FbStart

The post Workable teams up with Facebook to help mobile startups grow appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Fixing this is a lot simpler than you might think. Google already provides us with two ways of improving the sign-in experience in our apps.

Google Sign-In (previously known as Google+ Sign-In)
and SmartLock

The majority of users download an app and want to interact with it quickly – especially if it’s a productivity tool or some kind of a social network.

What a better way of helping them by letting them sign-in with just one tap?

Almost every Android user adds his/her Google account during the setup process. Most of the time this is their primary email address, which means it’s the email they use when they sign-up on various services. But usually, people tend to add more emails and Google accounts on their phones, for example: their work email.

This is something we can leverage in order to ease the sign-in process. To achieve this, we will use the Google Account Login package,

compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-auth:x.x.x'

from Play Services, which includes Google Sign-In API, as well as the Credential API for SmartLock. For the needs of this article we’ve also created a demo app which is available on Github.

So without further ado, let’s dive in the actual implementation.

Google Services Configuration File

To start using Google Services we first need to create a configuration file. This process has also been streamlined and it’s just one click to download it. You can find detailed instructions here. After downloading it, place it inside your “app” folder and you’re good to go.

Google Sign-In

Google Sign-In was previously known as Google+ Sign-In, back when Google required every new user to also create a Google+ social profile.

After Google dropped that requirement, all of their services were rebranded to plain ‘Google’, like ‘Google Sign-In’, for example.

As you can see at the bottom of the screenshot, this is the rebranded Google Sign-In button offered as a standalone view from Google.

<com.google.android.gms.common.SignInButton
        android:id="@+id/sign_in_button"
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content" />

Google Sign-In button (XML)

Now that we’ve added the Sign-In Button we need to configure it on our activity as well.

private lateinit var signInButton: SignInButton

override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)

    setContentView(R.layout.activity_sign_in)

    initViews()
}

private fun initViews() {
    signInButton = findViewById(R.id.sign_in_button) as SignInButton

    signInButton.setSize(SignInButton.SIZE_WIDE)

    signInButton.setOnClickListener {
        initiateGoogleSignIn()
    }
}

Google Sign-In button configuration

We also need to configure the GoogleApiClient, which will handle the Google Sign-In API and Credentials API requests:

private fun initGoogleApiClient() {
    googleApiClient = GoogleApiClient.Builder(this)
            .addConnectionCallbacks(this)
            .enableAutoManage(this, this)
            .addApi(Auth.GOOGLE_SIGN_IN_API, googleSignInOptions)
            .addApi(Auth.CREDENTIALS_API)
            .build()
}

Google API Client initial configuration

Let’s explain what these lines do:

1. addConnectionCallbacks → Makes the current Activity aware of GoogleApiClient connection lifecycle.
2. enableAutoManage → Lets GoogleApiClient “hook” on the current Activity in order to manage the connect-disconnect operations based on the Activity’s lifecycle.
3. addApi(Auth.GOOGLE_SIGN_IN_API, googleSignInOptions) → Here we’re declaring that we will use the Google Sign-In API, with the GoogleSignOptions we’ve already created.
4. addApi(Auth.CREDENTIALS_API) → We will also use the Credentials API for SmartLock, so we’re declaring this one as well.

We’re finally ready to proceed with the normal Google Sign-In flow. First step is to startActivityForResult with the Sign-In Intent when tapping on the Sign-In Button:

private fun initiateGoogleSignIn() {
    val signInIntent = Auth.GoogleSignInApi.getSignInIntent(googleApiClient)
    startActivityForResult(signInIntent, RC_SIGN_IN)
}

Initiate Google Sign-In

After that we’re ready to handle the result in onActivityResult:

override fun onActivityResult(requestCode: Int, resultCode: Int, data: Intent?) {
    super.onActivityResult(requestCode, resultCode, data)

    when (requestCode) {
        RC_SIGN_IN -> handleGoogleSignInResolution(resultCode, data)
    }
}

Google Sign-In Resolution handling

We can now process the result of Google Sign-In in order to update our UI. Depending on the result, we either sign-in the user or present them with a sign-up screen. All of these cases are implemented in detail on the demo project accompanying this article.

SmartLock

SmartLock is a powerful password manager that Google provides through the same Google Account Login package in Play Services.

But what does SmartLock offer for us as developers and for our end users?

SmartLock allows us to:

1. Ask users to save their credentials.
2. Request those credentials when opening the app.
3. Use credentials saved on Chrome, if we declare that our website and app can share credentials.
4. Display email hints in case we want to help the user in the sign-in/sign-up process.
5. Finally and most importantly, all of the above are stored on Google’s servers and users have complete control over what is saved/deleted.

We’ll cover all these cases in detail below, but if you think there might be something missing, please make sure to check the demo project on Github.

1) Ask users to save their credentials

First, we check to make sure the email address and password are valid for our business logic (this is a quick implementation for the purpose of the demo) and after that, we create the Credential object. Finally, we invoke the Credentials API in order to save the previously created Credential. Below, you can see how that is presented to a user.

private fun saveCredentials() {

    val emailInvalid: Boolean = emailAddressTextInput.editText?.text.toString().trim().isNullOrEmpty() ?: false
    val passwordInvalid: Boolean = passwordTextInput.editText?.text.toString().trim().isNullOrEmpty() ?: false

    if (emailInvalid) {
        emailRequirementError()
        return
    }

    if (passwordInvalid) {
        passwordRequirementError()
        return
    }

    val credentialToSave: Credential =
        Credential
            .Builder(emailAddressTextInput.editText?.text.toString())
            .setPassword(passwordTextInput.editText?.text.toString().trim())
            .build()

    Auth
        .CredentialsApi
        .save(googleApiClient, credentialToSave)
        .setResultCallback({
            result ->
            handleCredentialSaveResult(result)
        })
}

A quick implementation of a Credentials save procedure

Credential is a key element of the SmartLock domain. It holds all the credential information (either account type or password, a name and a profile picture URI) related to an E-mail address. Credentials can either have an Account Type or a Password.

We can also see that the credentials we just saved are available on passwords.google.com for the E-mail address we previously selected:

2) Request credentials when opening the app

After saving the aforementioned credentials, we can now request them when opening the app in order to automatically sign a user in, or give them the ability to use them for instant sign-in.

In order to request Credentials we need to create a CredentialRequest that specifies what kind of Credentials we want. You can declare that the Credentials you want should contain a password or their type is one of: Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.

private fun initSmartlockCredentialsRequest() {
    smartlockCredentialsRequest = CredentialRequest.Builder()
            .setPasswordLoginSupported(true)
            .build()
}

SmartLock Credential Request configuration

After creating your CredentialRequest object, you pass it to Credentials API and you handle the result:

private fun requestCredentials() {
    Auth
            .CredentialsApi
            .request(googleApiClient, smartlockCredentialsRequest)
            .setResultCallback({ credentialRequestResult ->
                handleCredentialRequestResult(credentialRequestResult)
            })
}

Request Credentials

private fun handleCredentialRequestResult(credentialRequestResult: CredentialRequestResult) {
    if (credentialRequestResult.status.isSuccess) {
        proceedOnMainScreen(credentialRequestResult.credential.id)
    } else {
        resolveCredentialRequest(credentialRequestResult.status)
    }
}

Credentials Request Result handling

private fun resolveCredentialRequest(status: Status?) {
    if (status?.statusCode == CommonStatusCodes.RESOLUTION_REQUIRED) {
        initiateCredentialRequestResolution(status)
    } else {
        credentialRequestFailure()
    }
}

Resolve Credential Request

private fun initiateCredentialRequestResolution(status: Status?) {
    try {
        status?.startResolutionForResult(this, RC_CREDENTIALS_REQUEST)
    } catch (sendIntentException: IntentSender.SendIntentException) {
        credentialRequestResolutionFailure()
    }
}

Start resolution for Credential Request

One thing you should consider here, is that the Credential object retrieved does not have an “email” field. Actually the email on the Credential is named “id”. Another strange thing is that if you’ve requested Credentials of specific Account types, you need to have in mind that they will not contain a password, due to the fact that Account type and password fields can not co-exist.

3) Use Credentials saved on Chrome, if we declare that our website and app can share Credentials

User Credentials saved on Chrome can be very valuable for our case as well. Well, SmartLock offers Credential sharing between Chrome and Android applications. All we need to do is:

- Create a Digital Asset Links JSON file (assetlinks.json)
- Upload it on our server, under "/.well-known/" directory

On this link you can find detailed steps on how you can create the Digital Asset Links JSON file and add it to your app.

The last step to enable this integration is to fill out an Affiliation Form, which usually takes 2 or 3 days to be accepted.

At this point, we have to thank Steven Soneff  from Google’s Identity team, for his valuable help on this process.

4) Display email hints in case we want to help the user in the sign-in/sign-up process

As a nice fallback when a user does not have any Credentials stored for our app, we can display some E-mail hints, in order to help the user choose an E-mail to sign-in or sign-up.

So how can we do this?

The steps are pretty much the same for it as well.

Google Account Login APIs are quite identical which helps us easily bootstrap the requests.

private fun initHintRequest() {
    hintRequest = HintRequest.Builder()
            .setHintPickerConfig(
                    CredentialPickerConfig.Builder()
                            .setShowCancelButton(true)
                            .setPrompt(CredentialPickerConfig.Prompt.SIGN_IN)
                            .build()
            )
            .setEmailAddressIdentifierSupported(true)
            .build()
}

Email Hint Request configuration

Let’s explain this code a little bit: We set the HintRequest to support email addresses and we also add a HintPicker configuration, which allows us to show a cancel button and also have a prompt as the dialog’s title. In our case we chose to show a sign-in prompt. Google also provides a sign-up prompt.

Afterwards, we need to invoke startIntentSenderForResult:

private fun requestEmailHints() {
    val intent = Auth.CredentialsApi.getHintPickerIntent(googleApiClient, hintRequest)
    try {
        startIntentSenderForResult(intent.intentSender, RC_HINT_REQUEST, null, 0, 0, 0)
    } catch (e: IntentSender.SendIntentException) {
        emailHintRequestFailure()
    }
}

Request Email Hints

And to follow, we handle the result:

override fun onActivityResult(requestCode: Int, resultCode: Int, data: Intent?) {
    super.onActivityResult(requestCode, resultCode, data)

    when (requestCode) {
        RC_HINT_REQUEST -> handleEmailHintRequestResolution(resultCode, data)
    }
}

Result of Email Hint Request

The result on this case contains a Credential object including the email address that the user has selected:

private fun handleEmailHintRequestResolution(resultCode: Int, data: Intent?) {
    if (resultCode == AppCompatActivity.RESULT_CANCELED) {
        emailHintRequestCancelled()
    } else {
        emailHintRequestSuccess(data)
    }
}

Handling of Email Hint Request Resolution

private fun emailHintRequestSuccess(data: Intent?) {
    val credential: Credential? = data?.getParcelableExtra(Credential.EXTRA_KEY)
    credential?.let {
        proceedOnMainScreen(it.id)
    }
}

Email Hint Request success

Conclusion

Google Sign-In and SmartLock possible outcomes can produce a lot of boilerplate code, as well.

To help you with this task and allow you to focus on the engineering process of your business logic, we’ve created a module, named AuthManager. AuthManager handles all of the cases and their outcomes, described above, while providing a fluent API. AuthManager is also written 100% in Kotlin.

You can find AuthManager on Github.

Feedback and PullRequests are always welcome.

This article was written by Pavlos and Vasilis, as part of a series of posts explaining how we created  Android and iOS apps for Workable recruiting software.

The post Android: Improving the sign-in experience with Google Sign-In and SmartLock appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Since Workable launched its mobile app in 2016, we’ve seen an increase in the number of users month over month, year over year, currently counting 10,000 users in total. As an Account Manager, I have the chance to talk to many of these people regularly. While every company has its own process and every recruiter their own working habits, I’ve found that most of our customers have the same “favorite” features inside the Workable mobile app.

Top 3 popular features of the Workable mobile app

1. Viewing candidate profiles

One of the big benefits of mobile apps is that your phone goes with you wherever you are and you can perform your regular tasks on the go. So, it came as no surprise to me that the candidate profile is the most popular feature of our hiring app. Every important information lives inside the candidate profile and hiring team members can refresh their memory before and after interviewing a candidate.

For example, interviewers have access to candidate data as they walk into the interview – no need to download resumes or assignments. Ben O’Mahony, from Cytora, notes why the mobile app is particularly useful for the busy hiring managers: “They don’t need to see the entire recruiting pipeline at all times. They just need to see who they’re interviewing. And this is quickly done through the Workable app.”

2. Moving candidates through the recruiting pipeline

We built the Workable mobile app to help our customers ‘get things done’. So, I was glad to hear that one of our customers, Gary Woodhall from Loyal Retainers, deals with most of his administrative tasks before even arriving at the office: “I read 90% of the CVs on my mobile. I do it first thing in the morning.” Gary, like any busy recruiter or hiring manager, wants to quickly review resumes and move candidates to the next stage or disqualify them, to keep the hiring process rolling. That’s because hiring is rarely – if ever – a one-person job and the faster you make a decision, the sooner you’ll hire your next team member.

For example, right after an interview, you can leave a quick evaluation or a comment that you liked this candidate. Then, another member of your team could step in and schedule a second interview or send a job offer. This helps you reduce overall time to hire and avoid losing a great candidate to a competitor because you didn’t move fast enough. It also allows you to focus on the most important aspects of your job; preparing for the interview itself, building relationships with potential candidates, etc.

3. Managing the calendar (scheduling interviews, communicating with candidates)

A big pain point for hiring teams is scheduling interviews. I hear about this a lot. Forgetting to send an invite, double-booking or exchanging a ton of emails to find a mutually convenient time. These are all problems that can slow down the recruiting process. And these are problems that the Workable mobile app can solve. On average, Workable mobile users send 700 emails per day through the app and schedule 100 interviews per day. That’s great productivity for teams who aren’t even sitting down at their desk.

“I mainly use the app for scheduling phone screens and interviews”, Shannon Koski from Pacific Mobile Structures confirms. “I email candidates to schedule an interview but they often respond when I’ve left the office. Having Workable on my phone means that I can see their reply, schedule the interview and save time, as I don’t have to wait until the next day to manage my communication with candidates.”

The Workable mobile app could also serve as your “hiring calendar” because it gives you a quick overview of your scheduled interviews. Ben O’Mahony explains: “When I go to into the app, I like that I know which candidates I have to interview later, you can see when they are scheduled for. I love that I can see the type of interview (e.g. if it’s a call or an on-site meeting), because it is not always clear from the calendar invitations.”

These are the three benefits of the Workable hiring app, but not the only features. How you use the app is totally up to you and your hiring process. You can simply tackle the administrative tasks, like resume screening; contact candidates and team members when you’re out of office; or manage the entire hiring process through the small screen of your phone.

If you want to learn more about how to use the Workable mobile app, drop me a line at maura@workable.com or schedule a demo with one of my colleagues. And if you’re already a Workable customer and a happy user of our mobile app, I have a feeling you’ll get happier with our upcoming redesign – stay tuned!

This post was written by Maura McGuinness, Global Senior Account Manager at Workable. 

The post How our customers use the Workable mobile app appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

1. Time is of the essence
   Being out of the office for a day, or even just a few hours, can be enough to lose a great candidate. By accessing Workable on your smartphone you have all the information you need to get moving with a good candidate from wherever you are. Get back in touch on time and ensure the candidate experience is everything that it should be.
2. Flexibility gets the job done
   It’s not all, you, you, you… When hiring is your full time job, you’re on top of it but sometimes you need to give your hiring teams a little nudge. The flexibility mobile recruiting gives is provides that nudge.  Your hiring managers can review resumes and leave evaluations from anywhere, at any time, via their connected smartphones.

So let’s look at the new features and see how they can help.

The Agenda

This is something we’re really excited about, as it makes great use of the medium. We all use smartphones as pocket computers or cameras, but it’s worth remembering they’re still communication devices, too!

The Agenda has been designed to show the information you need the most:

…and give you the tools you need to act on that information:

Held up on the way to a meeting with a candidate? Find the event and contact the candidate by SMS in one easy action — no digging around for that number. Heading from one interview to another with barely a chance to catch your breath? Check the Agenda, get the meeting details and remind yourself of the candidate’s history as you go. Everything’s in one place.

Of course the calendar view will also give you an overview of upcoming events when you need it.

Global Search

One of the key points about using Workable on your mobile is having the information you need at your fingertips. It’s a small(ish) screen, so access should never be restricted, but it should be focussed. While the Agenda handles scheduled tasks, the rest of the mobile updates help narrow the focus on the more routine aspects of day to day recruiting, making it more manageable.

Global Search is the ability to search for information about candidates and jobs. Access it from your homescreen, or dashboard, as soon as you log in. You’ll see one simple search box, but we’ve divided the results neatly into two tabs.

Search for candidates by the department or location to which they applied. Or you could search their name, work experience or education, skills, summary… the whole lot. Search for jobs by title, location (country, state, city) or department.

Candidate Access

In this release we’ve also provided a smarter way to sift through your candidates. Now when you move from your mobile dashboard to the candidate view, you’ll see the option to view all candidates, or view candidates by job.

Of course, viewing all candidates would be pretty heavy going on a mobile, so we’ve added some smart segmentation. This helps target your activities so you’re making the right kind of contact with the right people, at the right time. Here’s how it breaks down:

Unread candidates:
This group shows qualified candidates across all jobs, whose profile has not been viewed or opened on any of your devices.

Unrated candidates:
If you’re working with a hiring team, this is a handy segment to know. When Workable is used to schedule on site meetings, screening calls or interviews, this segment is automatically populated with the candidates in question. Direct your hiring managers here to leave their evaluations and ratings. Evaluations are easy to do on the go—a simple rating system qualified with a comment.

Unscheduled:
Another time-saving segment for admins and hiring managers, this shows every qualified candidate at an ‘Assessment’ stage in the hiring pipeline. This means candidates could be at Phone screen, Assessment or Interview stages, but nothing has been put in your Workable calendar yet. Work through this list to plan the week’s hiring activities.

Slipping away:
When you’re hiring for multiple positions, often in multiple locations, it can be easy for candidates to slip through the net. This segment shows qualified candidates who have been engaged using Workable at least once, but there’s no recorded activity over the last seven days.

View candidates by job:
And last, but by no means least, we’ve updated the option to view candidates by job:

Selecting a job from the list shows all the candidates, neatly divided into their pipeline stages.

Looking for a mobile recruiting app? See how our industry-leading iOS and Android app compares to other applicant tracking systems, like Lever and Greenhouse.

Access all areas

These latest updates are all about access. Getting to the information you need in the quickest way possible. Slice and dice your candidate database to work the way that suits you best. Use Workable to track and manage your candidates as you would a regular ATS. Or use Workable more like a CRM; keep in touch with your prospects and candidates at the right time to build stronger relationships for the future. It all helps to make mobile recruiting genuinely useful.

If you’ve made it this far through the post, thanks for sticking with us! It’s a big release, so there’s a lot of ground to cover. As I mentioned right at the beginning, this is a work-in-progress release. There’s lots more to come — but we’d love to hear your feedback in the meantime.

The post New features for mobile recruiting! appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Our latest integration is with video interviewing platform, Jobma. Using this integration, you or members of your hiring team can request video interviews and evaluate candidates right from the candidate’s profile in Workable.

Video interviews are becoming increasingly popular as the demand for top talent rises. Not only do video interviews speed up the screening process, they also afford additional flexibility for candidates, removing the expense and time of travel early on in the process.

By sharing a list of interview questions with your best candidates, you can request that they respond via video in their own time. This enables your hiring team to review the results as a group, or individually, depending on their own work schedules and location. When top candidates are already employed, this additional flexibility shows your commitment to building the best experience for your candidates and reflects well on you as a potential employer.

Jobma streamlines the hiring process by eliminating the stress, guesswork, and error as you file through multiple resumes. It helps create a better company fit by allowing you to meet your candidates virtually before you proceed to a formal interview.

If you’re already using Workable, learn more about activating your integration with Jobma. If you’re interested in sharing your product or service with Workable customers, find out more about our Developer Partner Program.

The post Workable integrates with Jobma to enable candidate evaluations via video interview appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Today we’re excited to announce our latest integration partner for our customers in the UK and Israel. bob, is an all-in-one HR, employee engagement and benefits platform.

We know how often valuable time is lost to manual data entry – especially when it comes to moving employee data through different, but related systems. This integration helps bring that to an end. Connect your bob account to Workable and an employee profile is created automatically in bob, as soon as a candidate is moved to the ‘Hired’ stage in Workable. The information transferred includes:

• First name
• Last name
• Email
• Phone
• Candidate source
• Resume
• Avatar/Photo (depending on your preferences)
• Job title
• Job department

Find out more about setting up the bob integration.

Stay tuned for many exciting new partnership announcements over the coming weeks! If you’re a software provider, find out more about our Developer Partner Program and get involved.

The post Workable integrates with HR and benefits platform, bob appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Here are the steps we took to grow our customer and technical support team:

1. We decided customer support was important

This might sound glaringly obvious, but committing to customer support was important for us. Support is our company’s fulcrum — our work touches every team, from Engineering to Social Media. We’re the human face of Workable and we’re hiring consultants for our customers. We embedded a customer-first approach into our product design and company culture from the start. Without this cultural foundation, we couldn’t have built such a great team so fast.

2. We searched for a specific kind of candidate

“Customer support” was a hard job to hire for. We needed to get our hiring timing right, both for when we hired new people, and in which time zones. As a distributed team, we basically had to hire two people for each role. Customer support job titles sound pretty generic, but we were looking for people with a really particular set of skills. We discovered that the best candidates are:

• Tech savvy
• Methodical
• Detail-oriented
• Good problem solvers
• Good multitaskers
• Good listeners

But, above all, customer support hires have to enjoy helping others.

We don’t follow hard-and-fast rules or stick to strict support policies. So we look for people who are adaptable, flexible, patient and who want to help, no matter the context. Because often, customers contact us with issues that aren’t product-related. For example, once we had a customer call us because he had zoomed in his screen while using Workable, and couldn’t figure how to zoom it back out. Even though his problem had nothing to do with our product, we look for people who are more than happy to help him. If candidates are uncomfortable going off-script or making decisions on their own, they probably won’t fit our support culture.

3. We wrote our job descriptions carefully

Writing good job descriptions was challenging, because we wanted to find such niche candidates. We took the task of writing an appealing job description seriously. Our end result resonated with candidates who actually cared about helping people . Here’s the “Customer Support Specialist” description we used to capture our support approach and attract good quality applications:

4. We designed a structured hiring process to find the right candidates

As a hiring software company, we realize how powerful structured interviews and applications can be. So, we added a structured assignment process to help assess candidates’ skills and work styles. We used a writing assignment to get a feel for candidates’ writing skills. We wanted to see whether they’d hit a friendly, conversational tone, like we do on our website. Then we asked candidates how they’d handle some support scenarios through multiple choice questions. We weren’t necessarily looking for the ‘right’ answers to their assignment questions. We were more interested in their approach to the questions and the reasoning they gave for their choices. We also looked for people who enjoy working in teams, because we have shared queues and frequent group discussions. So it would be painful if a new hire didn’t like to work that way. We have processes that we develop all the time, and  the team appreciates them for adding structure to their work. But, our company culture allows people to make decisions and mistakes. So if candidates like a mix of structure and freedom, they’ll like our style.

5. We take a customer-first onboarding approach

It’s difficult to onboard when our product is evolving so fast. But we figure that the best way we can support customers is to experience our product from their eyes. So, when a new customer support hire joins, we ask them to act like a customer. They sign up for Workable, start using our hiring software and write a few fake job posts. That way, our new hires know how our product works and how customers experience our software. Then we move onto more formal training, which includes an in-depth demo, like our Sales demos for prospective customers. From there, our team helps new hires get to know our product by sharing our internal wiki pages, documentation and other resources. We even set up fake notifications so our customer support team can experience notifications from our customers’ point of view. Using this kind of customer-first approach, we generally expect our new hires to be up and running by the end of their first month. And to address our distributed team and timezone challenges, we check in with each often and travel to meet our new team members in person, whenever possible.

6. We use customer support feedback to improve our product

We’re conscious of the fact that some customer support jobs can become repetitive and lead to burnout. We try to reduce repetitive tasks as much as possible by integrating our common support queries into new feature suggestions. And we always invite our support team to contribute to product management discussions that shape our product roadmap. We take this iterative approach because we believe a simple support truth:

What’s good for our customer support team is good for our customers.

7. We focus on ongoing professional development and growth

We encourage each team member to focus on aspects of their role they enjoy the most. And we schedule weekly 1:1 meetings to help identify and address issues before it’s too late. Team members often take on projects that would be handled by Customer Service Managers in other companies. For example, they write up new processes that the team will follow, or they evaluate a new tool that the team might start using. We also encourage team members to go to conferences and to pursue projects they’re interested in. (Even if they fall outside typical support topics). For example, one of our customer support trainers recently moved to our Product Management team, after taking an interest in product development. We encourage that kind of growth – and realize that sometimes, it makes sense to lose great people to other teams within Workable.

We haven’t experienced a churn problem because we hire strong candidates, pay well and give people independence to go off script. And we’re always looking for new ways to improve by considering everyone’s feedback. We’re convinced that, if our people are happy and invested in their work, our customers will be happy too.

The post How we’ve scaled our customer support team appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The smart people know that it’s easier to be productive with the right kind of help: productivity is a team sport.

Our aim at Workable is to make sure that your recruiting process runs as smoothly as possible, so we go the extra mile to provide the help you actually need.

Workable for mobile recruiting

As the Product Manager for Workable mobile, ‘going the extra mile’ is more than a figure of speech. We now offer a complete mobile experience in all major platforms (iOS, Android, Web). If you’re using Workable on mobile, you’ll get a smarter approach to recruiting tasks. The chances are you’re travelling, out of the office or between meetings. Time is precious, the screen is small, and real productivity requires the right kind of focus.

We’ve spent a lot of time defining and segmenting tasks to complement your mobile recruiting strategy and workflow. Yes – we’ve started with lists, but they’re automated in order of importance to save you time. If you only have three minutes between meetings, we’ve made it easier to make those minutes count.

Your Workable account to-do list

Workable has a full suite of recruiting reports, which is great when you’re at your desk with time to review them. But if you’re on the move you still need a fast way to check that everything is running smoothly.

The account overview for mobile helps you spot possible problems with your hiring process and catch problems before they arise.

Are you getting enough candidates for the job?

New candidates lists every candidate that has been sourced or applied over the last seven days. If you’re an account admin or a hiring manager, keep an eye on this list. If the number is below your target it could be time to improve your job ad, or advertise on a niche or specialist job board.

Are your team progressing candidates fast enough?

Unscheduled lists candidates that are waiting at the Phone screen, Assessment or Interview stages who are yet to have an event scheduled. Candidates stay on this list for 30 days, so it’s an easy way to spot candidates that you need to act on. Remember, the two day rule of recruiting – if you don’t snap up the talent, someone else will.

Are you about to lose a great candidate for the job?

Slipping away is a list that includes candidates that your team hasn’t discussed or contacted for more than a week. Great candidates can get lost because different members of the hiring team think someone else is taking action. Double check your best candidates don’t end up on this list – and if they do, use the Workable mobile app to take action fast. Taking too long to respond to a candidate can be the beginning of a poor candidate experience.

Are you engaged in the right conversations?

Popular covers the candidates that you and your team are talking about. The candidates with an evaluation of ‘Yes’ or ‘Definitely Yes’ and the top number of comments in the past seven days are included on this list. Catch up with the comments from the team and make sure the right conversations are happening.

Is it time to send a personal follow-up email?

Pending gives a fast view of candidates who have not yet accepted your offer of employment. This is important to track to make sure that your recruiting efforts don’t go to waste. See if it’s time to send a follow up email, or schedule a call to allay any fears.

And finally…
All candidates is, of course a list of every candidate that has been sourced or applied. Just because you’re out of the office doesn’t mean you’re out of touch.

Your personal to-do list

A macro view of everything is great, but of course you’ll also need to get into the details. Workable helps get the jobs done faster with personal to-do lists, segmented by type:

Unread candidates: a list of new candidates that have either applied or been sourced and are waiting your review. They’ll stay here until you’ve had time to read them.

Unrated candidates: these candidates have all had an event scheduled via Workable. Whether it’s a phone screening or an interview, as soon as the event has happened and requires your feedback, you’ll find the candidate in the ‘unrated’ list – no need to track them down in your candidate database. Leave a quick evaluation, complete an interview scorecard or disqualify the candidate. If your team is waiting for your feedback so they can move forward with a candidate, this is your first port of call.

Recently viewed: a list of up to 60 candidates you’ve personally viewed in the last seven days. This is a fast way to find that one person you’re looking for without having to remember their name, or every detail of their resume.

Waiting response: a list of candidates that have contacted you by email and have been waiting for your response over the past 7 days. Sorry to nag, but these things need to get done…

So there it is.

We’ve tried to make sure that we have everything covered to help you get things done at your ideal pace, and in a way that suits the way you like to work. But this is a team effort! If you have any thoughts or feedback to share on your own mobile workflow, please do get in touch.

Not tried Workable on mobile yet? It’s available on the App Store and Google Play Store.
Not tried Workable at all, but now you’re intrigued? Sign up to Workable first – you need to set up an account to access it on mobile, then it’s all yours, free for 15 days.

The post Tackle more with our smarter mobile recruiting app appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

With automated actions, our newest efficiency-boosting tool, make recruiters’ jobs easier and speed up time to hire by automating repetitive tasks and emails. Automate and personalize bulk candidate communication to increase productivity, allow candidates to self-schedule meeting times to streamline interview scheduling, and ensure every applicant gets a customized and personalized response to improve both the candidate experience and your employer brand.

Workable helps companies in 100+ countries efficiently scale up their hiring processes with tools like hiring plan, interview self-scheduling, native video interviews, and top-notch customer support.

The post Introducing automated actions: Increase productivity and hire more efficiently appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

With candidate surveys, our latest DEI feature, assess DEI performance in your hiring strategies and evaluate ways to improve. Collect anonymized data post-application to understand candidate demographics, identify sources that generate more diverse candidates, and monitor pipeline performance by demographic to improve inclusion within your company.  

Workable helps companies in 100+ countries create a more inclusive hiring practice with diverse candidate sourcing, anonymized screening, candidate surveys, structured interviewing, and enhanced reporting.

Read more on this topic:

• How to measure diversity using candidate surveys
• Candidate survey template

The post Introducing candidate surveys: Improve inclusive hiring practices appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

With Texting, Workable’s latest premium feature, you can now message candidates directly from the platform or app. Reaching out about a new opportunity, or scheduling an interview? Texting makes it easy for you to reach candidates quickly, wherever they are. Track responses in real time on the candidate timeline, just like you would with email.

Texts have a 98% open rate and a 60x faster response time than email, and 95% of all text messages are read within 90 seconds. Communication templates help you personalize with ease and seamlessly switch from email to text at any stage of the recruiting pipeline. By getting in front of candidates faster with Texting, you can focus on what actually matters: hiring great candidates.

The post Introducing Texting: Make the right hires, faster appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

After all, our customers are important to us. As Workable’s Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Security Officer, it’s very important to me as well. We want to give you an added level of confidence that Workable is a fully secure organization.

The good news for you is that after being rigorously audited and assessed, we’re proud to say we’re officially ISO 27017:2015 and SOC 2 Type 1 accredited.

ISO 27017:2015

ISO 27017:2015 is SaaS-oriented and certifies that we have guidelines for information security controls applicable to the provision and use of cloud services.

SOC 2 type 1

SOC 2 type 1 proves that Workable has designed appropriate controls to provide reasonable assurance that our service commitments and system requirements were achieved based on the AICPA Trust Services Criteria relevant to Security, Availability, and Confidentiality. We will be moving forward with SOC 2 type 2 to further validate the strength of our security controls over time. For more information, check out our documentation on it.

This isn’t just about being able to prove that our tech is safe and secure. It’s also about proving that Workable operates safely and securely – meaning you, your business, and your information are safe and secure when working with us as well.

The post Workable evolves with even higher security accreditation appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Learn how Salad and Go screens candidates with Video Interviews:

The post Introducing Video Interviews: The next evolution in remote hiring technology appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

To attract talent, mid-size companies need to compete with larger enterprises who have more time, money and resources. They need simple, powerful and affordable tools they can easily adopt and effortlessly scale with.

We’ve been doing just that for 20,000 companies in 100 countries for nearly a decade. Google helped raise awareness — and the bar — for product quality in a space that most vendors don’t care much about. It’s a bittersweet farewell.

So what now? If you’re looking for a risk-free transition, we’ve got you covered. Just for former Google Hire customers, we’re offering a new Exit Plan package. It includes:

• Free data migration service
• Free implementation to get you up and running within a week
• Similar pricing plans, so you don’t need to adjust your budget
• No payments until 2020, so you have time to settle in
• Exactly the same seamless integration with G-Suite, including your Google email and calendars
• All the functionality you’re accustomed to — and even more

On top of all that, you’ll be moving to a full-featured ATS that can scale with you as you grow.

Dozens of Google Hire customers are making the switch as we speak. Our customer service team is ready — around the clock and the world — to get you moved over and settled in quickly, easily and hassle-free.

Welcome to Workable, where the world hires.

The post Google Hire customers: Find a new home with Workable appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Since I am fortunate enough to witness how these kind of products are made, how the teams are working on them and even work with some people that built them, I could not help myself – I wanted to find a similar problem to solve: To design an interface for human beings under stress, with a goal to reduce that stress.

Stress mode: on

On a bright morning at a recent Workable summit, we were told that a new team would be formed with one goal in mind: build a new product to allow candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers to perform asynchronous video interviews. The business case was solid; on the recruiter’s side, it saves time so they don’t have to schedule phone screens and carry them out with candidates.

On the candidate’s side, it provides a reliable platform to record answers and share them with the company they’re applying to. We wanted to examine a scenario: How would the candidates record their answers? To answer this, we held a design sprint. We talked with several real-life candidates – even those who had performed a video interview in the past.

You can see plenty of feedback about the whole video interview concept in public, such as in this subreddit post. Even the negative stuff is immensely helpful for us, because we want to solve those problems and challenges with our new feature.

The number-one problem we would have to solve, as far as the candidate was concerned, was pretty clear. It’s the stress. I know, it sounds rather generic and vague, but picture this: You are a candidate and you have to record and submit a set of five questions via a browser. It’s a terrifying scenario for many candidates. Questions abound:

• This is my first time doing this. How does this platform even work?
• What if my internet fails me halfway through this process?
• How can I possibly look and act normal when I’m talking into a computer?

Reviewing these concerns can take up a lot of time – and it did.

Design comes into play

Since that list of concerns is quite comprehensive, it was obvious that we had the problem outlined. Here’s our opportunity to jump into Sketch and solve that problem. Right? Wrong.

In fact, it was too early to do that. Instead, we gathered more feedback from candidates who had done video interviews in the past and grouped their responses into specific concerns. That feedback gave birth to a set of principles that would guide us when we built the application.

Here’s the set of principles we outlined – a quick and dirty three-point list:

1. Make feedback always visible

This was the first and toughest one. We needed to allocate valuable real estate on the screen to provide platform feedback to the candidate. This feedback isn’t just about error messages; it’s about guiding the user throughout the whole process. It’s more about providing a north star.

Of course, it plays well with error messages too. Assuming the person will get the concept that a message is always there showing what’s going on at any given time, this will be the spot the candidate will look to for feedback if anything comes up (such as a technical issue).

2. Be picky about the options

The interview process – and especially the video part of it – is a high-stress time for a candidate. So, what you choose to expose to the candidate is extremely important. Remember the Google Maps example at the beginning of this story? Google Maps has been doing an excellent job structuring map and navigation information in such a way that you’ll have your route in the spotlight at any step of your experience.

The image below is a great example on how we achieved this for Video Interviews. This is the scenario when the candidate has the maximum number of CTAs displayed in the interface.

3. Separate screen into logical groups (and group relevant actions)

Video interviews in general, is a fairly new concept. That means there’s is no known path to follow and no real precedence to build on. Moreover, it’s not the most widely known or understood interface – yet. Video interviews can be a steep learning curve for many.

So, what I wanted to do was separate the interface into logical groups, and then group those together. By doing this, we would make a more intuitive interface.

In the end, we added three major controls: Navigation, Questions, and Interview. Each one of these three groups represented a specific pool where similar and common actions could be pulled together.

Outcome

Stress is quite intangible – it’s difficult to measure. Business metrics, retention, or adoption is much easier. Because of its intangibility, the stress factor of video interviews was difficult to solve. We can’t outright eliminate it, but we can remove some of the elements that might contribute to it by providing an interface that’s easy to grasp and understand for candidates.

Moreover, we wanted to make the person behind the screen feel that they are in control of the interface. For instance, the recording will start only when they’re ready. The interview begins only when they’re ready. Their answers are sent only when they’re ready to be sent. This puts the whole experience within control of the user, without the need for a “smart” experience that would make decisions and choices for you.

This project has been a great success so far. The numbers prove it too: our data shows that the completion rate of our Video Interviews is much higher than the industry standard. Industry-wide, we found that one-third of candidates actually complete their video interview, whereas candidates using our Video Interview platform completed it two-thirds of the time.

In closing – we set out to craft an interface that was simple to use, to free candidates of the burden of learning the interface and allow them to simply present their best selves during the video interview. Talking into a machine is obviously a bit awkward – we didn’t want candidates to feel that awkwardness. So we set out to make it as comfortable of an experience as possible. While we’re continuing to assess feedback, we’re excited to see how the positive response grows as more and more companies adopt our Video Interviews interface.

The post How we approached (video) interviews appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Automated posting to 6 major free job boards

Workable has partnered with Indeed, SimplyHired, Glassdoor, Trovit, JobRapido and Recruit.net to allow you to post jobs to multiple free job boards and easily reach a global audience of hundreds of millions job seekers performing billions of job searches per month.

Starting today, as soon as you open a new job position in Workable, it will also be automatically published on all the above 6 free job boards where millions of potential job seekers can find it. How?

With one click. For free.

Single-submission posting on the top two job sites in the world for all your jobs. Simple as that. Oh, and did we mention it’s free?

Can’t wait? Post your first job now.

The post Post jobs to multiple job boards appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Designed with the active hiring process in mind, a traditional ATS alone struggles to meet the challenges presented by this shift in the hiring landscape.

It’s a familiar scenario; you’re recruiting for a specific post and come across a quality candidate. They’re not right for that particular role, but could be perfect for a future position. You don’t want to lose sight of them, but if you can’t match them with an open position in your ATS, what options do you have?

Introducing Workable’s Talent Pool

Workable’s Talent Pool completes the 360 degree hiring circle; closing the gap between a potentially great future candidate and an active hire.

From someone you met at a conference to a stand-out developer you’ve spotted on GitHub, add candidates into your Talent Pool without the need to associate them with a particular job.

Talent Pool also makes it easy to harness speculative applications and referrals. Accept speculative applications directly via your careers site or forward resumes and referrals from your personal email. Workable will automatically scan the details to create a candidate profile in the Talent Pool. Initiate conversations and keep track of the communication outside the confines of a specific role.

Cultivate rich communities

To build up varied pools of talent you need to look outside of your immediate network. Talent Pool works in partnership with People Search, Workable’s powerful candidate-sourcing functionality to do just that.

From the main dashboard, use People Search to scan millions of online profiles and trusted data sources. Apply keywords and target location to match the criteria for roles you need to fill. If you find a great candidate for a future role, save their profile to your Talent Pool instead of a specific job. Add tags to organize and segment by specialisms, skills and location. Start building up a rich, living bank of talent, which you can track and nurture for future use.

Fully integrated into Workable’s ATS, Talent Pool is designed to work seamlessly with Workable’s sourcing tools. But you can also add profiles and build your pool by:

• directly uploading a resume
• sending an email to your account’s mailbox and attaching a resume
• using the ‘Add Candidate’ widget to enter details manually
• advertising for speculative applications through your careers site

Harness your employer brand

If you’re attracting potential talent to your site through a strong employer brand, don’t lose out on a good prospect just because there isn’t a role advertised matching their skill-set. Enable speculative applications in your account and receive resumes straight to your Talent Pool. When you’re next hiring, search the pool for prospects and reach out to talent with an active interest.

Grow meaningful relationships

In a competitive hiring landscape, nurturing prospects with timely, personalized outreach can mean the difference between securing a great hire and losing out. 80% of candidates choose one job over another based on the quality and length of the relationship formed during the process.

Using Talent Pool it’s easy to reach out, start a conversation, and build a meaningful relationship over time.

• Make initial contact with a prospect by sending an email directly from their profile in your pool
• Personalize outreach and make memorable connections using background information sourced through People Search
• Based on a candidate’s response, set reminders to get back in contact at key stages using the ‘snooze’ option
• Use comments and notes on the candidate profile to continue the conversation; key into significant milestones such as a return from Maternity Leave, a conference speech, or the launch of a major project

Having nurtured your prospect, when a position opens up that matches their skill-set move them from your pool directly into the pipeline for the job. Fully integrated with Workable’s ATS, the transition is streamlined and simple.

Keep your pool alive

Collaborative at its core, Talent Pool provides full transparency across your hiring team. Share comments and feedback, evaluate candidates, and send emails to prospects knowing that everything will be visible across the team on the candidate’s timeline.

With everyone up-to-date, members can share responsibility when needed and keep the conversation with prospects alive without risking an overlap or duplication of contact.

Fill jobs faster

Combined with a powerful sourcing tool to scout for prospects, Talent Pool adds CRM functionality to your hiring strategy. Prepare for the future, work towards a reduced time to hire, and fill jobs faster with the best talent around.

Not using Workable yet? Sign up for a demo and see how it will work for your organization.

The post Grow your talent pool and future-proof hiring appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Today, we’re introducing a powerful new tool that will make you better at sourcing passive candidates in competitive markets.

Solving the hard part of recruiting

At Workable, we believe that your recruiting platform should – first and foremost – help you build a richer pipeline to work with. Our software reflects the reality that sourcing talent is your strongest leverage for success. We brought you seamless integration with 50+ job sites to advertise your openings to the world. We helped you build beautiful careers pages and a mobile-friendly applicant experience. We’ve baked in a hassle-free referral program and external recruiter collaboration into your workflow.

Now we’re empowering your passive candidate sourcing with instant People Search, a recruiting technology that puts millions of rich profiles at the fingertips of your team, saving them hours of research, improving their hit rate and letting them bring people data in the context where your next great hire will be found.

Boolean expressions? Really?

When I hire a designer, it’s not the word “photoshop” in a keyword list that did it. It’s because I admire their work. So, when I’m looking for a designer, a database, a search box and a boolean expression hardly seem like the right place to start.

Instead, I want to look at online portfolio sites for work that inspires me. I want to check out the list of attendees in a design meetup that attracts the best professionals in town and learn more about each individual. I want to find people in the context of their work, not in the results pages of arcane search queries.

Put your sourcing workflow in the right order

People Search from Workable lets you do just that. It’s a sourcing tool that lives in your Chrome browser so you can right-click any name or social profile you spot on the internet to look them up. It will instantly research dozens of internet sites and data sources to put together a complete resume including contact information and links to social and professional profiles.

This way, you don’t need to start your search with databases and boolean expressions. You can find candidates where they are active, on professional sites, meetups, communities, company websites, articles or blog posts and instantly bring their profiles into life. And yes, you can clip them right into your Workable account for your team to review and reach out to, or download them as a PDF if you’re not a Workable user yet.

Spend your time on people, not data entry

We’ve been working with recruiters long enough to understand what really slows you down. We’ve seen you limit yourself to picking only a handful of candidates because researching them takes a long time. We painfully watched as you copy-pasted the basics into your applicant tracking system, often not enough for your hiring managers to make good decisions, because let’s face it: reproducing rich resumes from one system to another by hand is terribly tedious. We’ve seen you torture yourself looking up emails in five different databases, often missing good candidates because you lack a universal search.

We know you’re a creative and curious crowd, limited by the time it takes to research and collate information that’s already out there on the internet. To search across multiple sources, to aggregate and deduplicate and feed it into your recruiting platform is an inhuman task. It should be a computer’s job really. So we taught the computer how to do it for you. In seconds.

Your new superpowers

What can you do with an instant, universal people research and aggregation tool that syncs up with your applicant tracking system? Quite a few things that you wouldn’t dare try in the past:

• Break free from the tyranny of boolean search. Start in the right place: where people are active online. Look up every employee of that great company on Angel List. Check out the profile of the person who wrote that insightful answer on Quora. Get your hands on that list of conference attendees and right-click yourself to recruiter nirvana.
• Be unapologetically greedy. Source 100 candidates, or even 200 for a job. Conducting a resume search and feeding it to your system takes a few seconds, so go to town with it.
• Get it all in your ATS. Not just a headline and a couple of notes. The full resume, social profiles, skills, even deep info like their activity on GitHub. It’s not like you’re doing the copying yourself, so clip it in and help your hiring managers make better decisions.
• Forget shortlists. Build a long list and get your hiring manager to review it with you. Engage them earlier in the cycle and get them to help you aim your search in the right direction.
• Improve your hit rate. With a higher chance of finding personal contact information and a full-featured talent CRM sitting behind it, People Search will make sure that you don’t miss out on good candidates because the research was too tedious.

How does this work?

People Search does its magic by looking up multiple sources of publicly available information about people, essentially letting you reach almost anyone with a single universal search. It combines information from many sources intelligently to look up full resumes starting with as little as a name. Behind the scenes, it’s a lot more complex than it looks, using NLP and machine learning to deduplicate, verify and deep search information – a technology that took over a year and a team of awesome data engineers to build.

But you don’t need to know about that. Your job is to find great people. Let us worry about the technology. What you’ll want to know, is that some of the best folk in recruiting tech are constantly improving the algorithms and integrating more data sources, so it’s only going to get better. We hope that, once you’ve lived with it for a while, it will become the only research tool you need for recruiting.

Take it for a spin

People Search is now available for all Workable customers. We’ve included 10 searches per month for free as part of your plan so anyone on your team can source great people simply by installing our Chrome Extension. Not a Workable customer? People Search is still available to source the best talent. Instead of adding the candidates to Workable, download profiles as a PDF.

For in-house recruiters who do intensive sourcing, we offer individual recruiter licenses with unlimited lookups. And for those of you using Workable with multiple client accounts, it’s easy to switch between them from within Chrome. People Search is aware of the jobs you have in each account so you can clip people into the right funnel with one click. It will even tell you when you’re looking at someone that has already been sourced for another job in your account and let you check out their history.

Have a look at Workable’s features, or get in touch with us to tailor a solution to your organization’s needs.

The post Introducing People Search appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

But there are always those elusive candidate resumes that have slipped through the online net and sunk to the bottom of your offline candidate database. You know the kind of thing…

The folder of PDF resumes you received before using Workable that’s sitting on your desktop. A few prospects here and there who don’t have a LinkedIn profile. The random candidate who came via an email recommendation with a resume attached. Senior executives slow to adopt new technology.

The bottom line is, you can’t go cold turkey on resumes. You’ll do the bulk of your recruitment with structured data and online profiles, but you need some backwards compatibility. We know.

Here’s where Workable comes in…

Looking for ways to manage your candidate pipeline? Sign up for a 15-day free trial of Workable and start hiring better people, faster.

Taking the data entry out of hiring

Our bulk resume upload tool quickly transfers the valuable candidate data hidden away in emailed PDFs and DOCs directly into your Workable pipeline.

Data from each resume is automatically extracted to create individual candidate profiles. These profiles are added at the ‘Sourced’ stage of the relevant job in your dashboard (but they can be moved onto any other stage).

Our resume parser also gathers information from applicants’ online profiles to give you the fullest possible picture of each candidate. Scouring the web in seconds, all relevant social and professional data is automatically identified and imported directly into each candidate’s Workable profile. An optional feature, you can switch off the social media profile discovery by changing the setting in your recruiting preferences.

With one simple drag and drop into Workable, your offline candidate data becomes fully trackable, searchable and shareable with your team. No data entry required.

How to bulk upload resumes

1. Find the relevant job on your Workable dashboard (or ‘Jobs’ tab).
2. Using the cog icon to the top right of the pipeline, select ‘Upload candidates’ from the dropdown menu:
3. From the next window you can either:
   • select candidate documents using your computer’s file browser,
   • or drag and drop several resumes from your computer into the ‘Drag & Drop’ window
4. That’s it. Simple. Workable’s resume parser does the rest.

Create rich candidate profiles using Workable’s resume parser

Our parser scans all of your documents for the following information:

• Candidate name
• Headline (job title)
• Email address and contact information
• Summary
• Social media account links
• Profile picture

When the data is found, it’s extracted from the documents and entered directly into the relevant fields in each newly-created candidate profile.

Information imported from the resume and/or from online accounts is highlighted at the bottom of each candidate profile. You can change or add to any of this information by clicking the candidate’s name at the top of the page.

Did you know?

– You can upload files in any of the following formats: .pdf, .rtf, .odt, .doc & .docx

– Every email address is cross-checked against your existing candidate database to prevent duplicates.

– If you’re new to Workable, you can use our bulk resume upload feature to quickly import positions you had open before you signed up. Just re-create the position within Workable and use the tool to upload the resumes in one go.

– You can import as many candidate resumes as you need. But if you’re planning to upload more than 100 files, it’s best to do it in batches of 100. If you have thousands of files to upload, contact us to arrange a managed migration.

– You can add custom fields to candidate profiles. Contact us to find out more.

The post Tips for bulk resume uploading to your candidate database appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Helping companies to streamline their recruiting is what we do at Workable. We like to help solve the harder recruiting tasks, wrapping them up into an affective, flexible workflow. Partnering with specialist services helps make this a reality, which is why we’re pleased to announce our latest partnership with JamieAi, a service that helps connect employers with data service professionals across the UK, France, Netherlands, and Germany.

As you’d expect from company in the data science and AI space, there’s some smart technology behind the scenes. JamieAi makes recruiting quicker and cost-effective, while ensuring a match with candidates on a range of technical, cultural and personal attributes.

Combining human and AI expertise, JamieAi ensures only qualified applicants with the right skills and interests hear about your role. Providing an unbiased and effective way to hire, the integration ensures that you and your hiring team retain full control of the hiring process.

Setting up the integration with JamieAi is simple. Once authenticated, you’ll be able to link up JamieAi postings with jobs from your Workable dashboard. Once the jobs are linked, candidates matched through JamieAi will be visible directly in your Workable hiring pipeline. From here, you can gather feedback, plan interviews and assessments, exactly as you would with candidates for any other role advertised via Workable.

Find out more about setting up the JamieAi integration.

The post Workable integrates with Jamie AI for a smarter way to find data science professionals appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

While all your jobs posted via Workable are searchable on Indeed, as other companies advertise similar positions, older postings naturally slip back in search results, losing visibility over time.

To boost your jobs’ visibility on Indeed, you can pay to promote them as ‘Sponsored Jobs’. These are the first jobs people see in Indeed’s search results, typically receiving up to 5X more clicks* than free job postings.

Track and analyze your Indeed sponsored jobs campaigns

Some of you have asked for additional data and analytics to evaluate your Indeed Sponsored Jobs campaigns. This new integration gives you all that and more.
Now when you sponsor a job on Indeed, it’s via your company-specific Indeed account. This gives you access to Indeed’s Employer Dashboard, where you can see the clicks, applies, and other metrics associated with a sponsored campaign.

Easily measure and share campaign ROI

Your Indeed Employer Dashboard gives you the data you need to assess campaign performance.

See at a glance how many times your sponsored jobs have been viewed and clicked on, and your average cost per click. Confidently report on current performance and use that data to help plan your sponsored campaigns in the future.

Get started

Ready to sponsor a job on Indeed? Our help center has the details you need to set up premium job postings.

More: Everything about job posting on Indeed

The post Boost job visibility and analytics with our latest Indeed Sponsored Jobs integration appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

A vast, untapped candidate pool

New to the market, Jobs on Facebook provides a centralized jobs dashboard which harnesses the power of Facebook’s vast and loyal social network. It makes it easier for businesses to reach and hire the right applicants by connecting companies to high volumes of potential employees who visit the site every day.

Candidates can bookmark the dashboard and search by job type or industry to find nearby roles that match. Job posts are also boosted to relevant audiences through targeted ads, which appear automatically in Marketplace and News Feeds.

With its extensive, targeted reach, the Jobs on Facebook job board is ideal for high volume hiring. And particularly good news for small or medium-sized businesses with multiple new roles to fill. Most Facebook users aren’t active job seekers. And, yet, a 2017 Economic Impact Report shows that 1 in 4 people in the US searched or found a job through the site. Jobs on Facebook puts businesses directly in touch with an untapped, rich and regular pool of active and passive talent. And it enables companies to connect with this talent directly from an environment that’s familiar and accessible.

Post jobs to up to 2 billion potential candidates in one click

With our one-time setup, there’s no need to log in and out to access Facebook’s vast network of users. You can post to Facebook’s free job board (and our other integrated job boards) directly from Workable, in one click. Simply fill in a few small details on the integrations settings page of your Workable account, and that’s it. With that in place, every time you publish a new role it automatically appears on Facebook’s free jobs dashboard (although it’s easy to opt out on a per job basis if you want to). Any applications submitted through Facebook feed automatically back into your Workable account, where you can view and track them. No fiddly exports or downloads needed.

A seamless experience for candidates

The process is equally as seamless and straightforward for candidates. Optimized for mobile, users can search and apply for jobs on-the-go, while they’re browsing the site. Applications are submitted directly from Facebook via a simple, clear ‘Apply’ button. Much of the information is pre-filled, but it’s easy to add or remove data before it’s sent.

By making it so easy for candidates to apply, businesses stand a better chance of attracting a bigger pool of qualified candidates. And a better chance of hiring successfully at scale.

Ready to integrate?

It only takes a few minutes to set up and use Facebook Jobs with Workable. All you need to provide is a company address. If you’ve got a Facebook Business page then it helps to add that too, but it’s not essential. For more details on this, and other pointers, check out our Jobs on Facebook support article. And remember, we’re here to answer any questions or provide more info whenever you need it—just get in touch.

The post Workable integrates with Jobs on Facebook for easier, high-volume hiring appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Many companies struggle to develop an easy to use process that empowers employees to refer from within their network. Drafted looks to change that by proactively engaging employees in the referral process. This increases employee engagement and boosts quality referrals. Today we’re excited to announce that Drafted now integrates with Workable!

Drafted automates the referral process by making personalized referral suggestions directly related to open roles. Through machine learning powered smart suggestions, companies decrease their time to hire, at the same time as they increase the volume, quality, and diversity of referrals. It reaches into employees’ networks such as their LinkedIn and Google accounts to forge connections. After proactively discovering new sources of talent, Drafted personalizes outreach with pre-set email templates – but ultimately the decision to further these relationships is left in employees’ hands.

Drafted diversifies your hiring strategy, and can help increase referrals by 2x in 90 days, improve time to hire by 30%, and reduce cost per hire by $3,000.

Where Drafted and Workable meet

Drafted automatically imports new public jobs from Workable, and exports referrals straight to your Workable hiring pipeline. No more double-posting or copy-pasting. Even better, if you’re using Workable and Slack, your employees can make referrals in Slack and you can review them in Workable, with Drafted handling intelligence seamlessly in between.

Get integrated

If you’re already using Workable and Drafted, find out more about activating the integration. If you’ve yet to try Drafted, find out more.

If you’re interested in sharing your product or service with Workable customers, take a look at our Developer Partner Program.

Not using an applicant tracking system yet – or (perhaps worse) using one that your team just refuse to engage with? Get a demo to see how Workable’s intuitive interface and mobile app encourage teams to take action.

The post Workable integrates with referral system, Drafted appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

	Alva helps to make better hiring decisions with psychometrics tests, providing predictive and unbiased insights into the personality and logical abilities of candidates. Assess candidates with Alva.
	BrainsFirst NeurOlympics cognitive assessment games upgrade your candidate (pre)selection. Assess with BrainsFirst NeurOlympics.
	Speexx is Workable’s first language assessment partner. Large organizations everywhere drive productivity by empowering employee communication skills. Assess language proficiency with Speexx.

Background checks

Zinc’s automated reference and background screening solution saves you time, delivers valuable candidate insights, and makes your due diligence effortless. Conduct a background check with Zinc.

Job boards & candidate sourcing

	Hiresweet helps companies easily automate search and outreach to recruit passive candidates. Source today with HireSweet.
	Otta is a free tool that is a smarter way for candidates to find jobs at the world’s leading technology companies. Find UK candidates with Otta.
	Reach millions of active U.S. candidates by posting your job to Resume-Library’s partner network of 100+ job sites. Post a job on Resume-Library.
	WorksHub advertises job opportunities and open source projects across its seven tech-focused hiring hubs for faster and more efficient hiring. Source a developer with WorksHub.
	We Work Remotely is the largest remote work community in the world. List your remote job on We Work Remotely.

Onboarding & HRIS

	Make sure your new hires hit the ground running with the new Workable Connector for ADP Workforce Now®. New hires automatically transfer from Workable to ADP® once they accept your offer. Learn more about this exciting new integration.
	Enboarder’s onboarding platform turns new hires into highly engaged, long term employees and managers into onboarding rockstars. Onboard with Enboarder.
	Increase employee engagement, satisfaction and productivity with HR Cloud, a leading provider of HR software and HRMS solutions. Manage employees with HR Cloud.

Video interviews

We’ve expanded our video interview offering to make it even easier to go – and stay – remote. In addition to Google Meet, Workable now integrates directly with Zoom. Any customer with a Zoom account can automatically add their Zoom link to their Workable events. Learn more about our Zoom integration.

More integrations coming soon

Workable automatically integrates with over 90 HR providers, keeping all of your recruitment information in one place. From sourcing to converting candidates to successful hires, collaborate with your hiring team while candidate information stays secure. The Partnership Team is looking forward to what’s yet to come in 2021.

The post Check out Workable’s 13 new integrations for 2020 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Smart advertising

Brilliant candidates seek careers in companies with clear missions, defined values and the right culture fit. With Jobbio, you can promote your employer brand to attract best-fit talent to your roles. Use your job posts and company channel to showcase everything that makes your company great. And connect with candidates who love what you do and how you do it.

Talent marketing

Using Jobbio, candidates can create beautiful online bios. They can go behind the scenes to find out more about a company. And follow favorite companies and channels to find out about new roles. When the right position and the right company sync up they can apply quickly and privately with a click of a button. No surprise then that over 100M professionals use Jobbio’s search platform every month. With such a rich audience, more and more companies (over 6000 to-date) are using Jobbio to attract higher calibre applications from more relevant and qualified candidates. And, ultimately, hire the right talent.

Manage your Jobbio applications in Workable

We know that hiring’s easier when all the tools you use work seamlessly together. So we’ve made it super easy to connect your Jobbio account with Workable. To get started, log into your Jobbio account and visit the ‘Integrations’ section. Grant Jobbio access to your Workable account and you’re set!

Once enabled, Jobbio will automatically pull jobs from your Workable dashboard and distribute them across its exclusive network. And every candidate who applies will be delivered directly into Workable, so all their information is in one place. It’s seamless and hassle-free.

Want a new integration added to Workable?

You shouldn’t have to be a systems implementation expert to have a great experience across all of your hiring tools. If you’re a Workable user and have a tool you’d love to see integrated with Workable, let us know! If you’re a software provider, why not find out more about our Developer Partner Program and get involved?

The post Attract the right talent faster with our new Jobbio integration appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

We prefer potential over current skills. If a startup works as intended, it’s going to grow fast and morph unpredictably. So will the responsibilities and the demands for its employees. In fact, I’d say that the most agonizing aspect of working in a startup is that you’re constantly trying to catch up with the company. Today’s smart, top performers are tomorrow’s left-behinds.

At Workable, the one thing we’re trying to figure out is not who you are, but who you can be.

We believe in pre-interview assignments. These can be “homework” problems to solve by email, or a test at our offices. Whatever form it takes, we want to see how someone deals with an actual assignment. Again, what we’re looking for is not so much existing knowledge, but how someone treats a piece of work. Trust me, the person who hands in the nerdy 10-page answer with 2 attached excel sheets, went out of their way to research the topic online, has spell-checked and beautifully formatted the response, is not going to be a loser.

If you can’t be bothered to go the extra mile to land a good job, this is not the job for you.

We ask for things the candidate is unlikely to be familiar with. Startups are unpredictable and your current knowledge will not be enough to carry you forward. So, I want to see how you fare when you have to deal with something you’re not supposed to know.

We’re not looking for perfect answers to unfamiliar topics, we’re just checking to see if the lights go out when we ask for something you didn’t study in college.

We want to see you cut through the bullshit. Overly polished people with canned interview answers may suggest a good effort on the candidate’s side (good thing) but also suggest a lack of authenticity and confidence in one’s own personality. We want to see people with an opinion, a place in this world, with things they like and things they dislike. You need to be able to name a product you love, or tell us what you hated about college. You need to have an idea of what you’re after in life, and most importantly what you want to avoid. And it has to look honest and genuine.

There’s no way to fake this, but many candidates shoot themselves in the foot by trying to fake the polished, faceless, inhumane image that interview books promote.

We want to see a certain level of achievement. We don’t care for specific skills, your achievement could be in gardening as far as we’re concerned. But we need to see that whenever you set out to do something in your life you did reasonably well. There are exceptions to this, but smart and hard working people usually manage to get to a good college for their subject of choice, they do well in exams they cared about, find their way into some kind of job (even a mediocre one), fill their life with internships, interesting travel, hobbies, pet projects, and they do these things to a certain level of accomplishment.

What we care about here is one’s achievement relative to choices. Maybe you got it on your mind one day to learn painting and you have paintings and gallery exhibitions to show for. It’s not relevant to our work, but it shows that you’re the kind of person who puts the effort and does well in whatever he tries to do.

We want to see action. Successful people are active. They do stuff. Even if they’re unemployed they have hobbies, they do volunteer work. They don’t quit jobs before they found something else to do. They work summer internships in college. They can’t sit still. They have a backlog of ideas and stuff they always wanted to do but couldn’t find the time to.

There’s no bigger turn-off than the person who’s “waiting for the right opportunity to shine”. It won’t come and they won’t shine by sitting around doing nothing.

We have to like you. Yes right, I do mean this in the highly subjective and unfair way that makes you feel you could be friends with one person but not another, even if they’re equal in skill, theoretically. I know, it’s not supposed to be like this in a meritocratic world, right? Hate to break it to you, but someone’s ability to blend in with a team, get along with them and build up some emotional reserves for a hard fight is going to determine their objective performance in the long term.

Teamwork is less of a skill and more a matter of chemistry. Or at least, good chemistry eliminates the need of purposeful co-operation because it comes naturally.

We want you to care. Somehow, we need to see something that drives you. It could be that you’re opinionated about the way something should work in this world. It could be that you want to be the best in a particular field. It could be that you are passionate about something we do well.

There has to be a glint in your eyes that suggests you’ll be going out of your way to accomplish what we set out to, because of some irrational, emotional, obsessive desire you can fulfill in this job. It has to somehow be a different than any other job.

We want to hear stories. Active, accomplished people who care about what they do usually have stories to tell. If your 4 years in college or your 5 years in your first job or your photography hobby ever meant anything for you, if they were things you somehow cared about and thought about, you should be able to tell me a story or talk about it in a manner that wouldn’t be terribly boring in a fireside chat.

The post How we evaluate new hires appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Assessments

	Adaface saves engineering time by screening candidates with custom assessments for technical skills. Integrate with Adaface.
	Aspiring Minds’ assessments are used by 3,000+ corporations and 150+ Fortune 500 companies worldwide. Assess candidates using Aspiring Minds.
	An assessment tool, Benchmark.games matches applicants to their ideal roles based on behavioral science. Assess with Benchmark.games.
	Bryq offers assessments that help companies analyze candidates’ cognitive skills and personality traits against job and company requirements. Connect to Bryq.
	CodeScreen (by Autocruit) provides companies with automated real-world take-home coding tests for screening developers. Assess developers using CodeScreen.
	Devskiller is a developer screening and online interview platform for finding developers with the right skill set. Try Devskiller for free.
	HackerEarth provides thousands of questions across 35+ programming languages to evaluate developers’ code. Assess with HackerEarth.
	HackerRank makes evaluating developers easier, faster and fairer. And on a global scale—they’ve assessed over 20% of the developer population. Evaluate with HackerRank.
	Hundred5 is a skills-based hiring tool that replaces the resume with a short assessment. Candidates apply by taking the test. Integrate with Hundred5.
	McQuaig’s pre-hire assessments analyze a candidate’s personality, cognitive and behavioral traits. They also help predict culture fit. Use McQuaig’s pre-hire assessments.
	An assessment service, The English Quiz offers a selection of ready-made or fully customizable English language assessments. Assess with The English Quiz.

Background checks

	We’re happy to announce that Certn, the fastest-growing background screening provider in North America, now offers record checks right in Workable in as little as 15 minutes. Connect to Certn.
	InfoMart is Workable’s first global background check provider and an industry leader in identity screening. Conduct a background check with InfoMart.
	Verified First conducts background screens with ease, helps make effective hiring decisions and simplifies your hiring process. Integrate with Verified First.

HRIS

	CezanneHR is a comprehensive HRIS designed to help organizations engage their people better. Streamline HR management with CezanneHR.
	Factorial is the HR platform for everyone. Easily manage time off, time tracking, payroll, documents, reports and analytics. Manage HR processes with Factorial.

Job boards & candidate sourcing

	CV-Library’s multi-award winning platform holds the UK’s largest independent CV database, with more than 14 million CVs. Post jobs to CV-Library.
	eMedCareers offers great visibility of specialist medical roles to candidates in the UK. Post your job on eMedCareers.
	hackajob is a sourcing tool to get top developers, fast. Publish tech jobs and attract candidates with the specified skill set. Source with hackajob.
	Interseller allows companies reach out to candidates with automated and personalized email sequences. Begin a campaign with Interseller.
	Joonko is a U.S. sourcing platform that helps talent leaders promote their U.S. jobs to an ever-growing pool of diverse candidates. Source with Joonko.
	Moberries connects actively looking candidates to companies via AI-based matching so you can reach more, better candidates, faster. Try sourcing with MoBerries.
	Reed is the UK’s #1 job site, helping more than 7 million job seekers with their search for work every month. Connect to Reed.
	Search millions of active U.S. candidates and post your jobs across our huge partner network of 100+ job sites with Resume-Library. Post a job on Resume-Library.
	Sompani helps VC funds and their portfolio companies exchange and hire top talent via an exclusive, automated talent pool. Hire talent with Sompani.
	The Hub is a community platform tailored to the needs of growth startups in the Nordics and Northern Ireland. Publish your startup job on The Hub.
	Zmash is a recruitment and employer branding company that places an AI-driven chatbot on your career site. Convert candidates with Zmash.

Video interviews

	Astronaut’s mobile-first video interview platform puts the power in the hands of the hiring manager. It’s also loved by candidates. Bag a video interview free trial with Astronaut.
	Hireflix is an easy-to-use video interview platform that enables companies to screen more candidates faster. Connect to Hireflix.
	Video interviews are a great way to connect with talent on their own time, wherever they’re located. Our newest video interview provider, VidCruiter, delivers you the highest-quality employees in a cost- and time-effective way. Integrate with VidCruiter.
	Videoscreening by Seeknspeak is an easy to use video interview tool to help you spot the talented applicants in your pipeline. Check out Videoscreening.

More integrations coming soon

Workable automatically integrates with 70 HR providers, keeping all of your recruitment information in one place. From sourcing to converting candidates to successful hires, collaborate with your hiring team while candidate information stays secure. The Partnership Team is looking forward to what’s yet to come in 2020. 

The post Check out Workable’s 31 new integrations for 2019 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Three years later, the Workable virtual teams are fast approaching 80 people. Nikos, our CEO, is in Boston, where the team is packing up their rooms at WeWork and moving into dedicated offices nearby in Fort Point. Spyros, our CTO, is still in Athens but would struggle to fit the by now 40-strong engineering team into his apartment. Rapid growth means we no longer even fit in the nice two-story office we moved into only 18 months ago. We move into a bigger space in April. Sugar, who now has a whole team supporting her, still works from her place on Crete.

Workable also has a London office, which has been home to our creative director and the head of sales but now has a bit of data science as well. And this is not to forget our sales and support virtual teams who have a rugged outpost in Portland, Oregon and are looking for someone special in Australia.

In other words, while we’re developing around two main hubs, we have learned some distributed team best practices and keys for managing virtual teams.

Remotely feasible

We need to be clear what we mean when we talk about remote working and distributed teams because people talk a lot about them and they often mean sharply different things. Usually, they are talking about:

• Fully distributed teams: companies with no offices, notable examples being Buffer and Automattic. Because fully distributed teams are rare, they’re noteworthy. But true digital nomads remain a much-discussed and relatively small tribe.

• Partially distributed teams: have a main hub or hubs but employ a proportion of remote workers.

Workable belongs to the second of these and is significantly invested in two main hubs in the US and Greece. This isn’t because the old challenges of working away from the office have defeated us. From a technological and management standpoint, the problems associated with virtual teams have largely been solved in the last ten years.

A culture that sticks

Distributed work is something we thought hard about at Workable. And we concluded that we were getting value from a bricks and mortar office. We decided that we did want somewhere where people gathered, worked together and got to know each other. This would be central to how we’d establish a culture that was stronger than an idea remembered from an all-hands summit. It would be a place where we would live the rituals and develop the habits that make us feel part of a group.

If that sounds a bit like a home then it’s not an accident. At Workable, the bond between early employees was akin to family, and a family needs a home. Once you’ve built a relationship and trust, more flexible future relationships are possible. We would be unlikely, for instance, to hire someone in Sweden out of the blue. But if someone who has been working for us for two years wanted to move to Sweden then we’d consider it.

We’ve solved how to work effectively with each other regardless of where we are. But getting there would have been a lot harder without the experience of working together from our early Athens hub.

This is the spirit in which we came to Boston. It looks like all you need to do to do is hire a couple of people and rent a desk in a co-working space but that’s wrong. Some of the important early employees need to move there if the culture is to be transplanted effectively and you have to start almost from scratch in building an employer brand. In short, you need some critical mass. It’s more like building an extra company.

Two hubs good, three hubs bad

At one point we had three locations (Athens, London, and Boston), all of which were in the running to be Workable hubs of more than 20 people. But we had to be honest about the impact of spreading our effort across three fronts. The conclusion was that we could manage two hubs that were on a par in terms of what they offered the company and the team, but more than two risked eroding that standard.

At Workable, we can work remotely and some of us do, all or part of the time. We’re not dogmatic about it. Just because we have two hubs now doesn’t mean we can’t afford to make an exception. This is not about purity. But a future in which there were 150 of us all working from home didn’t make sense to us.

Yes, the tools are so much better than they were a decade ago but they don’t fully substitute for presence and proximity. Building a company culture through Google Hangouts and Slack is possible (and kudos to the remarkable companies who have done just this) but you have to want to make this the absolute defining article of your company culture.

For us this essence was the product, not the freedom from location. Nikos is asked sometimes if Workable is an American or a Greek company. His answer is that it’s both, “we are not defined by where we work but what we produce.”

5 tips for virtual teams

1. Get the tools right

Across the company, we rely on simple, affordable and reliable software. For us, this has been an evolving mix which we’ll divide into real-time (remote collaboration, teleconferencing, chat) and asynchronous tools. The main pillars of our real-time work are Slack, Google Docs and Hangouts.

Asynchronous tools are about capturing information about work in online tools so that people can design, implement, or review stuff in their own time. Here’s it’s important to have user-friendly, lightweight tools that people love to use. That enables you to capture as much of the work as possible and prevent remote workers feeling excluded. These include Asana (everyone), Pivotal (engineering), Invision (design), and Pipedrive (sales).

2. Spend time with each other early

Kick start your virtual teams with a real-life gathering. It’s much easier to get an understanding of the way people like to work — and their sense of humor — face to face. As Denise Wilton, our Creative Director explains: “Subtleties can get lost in text chat; that person still hasn’t replied… are they busy, really stuck or annoyed? Should I message them again? Once you get to know people in person it’s a lot easier to judge when a member of your team is struggling and when you can help.”

3. Travel often

Only by being there for an extended amount of time do you get a better sense of the issues and the working conditions of a remote team. Our VP Operations, Thanos Markousis, recalls his Boston team telling him that they sometimes missed out on important developments in Athens, but only when he stayed longer in Boston did he experience feeling a bit cut off himself. The answer was a shared document (which has now evolved into a wiki) where, during the day, the local team enters all noteworthy developments that are happening in the company (e.g. new release coming out, new way to investigate a common customer problem, new information about how something works), and it’s the first thing the Boston team reads when they start their day.

4. Get a schedule that works

Make sure people in separate offices (and different time zones) understand the schedule. John Short, our VP Demand Generation, had to flip his schedule from working by himself in the mornings, with meetings in the afternoon to maximize his overlap with colleagues six times zones away. Understanding and making an effort to actually do this is important.

5. Invest in communication

Using the best equipment for video and voice conferencing is going to pay dividends. At Workable, we have Chromeboxes which enable more effective long distance communication. “I really enjoy staring into a screen, calling out ‘can you hear me,’” said nobody, ever. It’s small things like spending five minutes to set up a meeting and bad connections that cause teams to communicate less when they should be talking more.

The post Lessons from a distributed team appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

We didn’t just experience a societal earthquake two years ago – we saw all changed utterly, to borrow from a Yeats poem. And we had to adapt quickly to survive. There were many adaptations as we quickly learned, particularly in the workplace – the surge of remote work, the incorporation of digital technology, and a mountain of concerns around employee engagement.

What about now in 2022? What does that new world of work look like and did all those predictions from the first time around ring true? Or were they much ado about nothing?

We decided to go and find out for ourselves, by sending out the same survey again in July 2022 – albeit with a few updated questions. The social patchwork that was so rudely ripped apart throughout 2020 has been somewhat stitched together in new ways. We know now what threads from that patchwork remained intact from before, and more so, what new threads are being sewn.

This new report comes in two parts – first, our learnings from the new survey, and second, how the new results compare with the results from 2020. The findings are remarkable. Enjoy the read and do join our conversation on the topic in the Workable Community.

Meanwhile, the major themes are as follows:

Hybrid is the new agreement

The oscillatory negotiation between return-to-office and full remote work may have settled on a new trend: hybrid. Is this a new stopgap measure or is it the way forward?

Jobseekers have the upper hand

The rise of compensation, benefits and opportunities as top value props shows that jobseekers have leverage in what they can get out of a job beyond “getting” the job.

Nothing is ‘normal’ anymore

The majority of businesses are moving on to the “next normal” in terms of working environments and business processes – and there’s no going back to the way things were.

Long-term remote problems

The long-term challenges of remote work are surfacing in the form of tech stack considerations, asynchronous issues and lingering anxieties both for businesses and their workers.

When there are setbacks and disruptions, there are adaptations and adjustments. And now, we’re presenting those in this comprehensive new survey report from Workable, titled The New World of Work, two years on: A 2022 Worker Survey.

The post Announcing The New World of Work, two years on: A 2022 worker survey appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Manage your recruiting brand, provide clear and frequent communication and help candidates feel at ease so they can do their best. Make those that get hired excited to start and those that don’t interested in coming back in the future.

Bonus: We’re totally mobile-friendly for every step of the candidate’s journey.

The candidate journey using Workable

Finding the job

Be where candidates are. Quickly post to all the most popular job boards, create social ad campaigns and tap in to coworkers’ networks with a referral portal. Plus, design a career page to your specific needs, creating not only a resource for prospective candidates, but keeping things up to date with your latest benefits, employee testimonials, photos, videos and more.

Applying

In a hot job market, candidates have many choices. Use Workable to design sensible application forms, making it easy for candidates to apply for your jobs. Workable parses resumes to eliminate the need for applicants to manually reenter details.

Communicating

Reduce candidates’ stress with clear communication. Take advantage of personalized templates and automations to always keep candidates in the loop through email and text message. Tools for self-scheduling put control in the candidate’s hand meaning time saved when it comes to nailing down a time to meet or rescheduling.

Evaluations

When it’s time to interview, Workable automatically builds landing pages where candidates can see the name, photo and title of everyone they’ll meet with, in addition to a map and directions to the office location or virtual meeting details. Native tools for video interviews and assessments are built with options to customize answer time, number of takes and practice modes. Candidates can get comfortable and do their best.

Document signing

Ready to lock in your next hire? Secure their commitment with a formal, custom offer letter. Upload templates with your own branding and design so that it’s easy to send once approved internally. Candidates can review the details and sign from desktop or mobile. When their signature’s submitted they copy of the document sent to them right away. You’re not just limited to offers. Send documents at any point in the hiring process – especially helpful when NDAs or other forms are required.

Surveying

Learn more about what your candidates think. Use surveys to gauge reactions and gather intel about your hiring process. Listen to candidates, create more equitable experiences, and better understand demographic information.

Not to mention…

Workable has features for anonymized screening, language options, background checks, integrations with your preferred HR tools, talent pool and nurturing options. We’re evolving and adding more tools all the time.

The post Maximize your candidates’ experience using Workable appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The result is Workable’s New World of Work survey report. We think you’d be very interested in this. Out of many insights, we’re highlighting three for you:

• Remote work is the big paradigm shift.
• Digital transformation is the way to get there.
• Employee engagement (particularly in remote) and remote hiring/onboarding are huge concerns now and in the future.

Other insights from the data include:

• COVID-19 forced nearly two out of every three businesses to move fully to a remote-first environment.
• 56.5% of businesses plan to make remote permanent for at least some of their workforce going forward. Just 6.2% of businesses plan to do nothing in general.
• 68% of those going remote did it without disruption because they had the technology in place. Plus, 46.1% will prioritize tech in their plans to go remote.
• 7 in 10 education workers said they could actually go remote if they needed to – but the technology is just not there to allow that to happen.
• Candidate engagement, onboarding and evaluation are predicted to be major headaches in the new world of work. Add remote to the mix, and it becomes even more challenging.
• Senior-level executives are more worried about productivity while their employees are far more concerned about engagement.

But while there’s plenty of discussion and consensus in the three highlighted areas of the report, there is no clear solution or even a rulebook to follow in this new world of work that we’re entering.

What we know is that the traditional form of work – effectively, being roommates with your colleagues, sticking to a set schedule, being “present” at your desk – is no longer tenable. It’s like trying to drive an autonomous vehicle with a stick shift.

Remote is easy at first, and so is the tech adoption to get us there. But in the long term, the pandemic is forcing us to evolve. The numbers from our survey prove that. We may not know exactly how to go about it, but it’s now on us to figure out how to do it in the best way possible.

One respondent summed it up aptly:

“It is a road that has not been walked. I honestly don’t know what is ahead; one is only just willing to explore many different strategies until they find one that works.”

The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing crisis is unprecedented, and is already being called a seminal event in modern-day world history. There will be entire books and documentaries produced on the topic.

One day, we’ll settle into a new form of living, whatever that may be. Until then, let’s keep thinking, talking, collaborating, as we work towards a new – and very different – future.

Stay healthy,

Nikos Moraitakis
CEO, Workable

The post Announcing our New World of Work survey report appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

In our last post, we announced the launch of our first aptitude assessments partner and continuing with that theme, today we announce our first integration to assess the skills of tech candidates via our partnership with Codility.

Recruiting and identifying the best talent for your open roles can be difficult, no matter what the position. However, that challenge is even greater when you’re trying to find talent for hard-to-fill tech roles such as software developers and engineers. In the past, often the only way to evaluate a candidate’s coding proficiency was to have existing programming staff on hand, to sit with each candidate individually and assess their fit for the role.  This is not just  time-consuming, but difficult to standardize, causing some of the best talent to slip through the cracks. With Codility, Workable customers can automate this process early on in the hiring pipeline, and ensure that each candidate is being assessed against the same criteria. This means that your already busy hiring team see only the most viable candidates at interview stage.

If you already have an account with Codility, activating the integration is simple. Once complete, you’ll be able to specify at which stage in the pipeline you’d like to send the test and the type of test that you send. Of course you can send specific tests for the different roles you’re hiring for. The process is seamless – everything can be done from the Workable platform, including reviewing the test results.

If you’re hiring people for tech positions in your organization and looking for a better way to assess their technical skills, find out more about Codility and sign up for a free trial.

More integrations coming soon

We have more exciting announcements coming up! Stay tuned for our upcoming integrations for video interviews, onboarding and new additions to our HRIS providers. If you’re a software provider, find out more about our Developer Partner Program.

The post Announcing our new integration with Codility appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Saberr is a people analytics company. Through technology, they aim to improve collaboration and help companies create happy, high performing teams. Saberr Base is specifically focussed on measuring candidate cultural fit as part of the hiring process.

Resumes and profiles are good for helping hiring managers identify candidates with the right set of skills. Pre-employment assessments can measure the strength of those skills and provide a strong indication of candidates who should progress to the next stage in your hiring pipeline. But long-term success in a company is often as dependent on building a cohesive team whose personalities work well together, as it is on hiring for a specific skillset.

A structured interview process can provide clues on how a candidate might match the culture of the organization, but interviews are a very short window and it’s rare that the whole team will take part in the interview process. We’ve all heard of, or experienced, the new employee who looked great on paper and interviewed like a rock star, but just never managed to bond with their team after starting in the role. Why? Because they weren’t a fit for the culture of the team. Saberr Base provides the solution to this hiring problem.

How to assess candidate cultural fit

Saberr Base’s process starts with a short 15 minute survey of your existing employees. This creates individual reports which, when aggregated indicate team values, motivations, positive influences – and where conflict in the team is most likely to happen.

The candidate report, usually completed before the interview stage, indicates candidates’ values alignment with your team and how well they will work with specific team members. It also shows personality fit against your role requirements. Finally, an interview guide based on Saberr data helps teams undertake robust culture interviews. Combined, Saberr’s predictive analytics can help you determine the likelihood that a candidate will fit the role, the team and your organization.

If you already have an account with Saberr and are currently using Base, activating the integration with Workable is simple. Once complete, you’ll be able to specify at which stage in the pipeline you’d like to send the Saberr Base survey. The process is seamless – everything can be done from the candidate’s profile in Workable, including reviewing the value alignment results.

Interested in making better hires for stronger teams? Saberr are happy to walk you through a demo to explain in detail how this could work for your organization.

More integrations coming soon

Yes! We have even more integrations coming soon. Watch this space through the end of the year, as we’re set to launch a series of new partnerships. If you’re a software provider, get involved; find out more about our Developer Partner Program.

The post Workable partners with Saberr for cultural fit candidate assessments appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Hiring assessments provide a data-driven approach to recruitment. They can help to remove hiring bias by creating a level playing field for every candidate.

“Resumes are not enough—they offer just one dimension of a candidate’s experience and are time consuming for hiring managers and recruiters to sift through,” said Raj Mukherjee, SVP of Product at Indeed. “Assessments also help to democratize hiring by giving job seekers an equal opportunity to showcase their qualifications when applying for jobs, so that they are able to find the right opportunities faster and easier.”

Empowering employers to assess candidates more easily

Indeed’s long term mission is ‘to help people get jobs’. In August 2017, they acquired Interviewed, the San Francisco-based candidate assessment specialists. At that time, Interviewed had helped companies to assess over 2.4 million candidates. Now with the combined power of Indeed job boards, companies can not only connect with, but assess candidates more easily.

A wide variety of candidate assessment tools for flexible screening

Indeed Assessments offers the flexibility to screen for the skills most relevant to your hiring needs. They provide 50+ ready-to-go candidate assessments covering cognitive and psychometric tests, computer, language and job skills.

Within these categories the candidate assessment tests span a wide range of job levels and industries, including technology, sales and customer service. Many of the tests feature interactive simulations of real life scenarios and are mobile friendly, making it easy for candidates regardless of their location.

A powerful recommendation engine

Through their recommendation engine, Indeed Assessments will suggest the most appropriate test for your role. As an employer you can choose from over 50 pre-built candidate assessments or custom build your own to fit your individual hiring needs.

Assigning tests and reviewing scores

Assessments help to provide a consistent candidate experience. Select the number of tests you want each candidate to receive (there’s no limit) and at which stage in the hiring pipeline. Send the tests directly via Workable and see the results on the Workable candidate profile, to objectively compare candidate performance.

The post Workable partners with Indeed Assessments to offer free candidate screening tools appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

HackerRank makes evaluating and interviewing developers easier, faster and fairer. And it does this on a global scale. It has 1,500 customers, has assessed over 20% of the developer population and shared over 21 million coding challenges. Combine that with Workable’s own set of stats—20,000 customers across 100+ countries, 75 million candidates, 1 million hires–and you’ve got one powerful hiring machine.

“This was a natural partnership for us to make,” says Rob Long, Workable’s VP of Partnerships. “Like us, HackerRank serves companies looking for the best tech talent around the world, from smaller startups to enterprise companies. And, like Workable, it also supports the tech community by making it easier for top developers to find the right jobs. Working together, we’re vastly improving the interviewing experience, not just for recruiters but for candidates too.”

Supporting recruiters and the developing community

When it comes to evaluation, what you assess is important but how you do it matters too. Providing a positive candidate experience is more likely to turn your favorite candidate into your next great hire. The good news? Integrating HackerRank with Workable makes technical hiring seamless for everyone. Recruiters can source, assess and track candidates on a single platform, while candidates experience a clear, consistent and considered end-to-end experience.

“We’re on a mission to match every developer to the right role, and improving the actual recruiting workflow is central to our goal,” says Josh Zaroor, HackerRank’s Head of Business Development.

Our customers have long loved Workable and the data it provides them. With this integration, we’re meeting widespread customer demand, simplifying the hiring funnel for everyone involved and bringing HackerRank’s powerful tech hiring solutions to Workable customers everywhere.

Three major wins for Workable customers

What’s in it for you? Integrating your Workable account with HackerRank delivers three game-changing benefits:

1. Seamless evaluation: From viewing, selecting and sending tests to managing assessments, results and feedback recruiters can do everything without leaving Workable’s ATS.
2. Data confidence: Centralizing all candidate information into one single source of truth, recruiters have fast and easy access to the latest data and can see at a glance the status of each application.
3. Faster, fairer hiring: Objective skills assessments eliminate bias, while also efficiently filtering out unqualified candidates. Time saved interviewing weak candidates can be reinvested into product development.

Ready to integrate with HackerRank?

It only takes a few minutes to set up and use HackerRank with Workable. Once activated you can add any of your HackerRank assessments to relevant pipeline stages and send the test from a candidate’s profile. When a candidate completes an assessment the results will appear on their Timeline and you’ll be notified. Got a question? We’re here to provide more info whenever you need it—just get in touch.

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But how can you choose who to move to the next phase based solely on those criteria? Even though you have some evidence, it’s easy to get lost in translation, especially when you have numerous applicants to screen.

That’s where Workable Assessments can step in and do the trick.

First, you’ll get a better overview of each candidate’s skills on different cognitive areas that you define as important to thrive. Second, you’ll learn more about their workplace personality and behavior to see if they’re a good fit for your current team and workplace.

Certified by psychometric experts and designed within the Workable platform, the Workable Assessments feature is not only credible, but also a handy solution for hiring teams. With easy access to performance insights and a user-friendly interface that enables collaboration, it’s an asset for organizations who want to introduce pre-employment testing into their screening process.

Inside Workable Assessments: Understanding different test types

Here’s a brief breakdown of Workable Assessments: the cognitive part consists of four tests measuring different types of mental skills – abstract reasoning, numerical comprehension, verbal comprehension, and attention & focus.

1. Cognitive Assessments

Abstract reasoning: This looks at the ability to logically analyze multiple information that are presented in a more abstract form – usually not numbers or words. For example, software engineers and researchers often need to think abstractly and out-of-the-box to recognize patterns and resolve problems in a resourceful way.

Numerical comprehension: This assesses how candidates handle and analyze numerical data in order to reach appropriate decisions. For example, an accounting candidate should have a high degree of this skill in order to perform their daily responsibilities. Overall, positions in Finance, Banking and Audit require a high numerical comprehension level.

Verbal comprehension: This measures the ability to understand and analyze verbal information, such as arguments and written statements, e.g. reports. For instance, it’s a critical skill for lawyers and journalists, among others.

Attention & focus: This assesses abilities that require observation and acute working memory. This is vital for roles that require a high attention span or switch often between tasks, such as content editors and data entry agents.

The jobs mentioned in the examples above are indicative. Every company shapes their roles based on its business needs and for similar job titles, requirements may vary. Once you define the mandatory skill set needed, you can hand over the related assessments to candidates.

2. Workplace Personality Assessment

Workable’s personality assessment is based on the Big 5 Model and unveils how people behave in a professional setting. More specifically, they measure the degree of the personality traits below – and 23 related factors, that define their workplace personality:

• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Conscientiousness
• Emotional Stability
• Openness to Experience

Before you administer the assessment, determine what traits the ideal candidate should have based on the role, responsibilities, and current team dynamics. For example, if you’re looking for a salesperson, then a high extraversion level would be an asset, but it’s not the same if you’re looking for a content marketer.

Even though Workable’s cognitive assessments are targeted to white-collar professionals, the personality assessments benefit all types of companies and roles. And remember, you don’t have to provide all tests in bulk; it’s up to you to decide what’s best for your hiring process.

About candidate experience

As with every other Workable product, this is designed with candidates and hiring teams in mind. We understand that pre-employment assessments could be stressful for candidates, so we made sure to provide an easy-to-navigate experience in an intuitive interface.

Before the assessment starts, candidates learn how the tool works. They have time to warm up, get comfortable with the instructions and answer a few practice questions.

In addition, we’ve introduced adaptive technology, which means that the difficulty of the provided questions varies and adjusts to the candidate’s ability. This minimizes the time needed to complete each test and makes candidates feel more confident throughout the process with their performance.

So, these are Workable Assessments, everyone. We’re thrilled to offer you this hiring solution – we hope you are, too.

The post Introducing Workable Assessments: Make data-driven hiring decisions appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Driven by a desire to help, our Product team banded together and built Bridge, a new outplacement solution that empowers customers to help displaced employees find new jobs, quickly, with other companies in the Workable network that are still hiring.

Normally, a product design and release of this scale takes many months to plan and execute. But, we knew time was of the essence and we consolidated our resources to make this available to our customers in just under two weeks.

We’re hoping Bridge offers an opportunity for customers to solidify their brand while helping laid-off workers hit the ground running in new positions as quickly as possible. Here’s how it works:

We, at Workable, are very much in the spirit of working together for the betterment of the community. And that’s especially strong in the midst of COVID-19. The Bridge project is our own contribution to that spirit. We can get through this – let’s make it happen together.

The post Announcing Bridge: Connecting laid-off workers with new employers appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

In this webinar, we’ll show you how this year’s product releases can help you elevate your employer brand, improve your candidate experience, and allow your team to hire remotely in this new world of work.

The post Tackle 2021 with Workable’s latest product releases appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Quit rates are through the roof, and weirdly enough, it’s not translating into a larger and more active candidate pool for employers – rather, it’s the opposite. Workers appear to be dropping out of the system, and they’re not all ready to move to a new job. Data from the Workable network confirms this as well.

Employers are taking a hit from all this. At best, they’re making do with leaner teams; at worst, they’re shutting down entirely because of this unique talent shortage.

It’s becoming more challenging to retain talent, and harder to attract candidates to new roles. As leaders in the hiring space, we’re very cognizant of this, and we want to help you overcome these challenges. So, instead of theorizing and speculating and predicting and analyzing, we decided to ask 1,250 workers in the US and UK to find out what they want and value in a job.

Out of the many insights in the Great Discontent survey, we have four main takeaways for you:

Money still talks

Despite all the new workplace developments, salary, perks and benefits are still top of mind. People want – and need – more of it when working.

Flexy is sexy

Flexible work arrangements are important to many workers – and much more for women than men – but it’s not as high of a priority for their employers.

The power of connectivity

No matter the kind of work involved, people are at the heart of it all. When people feel connected to their colleagues and leadership, they’ll stay and they’ll thrive.

There’s no place like home

Integrating personal and professional lives is very important for people – it’s the top reason why those not working aren’t working and the top benefit of flexible work. Again, this is especially so for women.

Our survey also finds that three quarters of workers may be ready to bolt at any given time. This signals a potential disconnect in the system. It’s a tough situation for employers, and this may require a fresh look at your talent attraction and retention strategy.

These are strange, historic, exciting times, and it’s clear the rules of the game are changing for employers. We don’t have all the answers – those will come later in hindsight. But the conversation is always worth adding to. We think you’ll find useful insights here as we venture into the new world of work and post-pandemic environment.

Without further ado, check out our reports:

• The Great Discontent: 2021 Worker Survey (US)
• The Great Discontent: 2021 Worker Survey (UK)

Have insights, concerns, criticisms, swear words, accolades, or anything else? We’d love to hear them. Please send them to our content team at content@workable.com and we’ll be sure to address each and every one of them.

Yours in sustainability,

Nikos Moraitakis
CEO, Workable

The post Announcing the Great Discontent: 2021 Worker Survey appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

It was an idea that took form over time, he explains, and grew into something more. Something with energy and purpose of its own.

“I think the idea is mostly popularized with companies with a lot of remote employees who needed to meet with each other once or twice a year,” Nikos explains, noting that in the beginning, it was simply a product summit with all hands on deck every three to six months. That, of course, was an easy thing to plan for.

“The first time we did it [in 2013],” he says, “the company must have had between five and 10 people.” The only person who wasn’t in Athens at the time was Workable’s Vice President of Partnerships, Rob Long, in London. That meant just one long-ish trip had to be planned; the rest could just gather at the Athens office and dive headways into the planned agenda.

“For one day, we all had this one meeting where we spend the whole day together,” Nikos explains, noting that there’s no separation between departments in a startup with less than 10 colleagues.

The focus of that gathering was clear: to review how many customers they got and how they’re using the product, to try and figure out what’s happening with the product, and what they were going to do in the months ahead based on the takeaways from that review. A regular planning session, so to speak.

That escalated quickly

“Six months later,” Nikos recalls about the 2014 event, “there were 15 of us. Then, [in 2015], it was something like 40-50 of us – not all in Greece. Some were in London and one in Portland, Oregon.” That summit saw 57 colleagues gathering at Astir Palace in Athens – take note if you’re looking for company retreat locations.

The temptation from a business standpoint would be to look at those numbers and make a decision on who should attend because of costs involved. But Nikos and his colleagues decided that everyone should be involved in such a company retreat – even as the number of people to be flown in and put in hotels was growing. Remote employees were put in a hotel and local Greek colleagues would drive in for the day, and they’d have a full-day gathering in a rented conference room at that hotel.

But then, things happened that evening during the dinner – the conversation went far beyond that of product and planning.

“We ended up discussing a lot more things. And since we got everyone together, we said, ‘OK, so let’s talk about the financing and everything we do.’”

That inspiration evolved into the next company retreat: a full day of intense discussion on features, pricing, presentations, and so on, Nikos adds. Many decisions were made this time – lending further value to the event.

They were at it again the following year, in 2016, at Grecotel Cape Sounio a little over an hour south of Athens – with 103 people in tow. Colleagues started remarking on how they enjoyed meeting so-and-so during the dinner that night, and particularly getting to know each other in a social setting outside of the work environment.

Persistence has its prize

As the summit and its purpose grew and evolved, Nikos recognized other benefits to organizing a regular company retreat.

“We said, ‘Now’s the worst time to stop it. Now that we have this many people who are abroad and they haven’t spent too much time with the others in Athens, now, it’s the best time to bring them together one day.’”

“We started realizing how big of a deal it is for the people in the company. This isn’t about the product meeting. The best part of it is everybody coming together.”

In 2017, Workable then had 170 people whisked away to Grecotel Olympia Riviera, a three-hour drive west of Athens, for a four-day event. This was a treat for local Greek colleagues who previously were driving to the destination and returning home in the evenings.

This time, “we had fewer presentations and more socializing activities,” Nikos says, going into detail about a team-building exercise where they split the company into 10 teams and each team was given materials to build a raft, which they’d take to the ocean for a test run and a race.

“As a team-building activity, it was fun. It was really hard to make the raft, let alone sit on it and paddle with it and battle out the people who were trying to destroy your raft.”

Again, as before, there was something new to be learned. The ‘organized fun’ had its drawbacks. Workable colleagues approached Nikos to tell him that they actually enjoyed having a drink by the pool with the little extra time they had, more so than the activities themselves.

Makes a lot of sense. Studies have actually found that there’s a significant health benefit to having some free time throughout the day on a regular basis, particularly when a strong message is sent out that people are permitted and encouraged to have that free time (which calls in the importance of clear company messaging).

In response to that, the 2019 summit saw a priority placed on free time rather than company functions. More than 250 attendees flew and bussed to Barcelo Hydra Beach Resort, some four hours south of Athens. As far as company retreat locations go, this was an attractive spot: a beachfront location with bungalows, open-air nightclub setting, large cafeteria, a swimming pool, plenty of beaches – ideal for a social setting. As Nikos put it:

“You come back and you have people who are not just colleagues, but many become friends.”

The quid pro quo effect

Friends isn’t just about getting together and enjoying each other’s company. When colleagues are more familiar with each other beyond their usual working relationship, there’s a tangible benefit to the business.

Nikos explains: “The biggest problem in companies, especially with remote workers and international offices, is that, inevitably, there will come a day when you need to go to someone not on your team, and you would have to ask them to do something they don’t want to do.”

It could be because you made a mistake in your job, and you need someone to help you fix it quickly. Or it’s your important customer, the one you really want to keep, and somebody needs to do something extra for them. That’s challenging when you don’t really know them.

“If that person [you need to talk to] was just a name on an email list,” Nikos says, “and you only knew the boss of their boss and you’ve never spoken directly with that person, and you’re going to just speak on a phone call, it’d be harder to get what you need done.”

However, if you had met that person over a beer or gone swimming with them on the beach, and had become friends, and they know you’re a nice guy, Nikos says, “of course they’re going to help you.”

Getting out of their cars

He refers tangentially to a well-studied phenomenon, that of road rage.

“Think about it,” he says. “If we’re walking down the street and you walk right into me, I’m not going to say, ‘You bastard, why’d you do that?’ That’s because we were not programmed to say or act something like that to someone’s face.”

But, Nikos notes, “when you’re inside a car, and the other person is inside another car, what happens is that when you’re shouting at someone, you’re not shouting at the person – you’re shouting at the car. People inside their cars say things to people in other cars that they wouldn’t have said if they were standing next to each other.”

He adds that a similar phenomenon takes place – to a lesser degree, of course – when you have remote teams working together from different locations, communicating via email and other digital media.

“What happens in companies like ours where people sit in offices very far away is a mild version of that. We are looking at the person sitting in a computer screen. It’s not quite the same. And you don’t need to be next to each other every day.”

He then notes another aspect of human psychology: sharing food with other people, which he says is the most powerful bonding activity humans have. It’s especially so when they are together sharing a meal – it’s been scientifically proven to have an effect on consensus and cooperation in the workplace.

“It gets people out of the car, has them break bread together, and this brings them closer together.”

It’s not just friends

There are other benefits to holding a company retreat. Nikos reminds us that investors have attended the summit and shared their powerful insights: “Obviously, these people have put so much money into it and they think that this company is going to be worth billions. They have a reason why. So it was good for them to explain in macroeconomics to the employees why this company is going to be so great.”

There’s also a managerial aspect to it.

“I have a rule,” Nikos says, “where all the executives need to talk every quarter and meet the team on the other side. [Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing Rachel Bates] has 120 people in her team – so she meets once every quarter. Other people may meet once a year. Now, these people can have that once-a-year meeting, plus the summit.”

With that, Nikos refers to the summit as a management tool that can be built and updated, and grows with its scale.

Company retreat long-term goals

Nikos emphasized the power of bringing everyone together to the same table for a few days. At the summit, he says a lot of people think: “Today, I’m going to stop worrying about what happens next week. I’m going to think about what happens a year from now. And I’m going to do that together with other people who I’m hoping will be with me a year from now.

“And we’re going to eat together and have fun together and meet each as a person. If you weren’t working with them for a year and I just took you to a hotel, you wouldn’t become friends,” Nikos continues.

But, he adds:

“If you have worked long enough to know each other long enough, and then I take you to that place and I give you the time to sit down and discuss on top of everything you know from each other, you realize you’ve already been friends with those people.”

And it doesn’t matter how often it happens – it matters what the quality of the summit is, what the company retreat ideas are, and how it’s organized. And of course, its overarching purpose. Are you looking to build a plan for the next year for your product? Are you pulling investors and clients together for a high-quality, educational round table? Are you going to have training sessions for all your colleagues? Or is it all of the above, with plenty of time set aside for open socializing and connecting?

Nikos answers from his own experience: “In the beginning, the most important thing is that everybody knew what was going on. Then it became everybody having some fun and we had the American office and the Greek office making sure that these offices liked each other.

“Now you have a bigger company of people like you, with remote teams and so on. And then you get out of the car, shake hands, eat together. You can be real people, together.”

Related: The power of the corporate retreat: 5 reasons why you should do it

The post Evolution of a company retreat: from product updates to breaking bread appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

If you already have an account with Criteria, activating the integration is simple. Once complete, you’ll be able to specify at which stage in the pipeline you’d like to send the test and the type of test that you send. The process is seamless – everything can be done from inside Workable, including reviewing the test results.

If you’re new to pre-employment testing, here’s a quick rundown of ways it can help:

Assess candidates more objectively

If your candidate has performed well at the phone screen stage, well designed assessment test from a specialist provider will help you to draw objective conclusions before you reach a structured interview.

Pre-set tests have the advantage of being standardized and administered in the same way to every candidate. By selecting a test according to job-related criteria, you’ll give everyone the same opportunity to succeed.

Save time on interviews

Interviews are stressful for candidates and take time for your hiring team to prepare and complete. Some of the basic requirements can be assessed through pre-employment screening before you get to the interview stage. Save time for both your candidate and the hiring team, and create a better candidate experience.

Make decisions based on quantifiable data

Companies are becoming more aware of the value of building diverse teams, and hiring methods that directly tackle unconscious bias will help improve your hiring process. Test results enable you to be specific about your reasons for rejecting or progressing a candidate. Rely less on ‘gut instinct’ and stay inline with EEOC regulations by using tests created by professionals, for the professionals that you want to hire.

If you’ve yet to use an assessment test provider, find out more about Criteria and sign up for a free trial.

More integrations coming soon

This is the first of many integrations that we have planned, so please keep an eye here and on the newsletter for our latest releases. If you’re a software provider, find out more about our Developer Partner Program.

The post Workable integrates with Criteria appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

A range of coding assessments

Coding assessment tests from Qualified cover a broad spectrum, from CS algorithms to specific technologies and frameworks like Node.js and Ruby on Rails. They use real testing frameworks—frameworks developers are familiar with—for evaluating results. Choose between their pre-made assessments or customize them to meet your specific needs.

Improve hiring workflow

Process candidates faster and without bias using Qualified’s automated assessment workflows. Their software weeds through the applicant pool at your assigned stage in the interview pipeline, objectively comparing test scores to eliminate weak candidates. This leaves you free to focus time and energy on your most promising candidates.

Insight into cracking the code

How candidates approach coding assessments can be just as revealing as the end result. By integrating Qualified with Workable you can identify engineers who have the skillset and thought processes that align with your intended goals. Using their code playback feature you can see how a candidate approaches a problem and the steps they take towards a final solution.

Get integrated

If you’re already using Workable and Qualified, see how to activate the integration and make Qualified an embedded part of your recruitment process.

Once you’ve activated your Qualified integration, you’ll be able to send an assessment from the candidate’s profile. When the results of the assessment are available, you’ll receive notification via email and your Workable Inbox, along with a link to log in to Qualified and view the results.

If you’ve yet to try Qualified, find out more with a free trial.

Interested in sharing your product or service with Workable customers? Take a look at our Developer Partner Program.

The post Workable partners with coding assessment provider, Qualified appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Identify high performers and make better hires

Recruiting software’s about more than managing workflows and process. It’s about building a pipeline full of quality candidates. And then using the right assessments to hire the best. With MindX you can identify candidates likely to be high performers at your organization. So, how does it work?

MindX joins gamification with data science and organizational psychology. The end result is a scientific assessment of work-relevant, cognitive traits, presented as a single score.

Using this score, you can determine at a glance (and with reduced unconscious bias) if a candidate is a good fit for your company.

Automate candidate workflow

MindX’s integration with Workable automates the entire candidate workflow; from sending tests to providing easy-to-interpret assessment outputs. Attach assessments to specific stages in the recruiting pipeline and review results directly from each candidate’s Timeline.

More integrations coming soon

Yes! We’ve got even more integrations coming soon. Watch this space through to the end of the year, as we launch a series of new partnerships. If you’re a Workable user and have a tool you’d love to see integrated with Workable, let us know! If you’re a software provider, why not find out more about our Developer Partner Program and get involved?

Bonus: 10 of the best recruiting assessment tools

The post Workable integrates with predictive assessment tool, MindX appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Measuring culture fit

ThriveMap is a tool that measures the culture fit between people and teams. It enables better hiring decisions by objectively assessing how your candidates like to work, and comparing that to your team culture. The culture fit measurement is based on the work environments in which people thrive—not on personalities.

Each assessment is bespoke, based directly on what your teams do day-to-day. Even better, it only takes only five minutes to complete.

Providing actionable data

Having assessed culture fit, ThriveMap’s software outputs easy-to-use analytics. This data goes directly into the hands of your hiring managers; the people who are most impacted by hiring decisions.

Armed with relevant, actionable data and insight, your managers can use ThriveMap analytics to improve their team’s performance.

Improving performance

ThriveMap helps managers understand how their teams like to work. This gives managers the opportunity to improve culture, and in turn, raise performance. It does this by providing insights on how a team would like to work compared to their manager’s management style. This encourages higher productivity in a team’s current state and when new members are hired.

Evidence shows that ThiveMap helps improve hiring accuracy, reduce employee turnover, increase team harmony, enhance candidate experience and minimize hiring bias.

Integrating ThriveMap with Workable

By integrating ThriveMap with Workable you can identify the candidates who would thrive in your team.

Once you’ve activated the integration, you’ll be able to send a ThriveMap assessment from the candidate’s profile. When the results of the assessment are available, you’ll receive notification via email, and your Workable inbox, along with a link to log in to ThriveMap and view the results.

If you’re already using Workable and ThriveMap, see how to activate the integration and make ThriveMap an embedded part of your recruitment process.

If you’ve yet to try ThriveMap, find out more.

Interested in sharing your product or service with Workable customers? Take a look at our Developer Partner Program.

The post Workable partners with culture fit assessment tool, ThriveMap appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

As anyone that reads our Recruiting Blog will know, we’ve recently expanded our sales team at Workable. Rachel, our VP of Sales explains how having a mobile ATS she could use on the move made this possible. As you can imagine, finding the right way to assess candidates for sales focussed roles is close to our hearts. This is another reason why we’re excited to announce our latest partnership today: Workable now integrates with Objective Management Group (OMG).

No matter the position, identifying the candidates with right set of skills can be a challenge for any organization. Strong candidates for sales roles can be even more difficult because, let’s face it, most will already know how to present themselves in the best possible light. Using OMG’s sales assessments, Workable customers can eliminate 96% of the mistakes made when hiring salespeople (and sales managers, too) and take a more objective view when it comes to an individual’s charming personality, perfect track record or resume.

If you already have an account with OMG, activating the integration is simple. Once complete, you’ll be able to specify at which stage in the pipeline you’d like to send the test and the type of test that you send, for the different jobs in your Workable account. The process is seamless – everything can be done from inside Workable, including reviewing the test results.

If you’re hiring people in sales positions in your organization and looking for a better way to assess their technical skills, find out more about OMG and sign up for a free trial.

More integrations coming soon

OK – we’ve said this before, but we have a lot more exciting releases in the coming weeks to close out 2017 with a bang! Stay tuned for coming announcements with new partners in video interviewing, sourcing tools, and more. If you’re a software provider, find out more about our Developer Partner Program.

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One plan fits all

So, Workable Hiring Plan. Who is it good for? Absolutely everyone (who needs to be involved).

Managing requisitions requires input from different stakeholders across your organization. If you’re growing at pace—with new departments emerging as you expand—there’s often little time to formalize processes across all teams. (We know, we’ve been there!) Which is why it’s so common for individual areas to track their own requisitions, sharing ad-hoc info through emails and spreadsheets. Fine at the time, maybe. But not so great when it comes to building a cohesive hiring plan or a future-proof planning process.

From finance teams, budget-holders and senior leaders to department heads, hiring managers and admins, Workable Hiring Plan aligns all of your stakeholders. It gives easy access to all the hiring data and requisition approval tools needed to wipe out individual planning docs. And, by making it easy for everyone to collaborate and engage in the process when they need to, you can keep your requisition process moving forward with pace.

Get fast approval of all requisitions

Behind most great hires, you’ll often find a less-than-great requisition process lurking in the background. Managed manually, through emails, forms and spreadsheets, approval workflow is typically sluggish and prone to bottlenecks.

The answer? Automate, automate, automate! Create all your requisitions using Workable Hiring Plan, assign the right approvers and let our software do the rest.

Adding a new req is easy, with only a few key sections (such as job title or location) to fill in.

Want to add more detail? No problem. Choose from the optional fields provided or request your own. Information added here is shared with all approvers, which means the job description, goals and requirements are clear and transparent. And consensus is obtained from the start. Had your requisition rejected? Adjust the details (for example, salary range) and re-submit.

Setting up your workflow’s another quick win. Use our standard template to assign the same approvers for every role. Or customize who approves what according to department or location (or both). As well as saving time, requisition approvals ensure the right people sign off on the right requisitions at the right time.

All of your stakeholders are automatically notified (through desktop or our mobile app) and empowered to act on-the-spot when action’s required. With approvals pinned down, and a clear audit trail in place, you can act fast to advertise and hire great talent when you need it.

Track and adapt your plan

Budgets, timelines and team needs change. We know. And the best hiring plans are those that reflect this. With all of your requisitions in one place, and real-time data on hand, Workable Hiring Plan is a dynamic, single source of truth which empowers you to:

• quickly see the status of each requisition,
• track your planned start date against each requisition’s approval status,
• report accurately on time to fill, and
• compare final offers with your budgeted requisitions.

If timelines or finances need updating, use live data to inform changes and get speedy approval from your stakeholders. Automated notifications keep everyone in the loop. So, if the final salary for a req is more than originally agreed, or the start date’s later than you first planned, you can be confident the right people will know.

A powerful tool for longer-term requisition planning

With your current hiring plan on track, and notifications in place to flag any changes, why stop at this year’s requisition strategy? Packed full of rich data, Workable Hiring Plan’s also a powerful tool for longer-term planning.

Add requisitions for next year, as well as this year, and use the filter option to analyze data across all past, present and future plans. Report on your own metrics—including any custom fields you’ve added. And apply this year’s learnings to next year’s plan. Need to get senior leaders on board? Shareable reports filled with rich, custom data make it easy to engage key stakeholders in future strategy.

Want to find out more?

Workable Hiring Plan is available to buy as an annual add-on to our Enterprise and Pro packages. If you’re already with us and want to find out how it could work for you, get in touch! If you’re new to Workable, but big on requisition planning, we’re here if you want to chat through your options or schedule a demo.

The post Transform your requisition approval process with Workable Hiring Plan appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

So, the challenge was on. As well as working for candidates, our new careers pages had to work for recruiters too. To do this our team needed to tackle two things: the application process, and the careers page itself. Here’s what we did it and what impact it’s had so far (hint: early metrics are looking good!).

Careers pages that engage visitors

Recruiters want careers pages that market their brand and attract quality candidates to open roles. Quality candidates are attracted by careers pages that deliver clear information about a company and its available roles. This clear overlap made defining our initial brief relatively easy. Our new careers pages had to focus on two key areas: branding and search functionality.

Powerful ways to showcase your brand

Easy to set up and easy to use across all devices, it’s now also easier to promote your brand through your Workable-hosted careers page. From your company profile page you can:

• add a logo
• provide content about your company—including photos and videos
• select a main brand color for all of your titles, buttons and links, and
• check the contrast ratio of your brand color (this ensures it meets web accessibility standards and is readable and comfortable for the widest possible audience).

These four powerful enhancements take minutes to put in place but, once set, apply automatically across your Workable-hosted careers page.

Faster and more accurate filtering of roles

If you’re a prospective candidate, the last thing you want to do when you visit a careers page is wade through tens or hundreds of open roles to find the right ones for you. In fact, chances are you won’t even hang around to look—we know, we’ve been that candidate! Which is why every Workable-hosted careers page now includes sophisticated search filtering. By filtering based on location (or remote roles), department and work type, candidates can quickly find openings that best-match their interests and skills.

Application forms that convert visitors into candidates

Unlike our brief for the careers page, our remit for the application process had a disconnect rather than an overlap. Candidates want application forms that are quick and easy to complete. But, recruiters want application forms that hold rich and detailed information about candidates. So, we needed to make the application process deliver richer profiles with less effort. Here’s how:

1. Automate form-filling
   Using our new careers page, application forms can be auto-filled using information extracted from an uploaded resume. Within seconds, work experience, education history and all personal details (name, email, phone) get filled in.
2. Simplify cross-referencing
   User research told us that candidates regularly check the job description when filling in an application. So we added a new job description tab to make it easier for them to view it in context, alongside the application.
3. Include built-in checks
   Another usability issue almost all web users (and certainly applicants) face is getting validation errors after submitting an application. Which is why our new application form includes inline validation or “correct-as-you-go” checks. These checks prompt candidates to complete or correct a field of information before they move on. The result? Faster applications, increased completion rates and better user satisfaction.
4. Optimize for mobile and desktop
   More jobseekers are using mobile tech to search and apply for new roles. To address this, we’ve made it easy for recruiters to preview how the application form will appear on mobile as well as on desktop. This means recruiters can make conscious decisions about design and length and ensure it works powerfully on both platforms

Early metrics and later developments

I’m pleased to say we’ve met our challenges. And more! We released our new careers pages and application form two months ago and, the good news is, early metrics are strong. Candidates can now submit rich applications in less than a minute. And the conversion of applicants has increased by 15 to 20%. But we’re not stopping there. We’ve got more advanced enhancements, including language kits, in the pipeline. So, watch this space. And, in the meantime, if you’re not using a Workable-hosted careers page, but would like to find out more, why not get in touch?

The post Designing careers pages that convert appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

First off, Eftychia stresses that a careers page is a critical part of the overall recruiting marketing strategy of a company. The vast majority of candidates will end up in your careers page during their job application journey.

“The second thing after seeing an open role in a board or another platform is to click to go to the company’s website and look for all the details of the company,” Eftychia says. “After this, they might go to Glassdoor, but overall, the most common step is to visit the careers page.”

Candidates don’t only apply to jobs but to companies, too. They want to know what a company’s values, vision and culture are before expressing their interest for a role. They want to visualize themselves working for you and imagine what their daily work life would be like.

That’s why Eftychia recommends making your careers page as inclusive and transparent as you can, sharing details on the company and the hiring process in an engaging way.

“You want to make the candidates excited,” Eftychia says. “You want them to really like the company.”

What should a careers page include to stand out?

As Eftychia reminds us, a careers page has a huge influence on a candidate’s motivation to apply for a job at your company. Think of it as prime real estate when promoting your company as a potential employer. So, you need to think carefully about what you need to include in a careers page that makes it unique and memorable for a prospective job applicant.

Eftychia recommends three main elements of a careers page that can make it really shine:

1. Share video testimonials

Posting videos with employee testimonials help you interact with prospects indirectly and show them who you really are:

”I would include in the careers page videos from employees talking about what they are doing, talking about their teams and why they like being in this company,” Eftychia says.

Eftychia is a strong believer that videos from executives in a careers page can make a good impression on candidates. No one can describe the company’s vision better than the company’s own leaders. It also makes the company feel more accessible on a personal level. She explains:

“I really like watching CEOs or CTOs being so close to the candidate and letting them know why it’s nice to work in their company or what their vision was when they started this company. It’s not so regular to see videos from executives as they are typically very busy for this, but I would like to see them on the careers page.”

2. Highlight company culture

Eftychia suggested introducing elements of fun activities that take place in the company to highlight the full workplace spirit to potential candidates:

“I would make it [the careers page] colorful and vivid and I would try to transfer the spirit of the company. I would also include activities from employees, even outside work. Like playing soccer, doing a team bonding activity or just having fun.”

For companies that have recently transitioned from shared physical workplaces to remote, Eftychia highlights that it’s worth sharing why they did so and what the future holds for the business to avoid confusion from the candidates’ side.

3. Describe perks and benefits

Efychia also adds that providing clear information about your company in your careers page, like details on the hiring process or company benefits, can also reduce pre-screening time; this could improve your time to hire metrics.

Do you need to share any additional or specific information when your company operates remotely? Eftychia suggests tailoring the careers pages’ content accordingly:

“You can have videos from employees while they are working from home or talking about the experience of remote working – [and] maybe even videos from the People team explaining the policies and benefits that the company has when it comes to remote working.”

How can Workable help? Workable Advanced Careers Pages

People teams usually collaborate with marketing and design departments to put this page together and deliver the best result. The People team often has to update the careers page quickly, like when a team member has retired or departed and needs to be removed from the careers page or details on benefits need to be updated.

But how efficient is this? Syncing with other departments is both time-consuming and inconvenient in those cases – and this doesn’t come without a cost:

“We need to inform the candidates accordingly because, when we start hiring, people may think that we are kind of imbalanced in what we say in the careers page and what we actually do. So it’s good to change everything really quickly.”

Advanced Careers Pages, Workable’s upcoming product release, solves this very issue. It enables recruiters and People Ops specialists to build and edit the company’s careers page easily without needing to bring in tech or design expertise.

Eftychia, who has used Advanced Career Pagers herself to build Workable’s own careers page, confirms:

“It’s very user-friendly. You can add everything you want and you can easily and quickly modify the careers page as needed. It’s pretty clear and it can be very transparent. Candidates may be able to see all the information they would like, in order to proceed to the next step and to be enthusiastic and motivated to join this company.”

With an enhanced careers page editor and templated sections, you can present all the information and content you want in a meaningful way. Add benefits, photos, videos, social media updates and other interactive elements that will help the candidates get to know you – in addition to your current openings, of course.

This doesn’t mean that collaboration with other teams will be completely off the table – that’s up to you to decide.

“You may need some advice from content or from marketing if you need to have some branded photos,” Eftychia explains. “But if there are design rules in the company about what photos to use or which writing style to prefer, then you can work quite independently.”

Plus, if you normally assign your careers page design to an external partner or agency, Advanced Careers Page will prove to be a cost-effective solution for your business in the long run.

How can you track performance with Workable Advanced Careers Pages?

In order to understand how your careers page performs, you have to analyze page visitors’ behavior and how they convert to candidates. With Advanced Careers Pages, you can have access to Google Analytics and Pixel tracking and understand those patterns in depth.

More specifically, you can track the number of visitors to the careers page and compare that with the number of actual applicants, as well as how they’ve interacted with the page – including which videos they’ve watched and what they clicked on. Those can be strong indicators of which elements are working and which elements need improvement.

But according to Eftychia, low visits and conversion rates do not automatically point to an ineffective careers page – maybe something else is missing.

“It [the analytics tool] can help you see how many candidates are applying but the careers page is not to be blamed if candidates are not applying. [It could be] something bigger. [It could be] the employer branding, or a specific situation. It has to do with many things,” Eftychia explains, adding that there can be numerous other factors affecting a candidate’s motivation to apply.”

To sum up, Eftychia believes that a careers page with creative elements and striking storytelling can bring the right candidates to you. With Workable Advanced Careers Pages, you can build a branded careers page and update it as needed without waiting for marketing updates or external resources to do the job – you can manage and master this project yourself within your People team.

The post Tell your brand story using Workable Advanced Career Pages appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The response from candidates and customers alike was overwhelmingly positive but we also heard from customers who wanted more customizable careers pages and options, like: 

1. More branding: Branding options were still limited in the 2019 release. Having only one branding color was challenging for organizations that featured two or three colors in their brand; moreover, typography configuration was a common request, to make the marketing and careers sites more consistent.
2. More content: The available content options were limited: you could add text, images, and videos. Hiring teams found it difficult to compete with custom careers sites’ content-rich sections with testimonials, maps, benefits, and more. 
3. Tracking performance: Τo improve your careers site, you must be able to track how it performs – ideally with your existing web analytics tools. Customers with dedicated recruitment marketing teams were missing a way to measure, analyze, and improve their careers site.
4. Customized URL hosting: For many customers, hosting the careers site under their own custom domain, like jobs.acme.com, instead of the generic apply.workable.com, was a common request to ensure a more consistent candidate experience. 

These challenges led some customers to look for other options to build the careers pages they envisioned. This meant either outsourcing the project to agencies – a long and expensive process – or requesting help from their own engineering and design resources, teams who usually have other high-priority projects to deliver.

Advanced careers pages

Understanding these needs, we designed the next version of our careers pages, enabling recruiting teams to build, update, and improve their careers site without breaking the bank. While maintaining a seamless candidate experience, we shifted our focus to the recruitment marketing team – enabling them to build advanced careers pages within Workable.

Through an intuitive user interface the user can set up the branding (colors and typography) of the careers site, add content components, such as testimonials, office locations on a map, and benefits, and publish with a single click; it is essentially a full-blown website builder tailored to fit a recruitment marketer’s needs.

In terms of product research at Workable, we’re lucky to be able to use our own product as a customer – thus, customer feedback is readily available. Our creative and recruiting teams user tested the product while building our own careers site. This way we had solid qualitative evidence to identify and prioritize the features and the usability improvements, instead of relying on our biases and assumptions. We then continued in short cycles of feedback and development with an open beta program: a group of engaged customers tried our new site builder and elaborated on their experience. Each piece of feedback was evaluated to guide our product development efforts in the way that is most meaningful to our customers.

As of December 10, 2020, advanced careers pages are available on Workable’s Core, Growth and Premier annual plans and the first customers’ careers sites are already live. According to our early product metrics, hiring teams now need less than a week to design, build and publish their careers site for the first time! And, on average, they create a first draft to iterate on in less than an hour. These times are just a fraction of what a custom careers site project (outsourced or internal) usually takes, and a positive sign of what’s to come. We’re excited to see what our customers accomplish with these enhanced employer branding tools. If you’d like to use our advanced careers page builder to efficiently – and cost effectively – reach more and better candidates, get in touch.

The post Introducing Advanced Careers Pages: Showcase your brand appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Get all the right data, skip all of the manual admin.

This new automation will eliminate manual admin and avoid costly data errors, freeing up valuable time and resources to focus on other pertinent tasks in your work without worry. Eight fields can be automatically transferred from Workable to ADP, including: First & Last Name, Email, Phone Number, Start Date and more.

Get started, quickly

Like everything with Workable, getting started only takes a few clicks. To get started, simply:

1. Purchase the Workable connector for ADP Workforce Now®  
2. Watch the data flow — auto export is turned on by default

Want to learn more about ADP Workforce Now® 

ADP Workforce Now® is a cloud-based platform for HR management software, where you can easily manage all of your HR functions — payroll, HR management, workforce management, talent, and benefits — and gain insights across them all.  

To purchase the Connector now, visit: http://adp.marketplace.com/workable

The post Announcing: Workable Connector for ADP Workforce Now® appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Get the right work done, faster

As soon as you open the app, you’ll see a smarter way to sift through your candidates. See which candidates you need to evaluate, which candidates you have yet to review and the ones you’ve viewed most recently (so you can access them faster).

You’ll also see the candidates who are waiting for your response to their email.

In addition, monitor your Workable account activity with categories like New candidates, Unscheduled candidates and candidates who are Slipping Away. We’ve also added a ‘Popular’ segment, with the focus on qualified candidates that have a ‘yes’ or a ‘definitely yes’ evaluation, to help you make sure the process keeps moving in the right direction.

Keep an eye on the Pending category too – these are the candidates who have yet to accept any formal offers that have been made.

Easier candidate communication

From the Agenda, see all your meetings that have been scheduled via Workable, and the tools you need to act on them. Access the meeting details and contact the candidate directly through SMS, phone, email or Skype.

Before an interview, jump straight to the candidate’s profile for reference and head back there to complete the interview scorecard when you’re done.

Find the right information, fast

Use the app’s Global Search to access Candidates or Jobs using any relevant keywords. Search by name, job location, keywords in cover letters or CVs.

What’s coming next?

Our goal was to save you time, and help you focus on the more important aspects of your job. I hope we’ve succeeded, but as always we’d love to hear your feedback. Thanks so much to our excellent team of beta testers who have helped out so far.

If you’d like to get started now, download the app from the Google Play Store.

If you’re an iOS user, please hold on just a little longer. The Workable iOS app is on the way! If you’d like to be a beta tester and get a sneak peek of what’s to come, please get in touch.

The post New release: Workable for Android appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

• Time to fill: The planning metric
• Time to hire: The efficiency metric
• Qualified candidates per hire: The sourcing metric
• Interviews per hire: The process metric

As well as the standard suite of reports, Workable also provides direct access to your raw recruiting data via Amazon Redshift. This allows you to create custom reports to track the metrics most relevant to your team, and combine data from different sources.

A partnership with Tableau

We’re delighted to announce that we’ve recently established a technical partnership with Tableau. This allows our common customers to utilize a Tableau dashboard template to visualise their Workable hiring data that lives in Redshift.

The dashboard has been designed by Workable and focuses on key hiring perspectives such as a geography, departments, hiring funnel and candidate movement across hiring stages.

Are you interested? If you’re already using Workable, find out more about how to visualize your hiring data with Tableau, or talk to us about custom reporting. Not using Workable yet? Find out more about reports, and how they can answer key questions about your recruiting process.

This post was written by Lefteris Mantelas, find him on twitter as @MantelasL.

The post Understand your Workable hiring data with Tableau appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The first presentation was from our own Nikos Dimos (Linkedin) and Rui Miguel Forte (Linkedin), who lead the Sourcing and Data Science teams respectively. Nikos talked about how the Sourcing team at Workable moved to Microservices architecture. He started with some basics, like defining a Monolith and Microservice architecture, and explaining when each is a good fit. He then drilled down to specific problems that kept cropping up with our old, monolithic architecture, and how they were mitigated by moving to Microservices. He showed how the new architecture relies on Rabbit MQ for inter-service communication, and employs tools like Apache Kafka to keep track of what service invocations took place and how. Key takeaways were understanding the tradeoffs when selecting between the Monolith and Microservices, how testing becomes easier and the fact that when moving to a Microservice architecture you need to embrace working asynchronously and make the most out of it.

Miguel (who is also the leader of the Data Science Athens group) carried on with an introduction on what Data Science is and the kind of problems we use it to solve, and went on with tools that his team frequently uses. The first tool is Apache Tika, a toolkit that extracts text and metadata from multiple file types. He also demoed (code available to play with on Github – branch develop) some more advanced tasks, such as image and links extraction. The presentation went on with PMML (Predictive Model Markup Language). A common problem our Data Science team has is that predictive models are easier to develop and train in languages like Python or R, but then those models need to be ported to Java for production. PMML is a – surprisingly old – exchange format allows us to transfer (export and re-import) the models from from one platform to the other, so that the model doesn’t need to be developed and trained from scratch (which may take days, depending on the model).

The second presentation was by Marios Kogias (Linkedin), who talked about Code Maintainability. The talk was based on the book Building Maintainable Software by Joost Visser and others. As Marios pointed out, the methodology promoted by the book is not written in blood, but is essentially a set of best practices which can make our life easier in the long run. Essentially, the talk highlighted three simple day-to-day habits, like keeping methods at most 15 LoC, duplicating code wisely, and keeping method signatures simple using encapsulation. Marios also described which refactoring operations (most IDEs have them out of the box) are appropriate for each case. Finally, the presentation mentioned code analysis tools like Better Code Hub, PMD and the fantastic SonarQube.

The third presentation was by Thomas Pliakas (Linkedin), who talked about Garbage Collection (GC) performance tuning. We all know that GC is something taking place in the background, and we don’t worry about it often. When we do though, it is useful that we know at least which are the basic garbage collectors, what algorithms they use and the phases of their execution. Thomas began with the presentation of the sub-regions of what we see from the outside as Java Heap (Eden, Tenured, Permgen), and why GC revolves around the age of objects. He then went on to explain what Minor, Major and Full GC are, as well as details of common garbage collectors. Thomas explained factors to take into account before tuning GC (latency, throughput, capacity) and continued with tunings for the G1, which is going to become the default. The presentation finished with references which are a very good starting point for people diving into the interesting world of GC.

All in all, it was a great meet up. Thanks to everyone who came, and of course, Nikos, Miguel, Marios and Thomas for presenting!

This post was written by Markos Fragkakis, find him on twitter as @fragkakis.
Photos by Markos Pitsilos.

The post Workable hosts the latest JHUG meet up appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

But making the hire is just the first step in the journey of a new employee. What happens between the offer acceptance and the new employee’s first day on the job can be the difference between an engaged new team member or the one in five who quit their job within 45 days.

Onboarding is more than paperwork

To create a successful onboarding experience, it’s important for companies to start showcasing their culture before day one. That’s why today we are excited to announce the launch of our latest partner, Sapling, who empower companies to solve and automate the onboarding challenge.

Sapling create structured and repeatable onboarding programs that promote new hire success. From introductions to fellow team members to the distribution of important documentation, and setting up the new hire’s environment.

Data entry? Done!

If you’re already using Workable for applicant tracking and Sapling for onboarding, you’ll know that with the joy of every new hire comes the drag of data entry. This new integration fixes that.

Connect your Sapling account to Workable and an employee profile is created automatically in Sapling as soon as a candidate is moved to the ‘Hired’ stage in Workable.

The data transferred into Sapling includes:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Job Title
• Department
• Personal email address
• Personal phone number

Once the information is transferred, you can start making your new employee feel right at home.

More integrations coming soon

It might be summer, but our work is not yet done. We have more exciting announcements coming up! Stay tuned here and in the newsletter for details of our expanding ecosystem. If you’re a software provider, find out more about our Developer Partner Program and get involved.

The post From new hire to engaged employee: our integration with Sapling is live appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

In the beginning…

Before we dive into details, let’s go back to 2014 when the Native-vs-Web debate reached its peak. Anyone in the mobile industry had a big decision to make – on which side should they invest time, resources and money?

Our team at Workable wanted to design a mobile experience that would help our customers recruit from anywhere, regardless of the device or platform they were using.

So, we faced a slightly different dilemma: “What comes first and what can wait?”. For us, it was all about prioritizing rather than excluding one technology to the detriment of the other. Since our goal was to support as many devices as possible and the deep linking status was blurry, our best shot was to begin with the mobile web app.

Kicking things off: a complete mobile experience in the browser

I started off by looking at what others had already crafted and what was available in the commercial space. Surprisingly, I ended up with no inspiration at all – remember we’re still in 2014! There were actually very few decent web apps out there. There were some noteworthy patterns, but they were all tailored to the needs of different products.

It became obvious that we had to pave our own path.

Defining the workflow

A solid workflow is the cornerstone of every successful development phase. After a few iterations, our team arrived at the following process:

• Wireframing on paper, in Illustrator and Sketch
• Prototyping in InVision
• Creating mockups in Photoshop
• Reviewing mockups and the user flow in actual devices with Scala View
• Converting the mockups into code (HTML/CSS)
• Testing the results in our device lab with Ghostlab and Chrome DevTools

Creating a consistent visual identity

We needed to apply a familiar visual identity to the user interface. But we also had to build something that would feel intuitive to the different types of mobile users we were likely to have. This was a challenge.

The idea that moved this roadblock aside was to borrow elements from both native platforms (iOS and Android), while keeping the neutrality at some level. To pitch the app-like experience as much as possible, we avoided any web-related design patterns.

Considering Workable? See how we compare to other applicant tracking systems, like Lever and Greenhouse.

Then came Workable for iOS & Android

So, we had a web app. No time to rest. We now needed to complete the full picture with native apps for iOS and Android. This new phase came with an extra challenge: the developers would be converting the design into code themselves. It soon became clear that we needed a more effective collaboration plan and to improve our workflow. We also needed new tools.

It was at this time that we switched from Photoshop to Sketch. We shifted over to Sketch because it’s supported by a vast community. It also integrates with various tools such as:

• Zeplin: for keeping mockups, specs and assets in one place and accessible to anyone within the team.
• Principle for Mac: for prototyping micro-interactions in no time, by importing existing Sketch mockups as starting point.
• Mirror and Crystal: for real-time previewing of designs in actual devices.

During the post-release stage, we also started collecting valuable insights from analytics that highlighted the way our users interacted with the product.

The era of Material Design

Just before I started designing our Android app, an interesting thing happened in the design and development community. Google introduced Material Design. An innovative visual ecosystem, Material Design proved to be a valuable ally.

Taking advantage of this, we shaped our app in line with this common design language. The result was an intuitive interface that helped our users feel productive when dealing with their everyday hiring tasks.

Working with iOS Human Interface Guidelines

Apple’s guidelines are a bit different, since they focus more on user experience and accessibility. Although some basic UI patterns are suggested, they’re not comparable with the detailed specs of Material Design. On the other hand, there was more room to create customized components that matched our needs.

Cross-platform consistency

While we worked to keep our native apps aligned to their respective guidelines, we wanted to avoid a totally different experience between the two platforms. So we used our brand guides (colors, icons, layouts, font styles) as a UI backbone, adding platform-specific characteristics on top.

A finely-tune, tailored product

Workable’s desktop package offers a great variety of features. Trying to squeeze all of them into a small screen was meaningless. Instead, we focused on what made sense on a mobile device.

We took components from the desktop version and combined them with new, mobile-only traits, such as:

• Smart candidate segmentation: for fast access to the most important tasks.
• Hiring agenda: to keep track of, and act on, your day-to-day schedule.
• Powerful search: working across your whole account to find what you need.

And now, a fully mobile Workable experience

We came a long way in a fairly short time; taking off from a desktop product and arriving at a multi-platform, fully mobile experience. The process was demanding but rewarding. I’m so pleased to have been part of the team. We all worked hard for a common objective: to put Workable in the mobile era.

So if you’re hiring on-the-go, give Workable a try by downloading the iOS app or the Android app. Or, just login to your Workable account from any mobile browser!

Not using Workable yet? The mobile apps are also available as part of the 15 day free trial.

The post Making Workable mobile appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Second, this guides us through iterations and improvements that can eliminate problems and frustration for the end user. Finally, this can actually decrease the risk of failure and improve profitability for the company, with reduced costs of customer support and happy customers who will spread a good word about our product to the world.

The Video Interviews feature first kicked off about a year ago, with our team gathering for a Design Sprint. The purpose of this week-long structured workshop is to map out and understand the problem, ideate, and agree on a target. We actually ran two separate design sprints:

• First, we did one focusing on the candidate’s experience (receiving a request to complete a video interview, recording answers and submitting the assignment).
• Once an MVP for the candidate experience was ready for implementation we did another, focusing on the recruiter and hiring manager’s experience (setting up a video interview for a job, sending a request to candidates and then viewing and evaluating the candidate submissions).

Defining personas and finding people to talk to

Leading up to the Design Sprint, we identified people who could share valuable insights with us on the topic at hand, which was oneway video interviews for recruiting purposes.

For the candidate persona we reached out to recently hired Workable employees who had experience with video interviews for their current role, or a previous one.

For the recruiter persona we reached out to select customers who had expressed interest in this feature to their account managers, as well as our amazing in-house recruiting team (who always contribute to our research and usability testing).

Understanding and empathizing with the end user

Hearing first hand from video interview applicants was an eye-opener, especially about how stressful this experience can be for them. Anything from a hardware issue to a distraction in their surroundings could cost them a good submission and jeopardize their progress in the interview process, which is critical for active job seekers.

At the same time we learned that candidates think highly of companies that use this type of “high tech and modern” method in their hiring process. These and other candidate insights guided us in designing a helpful and pleasant experience for them.

Recruiters talked to us about how bias can be a challenge for their hiring team while evaluating candidates. This is a challenge that video interviews could potentially augment if the evaluator focuses on the visual appearance of the person or the environment the video submission is recorded in.

At the same time they were very excited to get their hands on this tool that can help them screen candidates better and faster from an early pipeline stage.

Validating and testing our ideas

Equipped with a deep understanding about who we are designing for, what they need and want, the team got straight to work and designed the key parts of the candidate and recruiter experience respectively. We created working prototypes and invited a handful of Workable employees to test them out. This helped us validate the direction we had chosen and helped us identify some issues at an early stage, before spending effort on development.

Finding volunteers to test the candidate experience was easy, since we targeted any person who could potentially be asked to submit a video interview for a job application. to test the hiring manager experience, we targeted any manager who would potentially screen a candidate for their team with a video interview, even if they had never done this before.

Testing the product in the real world

As the development of the feature was reaching completion we engaged our own recruiting team and six key customers in an Early Adopter Program. We gathered their input as they used video interviews to screen and evaluate candidates over the course of a few weeks. Even though we had incorporated user input at multiple points since the beginning of the project and were confident in what we had built, there was still more for us to learn from its performance in real world circumstances.

We did not get much feedback from candidates besides some minor technical issues that were quickly fixed. This could mean that we indeed did a great job and delivered something that works perfectly, or perhaps that candidates were not willing to share their feedback during their application process with a company (and I don’t blame them).

Recruiters, however, shared great feedback with us, most of which has already been added to our roadmap. One of their key concerns was about creating a “good” video interview, in which they ask candidates enough questions to get the information they are looking for, but also does not require too much time to complete, which could lead to them dropping out and not completing the video interview.

Keep listening, keep learning, keep improving

Upon the completion of the Early Adopter Program video interviews became available to all Workable customers. You might have thought that our work was done, but it wasn’t! The world and people evolve and change and so should our product. We will keep monitoring the traffic and usage analytics of the feature to track performance and identify issues. We will also keep listening to all incoming feedback from our customers through different channels, such as customer support and the account management team, in order to react to it.

Salad & Go, for example, shared some great feedback on how they’ve been able to use video interviews to conduct remote hiring:

We will keep asking questions in order to understand what our users need and improve our product for them. This is essential to the quality and success of Video Interviews – and this is important to us as well.

Anything from a casual conversation where you ask a friend for their opinion on something, all the way to a formally structured research or test activity can help you learn something you did not know before. And this is the essence of user-centered design, so start talking to your users today!

The post Video Interviews: Designing for and with end users in mind appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

An easier way to post jobs

To make life easier for hiring teams, one of our first releases of 2017 was an improved job editor. This included a number of features, from auto-suggested job titles and locations to a library of over 400 editable job descriptions. With an expanding range of free and premium job boards to choose from, these updates helped to get faster job board approval and better attract the right talent. If you’re still not taking advantage of the full scope of job boards available, it’s worth finding out more about the benefits of posting to free job boards.

Later in the year we announced new question types for our customizable job application forms. Following that theme, we also introduced custom fields on the candidate profile, useful for professions where specific information (eg. pilot license number) must be kept on record. Customized per account, this is a premium feature available to organizations on a Workable Pro Plan.

In July, Workable become one of the first ATSs to optimize job postings for ‘Google for Jobs’.

More integrations with recruiting tools

In April we launched our Developer Partner Program, which helped set the pace for our partnerships team. As all-in-one recruiting software, our aim is to streamline the hiring process. The Partner Program helps gather the many different specialist recruiting services available, and to make them accessible via Workable. This year alone, we’ve launched integrations with HRIS, onboarding platforms, sourcing tools, assessment tests, video interviewing platforms and more.

At the beginning of December we also announced news of deeper integrations with LinkedIn, as a LinkedIn Preferred Partner. But we’re not done yet! Look out for more integrations in 2018.

Improved interview scheduling

Interview scheduling is known to be a huge headache, so this is something we were eager to address.

After a beta testing with a fantastic group of Workable customers, our full integration with Google Calendar and Office 365 went live in the Autumn. You can now check team availability, send invites and book rooms via Workable. It’s easy to preview your calendar directly inside Workable – remove weekends, if you’re lucky enough not to work them – and focus on what matters. The feedback for this release made us even more sure that this was a good problem to solve. That said, we’re not done yet – again, there is more planned for 2018.

Find the right candidates faster

This year we further developed People Search, our candidate sourcing tool. Previously a Chrome extension, it’s now available directly from Workable. The search has been upgraded, so it’s faster to find candidates based on skills, location, key words and more. If that’s not enough, it also supports Boolean Search.

A single platform for recruiting, these latest updates make Workable faster than ever for posting a job, sourcing and evaluating candidates.

In October we launched the Talent Pool. This is a place for storing candidates who are under consideration for future positions. When you know a job is coming up, and you want to start building a relationship with potential candidates, save their profiles to the Talent Pool and reach out with a personalized email using data gathered from People Search.

A fully featured mobile ATS

Of all the recruiting software on the market, Workable is one of the few ATSs available as a native iOS and Android app. Development has continued at pace this year on both platforms, making Workable more effective than ever.

The difference between desktop and mobile in terms of features is narrowing all the time; it’s easy to review profiles, schedule interviews with your hiring teams, communicate with candidates and complete an interview scorecard – all from your mobile device. In the spirit of ‘eating our own dogfood‘ we interviewed Rachel, our VP Sales about how she built a team using Workable on her mobile. If you’re trying to engage reluctant or busy hiring managers, we suggest mobile as an effective option. It’s easy to use up ‘dead time’ between meetings or travelling and avoids the obligation to stay late in the office.

We’ll be writing more about mobile in the new year, so stay tuned.

Recruiting templates and resources

Outside of the development work on the product itself, our team of specialist writers have been adding to our vast library of recruiting resources. Regular updates on our popular recruiting blog cover everything from workplace culture, recruiting best practices, tech, trends and more.

If you’re curious, from over 400+ job description templates available, these five job descriptions were most used in 2017:

• Sales associate
• Cashier
• Admin assistant 
• Customer service representative 
• Chief operating Officer (COO)

Catching up in 2018

Whether it was the Workable World Tour, SourceCon, HR Tech or one of the many other events we attended this year, we’ve enjoyed getting to you know you in person. If you missed us in 2017, sign up to the newsletter in the box below to find out where we’ll be next. We’re always happy to demonstrate the latest features in person to ensure you’re getting the most from your account. Thanks to everyone for all your support this year – here’s to happy holidays and a successful 2018!

As always, if you’re not using Workable yet, but think 2018 could be the year for a new ATS, we’re only too happy to schedule a demo.

The post Workable’s 2017 in review: all the feature updates you need to know appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

What is a coworking space?

A coworking space, for those not familiar, is a large office that houses many companies. Typically you’ll find small businesses with up to 20 employees, and startups that are growing but are not ready to invest in their own dedicated office space. Each company has its own office or desk, but neighbors other companies.

An affordable launchpad

If Workable had decided to move into our own office right away we would have been looking at a  3-6,000 square foot office that costs upwards of $40 per square foot in our current neighborhood. Additionally, there would have been tens of thousands of dollars in upfront costs for the buildout. We would have been paying $10,000 a month from the very beginning on the monthly lease alone, just to have space for three employees, not including the build out. That is a major commitment for a young company that can’t predict how many employees it will add over its first few years, and is just starting out in a new market

A recruiting asset

The coworking space has been a great recruiting tool. Our shared office center in Boston, WeWork Fort Point, offers great amenities, contemporary meeting spaces, and access to fun events. When you’re young, you still want your working space to have a nice buzz. Three people sitting at desks in the corner of a 4,000 square foot place can seem daunting. With a company that size it’s tough to stay on top of amenities such as coffee, water, and snacks. Coworking spaces are well-designed and have a modern feel that improves the candidate experience.

A community

A lot of the coworking spaces pride themselves on the community. That is not some BS they make up just to sell more units. WeWork has a ton of events going on and we have been able to meet a lot of like-minded people. There are people from other startups, law firms, marketing services, and other companies that have been useful for us to get to know. We found SocialFulcrum, one of the marketing agencies that we have hired, through the coworking space. That’s good for them and good for us.

WeWork also hosts several vibrant networking events that are relevant for small businesses. They have vendors who bring lunch, VC’s come in to talk about pitching, and other educational sessions. Community events make the workplace upbeat and are not something most companies have access to until they get bigger.

A chance to learn the city

While coworking, we were able to get a lay of the land in our Boston neighborhood and figure out where we want to establish our office for the long-term. Although our customers are all over the world, our goal is to create a presence in Boston for recruiting. When moving into a new market, it’s important to get a good hold of where your potential employees want to be, what the right neighborhoods are and what’s convenient in terms of transportation, parking, and other amenities.

Feeling disconnected as a team

One of the downsides that we started to feel as we got bigger was that the people in our Boston office started to feel disconnected. When there were six of us we all fit in one space and it was fine. At some point on the way to 15, where we are today, things started to feel disconnected. People from sales and support didn’t meet the new people coming into marketing and vice versa. We have four offices, and what we found was there wasn’t a reason to go into the other offices, so we didn’t.

Buffer time for your moving schedule

Another thing we learned about moving into a new office is that you need to schedule in some buffer time to make sure you complete the process on time despite any obstacles. It takes about six months from start to finish of the process. To find the right office space, it might take up to two months, one month to finish the lease, a couple more weeks to finalize design and build out plans, and finally a couple of months for build out. When we opened up our Boston office, it would have been impossible to get started running our business to even start without renting a shared office space. I don’t know how startups did it before coworking spaces were an option.

Today, Workable moved into our new Boston headquarters. That’s over a year after we opened up in Boston. Since moving we’ve raised $27 million in venture funding, and have gone from 30 employees to over 80. In Boston, we’re on pace to grow from 15 employees to 50. The biggest coworking space benefits have been the ability to grow the company significantly while searching for the right workplace location for the foreseeable future.

The post What a year in a coworking space can do for your company appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Well, the great news is we’ve been (very) rigorously audited and assessed, and Workable is now officially ISO 27001:2013 certified.

What does it mean to have ISO 27001 accreditation?

Having this certification is public recognition that what we’re doing internally to ensure ongoing data protection meets the highest, worldwide security standards.

What that means day-to-day is that we’ve got powerful processes and policies in place to regularly check for threats and vulnerabilities. And that we’re robust and resilient to those potential threats. In a nutshell—what it means is “We’ve got your back”.

David Hartig, our COO explains,“This accreditation is a tick in the box for us as we were on a secure track beforehand. We understand the importance of these controls and have implemented them from the very beginning. But we wanted to give our customers an added level of confidence that we’re a secure organisation. That’s why we went for accreditation.

What ISO prompted us to do was to formalize our process and make it more traceable. So what we’ve been working hard on is making it easier to track, audit and evidence what we had in place already.

Being ISO 27001-accredited isn’t just about being able to prove that our tech is safe and secure. It’s about being able to prove that Workable as a company, its employees and infrastructure, is operating safely and securely too.”

Will there be any change for our customers?

For our existing 6000+ customers it’s business as usual, with the added reassurance that as we continue to grow as an organisation our commitment to maintaining the highest standards of security will grow with us. We’ll continue to invest in ongoing cyber-security training to promote an organisational culture that reinforces the protection provided by our software and systems.

For prospective customers, we’re now able to offer the added level of confidence that comes with formal third-party accreditation. So, however large or small your candidate database, you can join us knowing that we’ve got the controls in place to securely scale-up and manage your biggest and most valuable asset – your candidates’ confidential data.

“We can now show customers that we’re a robustly secure organisation,” says David. “They can see the certificate. They don’t have to take our word for it. Independent experts have assessed, audited and approved our processes and policies. And they will continue to have oversight of what we do through quarterly internal and annual external audits.”

How does this link up with GDPR?

Having ISO 27001 certification takes on extra significance with the implementation of GDPR looming.

“GDPR bases itself on a security standard,” says David. “And for the most part they point to ISO 27001 as being the basis for a secure environment. So, arguably, if you don’t have ISO 27001 certification or you can’t meet the requirements of the certification it’s going to be tougher to prove that you’re GDPR-compliant.”

Find out more about how Workable meets security standards

From access controls to single sign-on, data protection to data encryption, Workable’s operating model has centered around security from day one.

The post Workable gets ISO 27001 certification appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

A simple mandate demands a straightforward solution. And the great news is if you’re using Workable the solution is straightforward—we’ve taken care of the details for you. Whatever the size of your hiring team or your data processing operation, we’ve got a range of different integrated options—from existing features to new, GDPR compliance tools. No fuss required. Lots of time saved.

A robust, secure and accredited hiring platform

But first things, first. Before tools comes security. Data protection is the backbone of GDPR. A secure and stable platform from day one, Workable is 100% GDPR-compliant. We’re also ISO 27001-accredited, which means it’s easier for us, and our customers, to comply with the new regulations. And we’ve recently added extra layers of security such as single sign-on to give added confidence to users.

So, if you’re using Workable to manage your hiring data you can be confident it’s in safe and secure hands, and it always has been.

Supporting GDPR-compliance as standard

You can manage GDPR-compliance effectively throughout the hiring process, using any Workable account.

You’ll probably be familiar with most of the features highlighted below, but there’s one big change. We’ve recently added an account-wide right to erasure option. Designed specifically with GDPR in mind, it sits in a new section labelled ‘Compliance’ in your account settings.

Turn this feature on to enable candidates to delete their own data from your records. Having deleted their data, Workable will automatically prevent anyone from your company from contacting the candidate again—unless they choose to apply for another position in the future. This protects you against potential breaches of the right to be forgotten and data retention rules.

The following features help you manage the rest:

• The default customizable application form only requests the basic information required by most hiring teams. This helps meet GDPR’s data minimisation requirement.
• Comply with transparency requirements by using the job editor to add in details of how your organization processes candidate information. Then use email templates and bulk mail-outs to make sure hiring teams share this information consistently and accurately.
• Manage different GDPR compliance requirements directly from the ‘candidate profile’:
  • Use the ‘candidate resume download’ button and ‘print profile’ link to action right of access and right to data portability requests.
  • With the ‘edit candidate’ option it’s easy to correct inaccurate data, part of the right to rectification requirement.
  • You can also delete candidates individually or in bulk, helping you with the right to be forgotten, right to object and data retention rules.

The GDPR Feature Pack for recruiting—automated GDPR compliance tools for maximum support

“Workable’s GDPR support has helped us come up with a process to follow. We’re upgrading to the Pro plan because the level of support it offers in automating a lot of the GDPR requirements. It’s a huge timesaver.”
Esther Smith, Global Head of People at IQPC.

Demonstrating compliance is harder to achieve on an ad-hoc, case-by-case basis if you process higher volumes of data. Or if your operation’s a little more complex; with multiple pipelines, different hiring teams, or a strong focus on candidate sourcing. To meet these challenges we’ve added a package of new, GDPR-specific features to our Pro plan.

From minimizing the risk of storing data illegally to remaining complaint without distorting reports, our new GDPR Feature Pack automates many of the key GDPR requirements for recruiting. It takes seconds to activate and runs by default across your whole account so you can relax and focus your day-to-day attention back on hiring.

GDPR requirement #1—transparency

Activate the GDPR Feature Pack and we’ll provide you with a legally-verified, customizable Privacy Notice to share with candidates. Just add the details unique to your company and save the template. Candidates will automatically receive a copy of this on application. If you’ve already got your own, lawyer-approved policy we can link to that instead.

If candidates have actively applied for a role with you, consent to process their data is implied through GDPR’s legitimate interest caveat. But, if you do want to seek active consent, we can include a check box on every Workable-generated application form.

GDPR has different transparency requirements around sourced candidates. To help meet these we’ll include an automatic email footer linking to your Privacy Notice in your first communication with every sourced candidate.

GDPR requirement #2—right of access and right to data portability

As well as the standard features available on each candidate profile, you’ll also get the option of a ‘Candidate Breakdown Report’. This exports candidate details into CSV format, should any candidates request to see the data that you hold.

GDPR requirement #3—right to erasure and right to object

An opt-out link, automatically included in every application confirmation email, enables candidates to delete their own data. Doing this triggers a set of rules that make it impossible for anyone in your organization to contact them again, unless they apply for a new role in the future. Once deleted, Workable anonymizes the data so that your reports remain accurate.

GDPR requirement #4 —data retention

With GDPR you can no longer store candidate data indefinitely. Activate the options in your Compliance settings and data will automatically delete based on your chosen time frames. For candidates in archived jobs this is based on the date the profile was created. For candidates in active jobs or your Talent Pool, this is combined with a defined period of inactivity. For sourced candidates it’s triggered if there’s no contact within the required period of 30 days. Workable will also send a one-off email to all of your newer candidates—those who fall outside your pre-defined time frame—with links to your processing information. This way, you can be sure you’re starting off on the best footing from day one of activating the feature.

Hiring and compliance tools that go hand-in-hand

If you’re using Workable to manage your hiring you can use it to help manage your GDPR compliance too. As ‘data controller’, ultimate responsibility for compliance rests with you. But these features help you to meet that responsibility with minimal fuss. Find out more about staying compliant in our GDPR checklist for recruiters.

If you’re not using Workable and still struggling with spreadsheets to manage your recruitment, you run a much higher risk of non-compliance with GDPR. A risk that could prove costly if you’re hit with a GDPR fine. Why not have a free GDPR consultation or a demo to see how Workable can help? If you’re in a rush, try our online GDPR Readiness Evaluator. In just 14 questions, see how prepared you are and get some tips on changes you could be making.

The post Tools to meet GDPR compliance requirements for recruitment appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Making arrangements becomes even more with complex if you’ve got one interview which is divided into multiple parts, each with a different panel of hiring managers or stakeholders. First you have to find slots across a single day that work for everyone. Then you need to find and book available meeting rooms for each slot. Finally, you need to communicate the details.

Well, there’s good news! We’ve just launched an update to our interview scheduling feature which does the bulk of the leg-work for you. Now it’s easy to schedule complex interviews that work for all participants in seconds. The end result is a fast, seamless and scalable scheduling process which makes life easier for your hiring managers and interview coordinators. And offers a clearer, more cohesive experience for your candidates.

Book complex interviews faster

During the hiring process, most candidates are interviewed by at least three different individuals. And, depending on the role, could take part in up to five separate face-to-face assessments; from HR and tech interviews to group and panel events. While these may span a few weeks, they usually take place on the same day. Scheduling each part across the same day provides a better candidate experience, speeds up the hiring process and boosts your time to hire metric. But it also presents a challenge to recruiters.

Coordinating schedules and booking meeting rooms to meet the demand for multiple interviews can feel all-consuming if you’re doing it manually, toggling between various calendars and screens. Workable’s Multi-part interview feature automates much of the admin. With everything visible from one central screen you can act fast to book slots and let Workable do the rest. This moves the interview scheduling process forward at pace and you can use the time saved on tasks where you add most value.

From one screen inside Workable you can now:

• Split one interview into separate time slots, setting a different agenda for each.
• See at a glance live availability of interviewers and meeting rooms for each time slot, avoiding endless back-and-forth emails.
• View calendars side-by-side, including a real-time view of your external Google or Office 365 calendar.
• Drag-and-drop interviews into available slots and book onsite meeting rooms.
• React quickly to changing schedules using real-time calendar sync between Workable and your external calendar.
• Press ‘submit’ just once to send out separate, topic-specific calendar invites to your interviewers and one clear, comprehensive invite to your candidate.

Make fewer mistakes when scheduling

We know how important accuracy and attention to detail are when it comes to the hiring process. Even the most simple scheduling error can have a big impact on both your hiring team and your interviewees. As well as time spent rescheduling and communicating changes to all participants, you’ve also got some damage limitation work to do when it comes to your candidate experience.

When you’re time-pressed and juggling ten other things it’s only natural to miss the odd overlapping time slot or missing agenda. Which is why we’ve got your back.

Our Multi-part interview scheduling tool automates your scheduling to limit human error, providing a number of key, built-in checks. Before your invite is sent out to all participants our system will flag up all possible scheduling errors, so you can address them before moving on. These could range from:

• overlapping time slots
• gaps in the schedule
• missing information, such as meeting room, attendees or agenda
• potential scheduling problems, such as a multi-part interview that runs over two days

Not using Workable yet? Request a demo to learn how you can optimize your interview process and hiring efforts with our all-in-one recruitment software.

A better hiring experience for all participants

Multi-part interviews by their nature involve a range of different stakeholders, each with their own specific remit when it comes to the interview process. If you’re using rigid scheduling software or managing the process manually a one-size-fits-all approach is often your only option when communicating interview details across hiring teams. But it’s not the best approach. We’ve made it easier to offer each participant a more bespoke experience with minimum effort.

A streamlined approach for your hiring panel

It’s a given that candidates need to be available for the whole duration of the interview. But members of your interviewing panels are usually only needed for parts of this. Having to book the full 3-hour interview out in each interviewer’s calendar, when they’re only needed for parts of this, isn’t the best way to manage colleagues’ time.

So minimise internal disruption by providing your interviewers with all the information they need and nothing they don’t.

Simply:

• create a separate slot for each part of the interview
• assign specific interviewers to the relevant slots
• press submit

Your interviewers will then receive, via email, an individual calendar invite for each slot, labelled accordingly (for example, ‘HR interview’ or ‘Tech interview’).

From the email, your interviewers can also:

• accept or decline slots separately
• link to the candidate’s Workable profile
• view details of the entire interview from a separate auto-generated events page, which includes a map and the full day’s agenda, with times, topics and a list of attendees

A more cohesive experience for candidates

The added beauty of the Multi-part interview scheduling tool is that, while it manages the interview’s multiple parts as separate entities for your interviewers, the interview is presented as one cohesive event for your candidate. So they receive one clear email invite with a comprehensive agenda for the whole day. Like the hiring panel, they can accept or decline straight from the email and see full details of the event, including a map, from a separate events page.

Scalable scheduling

Perhaps you’re a fast-growing start-up anticipating sporadic peaks in hiring. Or a large established business regularly hiring in volume. Either way, using Workable for scheduling means you’re equipped to handle large numbers of multi-part interviews whenever they come up – quickly and easily.

The post Streamline complex, multi-part interview scheduling with Workable appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

There’s one in particular we’ve heard loud and clear: Admins need to manage their company’s account, but want a better way to follow the particular jobs that concern them. So I’m genuinely happy to tell you about customized dashboard views for Admins!

Previously, Workable Admin users were automatically members of the hiring team for every job in your account. For some customers, this makes complete sense. For others, this meant that the job dashboard wasn’t entirely relevant, it was harder to filter jobs in the Candidate Database and Reports, and your ‘new candidate’ emails let you know about every candidate for every role. We added notification preferences in your Personal Profile to give you a little more control over this (another common request!), but it didn’t solve this issue completely.

Now however, Admins can be added or removed from a job just like other users. You still have access to your Workable account details (like payment, and settings) but now you can focus on the jobs that need your attention. Your dashboard and email notifications will reflect only those jobs. Soon, you’ll be able to quickly select ‘my jobs’ for a filtered view in your reports and your Candidate Database.

Managing your role on the hiring team

If you’re an Admin, now you have some extra magic powers; you can add/remove yourself right from the dashboard (see image above), and still follow or view candidates even when you’re not on the hiring team for that job. In other words, you gain some organization without limiting your access to any information in your account.

If you’re looking for even more customization, don’t forget that you can still create a saved dashboard view or customize your notification preferences (push notifications on our mobile apps can be pretty handy to keep things moving quickly.)

With this update, you can be sure all users have the account access they require for their job, without worrying about how it affects their place on the hiring team. This ensures account security by reducing unnecessary noise and making it easier to identify top priorities.

We also have a few more updates planned that will build on this and provide even more control over your account access and user roles. Stay tuned for more information on that later this summer — and thanks as always, for your feedback.

The post An easier way to manage your hiring: a product update appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Recently launched, our powerful single sign-on (SSO) feature functions seamlessly alongside your existing recruiting workflow. It provides an extra level of security, a smoother user experience, and ultimately faster hiring.

Once activated, Workable users can use their own chosen one-step authentication method to log into Workable and access their data.

One login, multiple applications

There’s no doubt that the Software as a Service (SaaS) distribution model is changing the way businesses of every size operate. Automating and integrating key, but often mundane processes, cloud apps bring with them huge benefits. But underlying their growing use are a number of challenges around user authentication. That’s where single sign-on can help. Here are five key benefits of single sign-on:  

1. SSO saves money
   Around half of all IT helpdesk calls are for password resets. With only one password to remember, SSO can significantly reduce IT helpdesk costs.
2. SSO saves time
   The average user accesses up to 20 different applications a day (and that figure is set to keep growing). Re-entering passwords across multiple apps drains time. With SSO you just need to login once.
   
3. SSO reduces risk
   Password fatigue can be a real threat to data security. With only one password to remember, users are more likely to make that password a strong one, one they can easily recall and keep confidential. And because user passwords aren’t stored or managed externally, data protection is further strengthened.
4. SSO streamlines workflow
   Using one set of login credentials to access different software systems, a single sign-on solution organizes and centralizes access to your apps whilst also validating the id of all users.
5. SSO supports compliance
   Building a centralized database, SSO supports compliance, promotes secure file sharing, and ensures effective access reporting.

Activating single sign-on for Workable

SSO implementation is based on a relationship between your service provider (i.e. Workable) and your chosen Identity Provider. Workable integrates with SSO services that support SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language). Some of the providers we integrate with include:

• OneLogin
• Okta
• Microsoft Azure Active Directory
• Google Apps
• Centrify
• Auth0
• PingFederate

To connect your single sign-on (SSO) provider to your Workable account, just contact us and we’ll initiate the setup process for you.

Once activated, account users will use your SSO provider to sign in to Workable. When a new hiring manager joins Workable, you can provide access right away. With SSO, all it takes is just a few simple steps to add users and also to revoke access once the hiring process is over.

Not using Workable yet? Sign up for a demo and see how it will work for your organization.

The post Five reasons to use single sign-on (SSO) with Workable appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The clock on my laptop tells me it’s 6:37 p.m. The image of my title slide on the big screen confirms that the projector is working. Another projector shows our Twitter feed. I’ve tested it more than once. Can you tell that I’m nervous?

I inspect the neatly arranged seats laid out before me, there are 80. I’ve counted them. Practically all are empty apart from a few early arrivals. But there are voices, more people are trickling in. I’m relieved.

I’d been toying with the idea of a meetup for over a year until I finally decided to take the plunge. So here we were, after a couple of months’ preparation, at the first Data Science Athens Meetup.

If you were being kind, you might use the word “nascent” to describe the meetup scene in Greece. We’d booked a spacious conference room at one of the handful of startup incubators in Athens. Pizzas and drinks were due to arrive towards the end of two carefully planned presentations, one of which was my own. Yet this wasn’t a typical evening of fun and relaxation. The highlight would involve Bayesian statistics. So the fact that 300 people had signed up seemed incredible.

Who were they and why did they care?

This is what I learned and I think it’s pretty much true for all meetups (a lot of people fit in more than one category):

1. Practitioners

• Learn from experts
• Maintain link with academia
• Find others with whom to collaborate
• Find professional mentors

2. Entrepreneurs

• Find talent to hire
• Find inspiration for a new startup
• Learn about a new field from experts
• Promote their own product or company

3. Researchers

• Find applications in industry
• Find collaborators for a paper
• Learn about industry needs
• Practice presentation skills
• Get out of the lab!

4. Educators

• Promote their school, program or seminar
• Attract students to their research group or lab
• Promote their research and published works

5. Students

• Learn real world applications
• Form study groups
• Secure internships and industrial placements

Ten minutes into our debut event more than 100 people inundated the room. I left the event energized and very positive about what the future holds. For me, creating this community is really about enabling people to connect with each other outside the confines of their quotidian environment, be it corporate or academic.

Here at Workable, I am constantly inspired by the level of drive and intensity behind the engineers that work alongside me. Each of us strives to achieve immersion in our respective field, contributing to open source projects, organizing and speaking at events, winning competitions among other things. My own favorite related hobbies are teaching and writing. I’ve been teaching data science to graduate students at the Athens University of Economics and Business for three years now.

Last June, I also became a published author with my book Mastering Predictive Analytics with R. More of my colleagues, like our lead designer, Zaharenia Atzitzikaki, are also writing.

There’s a crucial element to professional immersion that I think some of us tend to forget. This is the importance of being active within an established forum of peers. No matter how great of an environment your workplace is, and how much personal effort you invest in your own development, there is a much larger community out there that can help you grow and progress in a myriad of different ways.

A credible local community

An overlooked aspect of meetups, however, is the creation of a credible local community. I’m willing to bet that Athens is probably not your first choice when you think of centers of excellence in a field such as data science or even technology in general. I am on a mission to change that. Now there are some other people with me on this mission.

Granted, much has to be accomplished in order for perceptions to shift but I believe that a vibrant and outspoken community that works together to share knowledge and opportunities can be a potential catalyst. With the help of startups like Workable, which incidentally sponsors our meetup, we can give back to the local community and encourage other startups to follow in our footsteps.

Last month Workable announced a funding round of $27m, raising the bar in product design, engineering and customer service within the human resources space. This achievement not only sets a standard for other startups here to pursue, it has also given many people hope. In our meetup, we’re taking this hope and turning it into a community that will inspire excellence while learning a lot in the process.

In our next blog post, we’ll look at how meetups make sound business sense and provide rich recruiting grounds.

The post The Magnetism of Meetups appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Check out our biggest product updates this quarter in a quick, 5-minute video. 

Product releases

Candidate surveys: Measure your brand reputation or gain a better understanding of candidate demographics with candidate surveys. Tailor questions to meet your company’s needs, help teams identify areas of improvement and report on results. Candidate surveys will be gradually rolled out to all Core, Growth and Premier plans over the next few weeks.

Branded careers pages: Updated formatting and branding options make it even easier for you to create a beautifully branded careers page.

• Customize your favicon
• Rich text formatting
• Background image placement
• Logo size configuration

Video Interviews: Workable now supports the option to include your own welcome video and video questions to help you personalize the candidate experience.

Advanced referrals: More customizable options are now available for advanced referrals. 

• Notifications: adjust default email settings for referral users 
• Limit jobs in the portal to internal applications or referrals only
• Add custom questions for referral submission

Hiring plan: You can now edit and update custom requisition fields, add new options, and disable existing options in your hiring plan.

Mobile app: We’ve made it even easier for you to track jobs and candidates, right on your phone. Our newly redesigned home screen helps you find the info you need, fast. Download through the App Store or on Google Play.

The post 6 Workable product releases to boost your brand appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The upside of increased exposure is more candidates for every job. The downside is the time it takes to review candidates effectively. Even with resume parsing it can be hard to cut to the most relevant content. This is where a custom job application form can help.

Workable has always provided the option to create customized application forms. In our last Workable update, we made these even more affective with the addition of new question types. This means you have even more options to speed up your screening process.

In this post we’ll provide a few pointers on job application formats, and explain the basics of how to create a job application form of your own.

The benefits of using an employment application form

For job advertisers, application forms have clear benefits. You can:

• ask for relevant information that might not be listed on a traditional resume
• compare candidates more objectively, based on every candidate’s response to the same questions
• sift high volumes of candidates faster, based on responses to the most important questions
• get a quick understanding of a candidate’s basic skills, including comprehension, spelling and a grammar

The slight increase in effort required to apply should also mean that you’ll only hear from the most interested candidates.

Looking for ways to better screen candidates? Sign up for a 15-day free trial of Workable and start hiring better people, faster.

Things to avoid when creating an application for employment

Unnecessary questions

While the right application form will help screen candidates effectively, a huge list of questions, or questions which are already answered on a resume will waste both your time and the applicant’s. Is a question essential? Set the response to mandatory. If it’s a ‘nice to have’ set the answer to optional.

Make sure that every question you ask has an actionable outcome. Example: need someone to start immediately? Ask applicants to supply a preferred start date, or the length of their notice period.

Wordy answers

Remember that a high percentage of job seekers are browsing and applying via mobile. Workable optimizes job application forms for mobile by default, but consider the types of questions you’re asking. Not only is a wordy response difficult to complete on mobile, but your hiring teams will struggle to read every answer when application numbers are high. Example: want to get a very quick idea of the candidate? Ask them to describe themselves in five words. You can ask more detailed questions at the phone screen or interview stage.

Discriminatory language

Check that the expected response to your questions are non-discriminatory. Reviewing application forms based on responses alone is a more objective process, but it’s meaningless (and often illegal) if your questions are screening out a diverse range of applicants before you begin. Example: Years of Related Experience, not ‘Date of Birth’.

What questions should you ask on a job application form?

The purpose of an application form is to create a viable shortlist. Ask concise, relevant questions, which will give a good indication of a candidate’s basic suitability. You’ll be able to delve deeper at the interview stage.

Take full advantage of the question types available inside Workable:

For example:

• What attracted you to this position (short answer)
• What date can you start? (Date question)
• Are you willing to relocate? (Yes/No question)
• Are you legally eligible to work in this country? (Yes/No question)
• What is your current salary (Number question)
• Which of the following software applications do you use regularly (Multiple choice / multiple selections)
• Provide examples of your recent work (File upload question)

If your job requirements are specific, consider importing them from your job post into your application form as questions.

Workable also enables you to auto-disqualify candidates if the answer to a question is ‘no’. If you apply this setting, you’ll still have access to these candidates, but they will be accessed via the ‘Disqualified’ folder the ‘Applied’ stage of your recruiting pipeline.

If in doubt, test

After constructing your application form, ask members of your team, department or company to try it out. Are their results giving you what you need? Can you make what feels like a good first judgement from their responses? If not, keep making adjustments until it feels right.

Time invested in the set-up will be repaid with faster candidate screening. You can also keep the form you create as a job application form template to reuse on other jobs.

Ready to get started? Find out more about setting up your application form with Workable. Not using Workable yet? Get more details on candidate sourcing features.

The post How to create a custom employment application to screen job applicants appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

And, here it is!

Just launched, Workable Referrals is an advanced referrals and internal job portal, which brings the benefits of employee referral programs back on the radar. It turns your entire workforce into a recruiting machine. It also takes care of all the admin. And a beautiful thing it is too.

Why? Because it ticks five elements guaranteed to make referrals fly. Buckle up for takeoff…

See also: our guide with everything you need to know about employee referrals.

Want more referrals?

1. Make it easy

Yes, the people you’ve already hired can lead you to more great talent—candidates who’ll stay longer and perform better. But it’s not on their radar. They’re not recruiters, after all. And they’re busy doing what they were hired for.

The answer? Make referring so easy, it would be more difficult not to.

That’s why, with Workable Referrals, all you need to do is share a link to the platform. No ATS access is required (the portal syncs up with your company’s Workable recruiting software, but isn’t accessed through it). There are no additional logins (a work email’s all that’s needed). And, there’s no separate admin to supply (everything’s tracked and recorded through the portal).

Keeping track of new jobs is straightforward too. And customizable. Employees can get updates via email; choosing between a weekly or daily digest or immediate notification. They can also opt out of emails entirely and, instead, bookmark the link and check-in whenever’s convenient.

If they’ve got someone in mind (and chances are they will)—great! All it takes is a few quick clicks. Making a referral’s as easy as sharing a resume, email address or social profile link.

They’re keen to help, but no one specific stands out? No problem. A role can be shared across any social network using a unique job referral link.

Like we said, make it easy.

2. Demonstrate commitment

Trust plays a big part in referrals. If you’re recommending a friend or professional contact, you want to make sure their experience is a good one. Which is why an ad-hoc approach doesn’t work on a larger scale. Without a system, actions get missed and talent falls through the loop. Candidate experience also suffers, risking company rep (and your referrer’s). No surprise then that referrals dry up.

Workable Referrals dignifies the process by showing commitment, removing uncertainty and wiping out demotivating blind spots for employees. Here’s how…

• Standard questions guarantee context, streamline process and ensure legitimacy.
• Next steps are automatically assigned and tracked.
• Automated updates keep employees up-to-speed on their referrals’ progress.
• And rewards offered are formalized and visible, with a live and accurate summary of all bonuses logged against each referrer.

There’s also a suite of features designed to help HR stakeholders and hiring teams:

• analyze candidate sources using comprehensive reporting functionality which syncs up with hiring pipelines,
• filter internal applicants and referrals to prioritize,
• define reward type, quantity and value,
• upload or link to a rewards policy, and
• track internal applicants, as well as external ones.

3. Go on, gamify

Who better to sell your brand than your own employees? With Workable Referrals, it’s easy for your people to share job ads on their social networks. As well as boosting your brand, this adds a gentle touch of gamification which, for most of us (if we’re honest), is hard to resist.

Having posted the link, your employees get to track activity across their network. They can see at a glance how many views their link’s had, watch the referrals come in, control and comment on who they move forward and track progress.

And if this results in a successful hire, you can give them the option of choosing their reward at the end.

If there’s no hire, you’ve still engaged your employees in the process and connected with a bunch of high quality prospects you wouldn’t have found in any other way.

4. Invest a little

Most agency fees come in at around 20% of a hire’s first-year salary. Swap recruiters for referrals and the savings extend to thousands (potentially tens of thousands, and rising) each year, depending on your hiring volume and average salary.

Workable Referrals is a paid-for, add-on feature. It’s an optional extra because we know that not all of our customers will need it. If you’re not hiring at pace and/or are comfortable managing your own referrals, great. There’s a full and free toolkit available as part of every Workable plan. But, if you’re looking to maximize the recruiting power of a growing employee base, why not scope it out? It could just be one of the best small investments you ever make…

5. Look within, too

Hiring externally is 1.7x more expensive than promoting from within. So, once you’ve found someone great, you’ll want to hold onto them.

One of the big questions we faced when developing Workable Referrals was: “Why make it an internal job portal too?” The answer? Because, as well as giving employees an added incentive for logging on, it’s also a natural fit. Both are about publicizing opportunities; something that becomes more resource-intensive as businesses expand.

If you’ve got an interface rich with opportunities at your company, why limit it to external candidates? With Workable Referrals, your employees can view all open roles, make a referral OR bag an opportunity for themselves. Which, is only fair, after all.

Want to find out more?

Workable Referrals is available to buy as an annual add-on. If you’re already with us and want to find out how it could work for you, get in touch! If you’re new to Workable and interested in supercharging your referral program, we’re here if you want to chat through your options or schedule a demo.

The post Five big reasons to put employee referrals back on the radar appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

This comes on the heels of considerable growth in the business the past year, with Workable raising an additional $50 million in November 2018 to make its software and service even better in meeting the needs of a rapidly evolving recruitment environment.

Comments on TrustRadius about Workable were overwhelmingly positive. Annie Talbot, Director of Human Resources for Vacation Innovations, highlighted how Workable optimized her recruitment pipeline:

It has really helped us streamline the hiring process and reduce communication issues between the hiring managers and HR.

Maryann Merolla, HR Director of Madison Performance Group, noted its ease of use even for non-regular users:

It’s easy to add co-workers to Workable, and since it’s very user-friendly, they are able to use it without any training. We can share comments, evaluations, and scheduling right in each candidate’s profile. I can customize the process based on co-workers’ needs.

Another verified user at TrustRadius lauded the ability to see all aspects of the hiring process in one place:

Workable is used by our Talent Acquisition team as an Applicant Tracking System. Our entire organization uses it to track the hiring of new employees. Workable allows us to see candidate flow in a simple way to be able to screen and process large numbers of candidates through the hiring process.

Since they launched in 2016, the TrustRadius Top Rated Awards have become the industry standard for unbiased recognition of the best B2B technology products. Based entirely on customer feedback, they have never been influenced by analyst opinion or status as a TrustRadius customer.

Established in 2013, TrustRadius has become the most trusted site for B2B software reviews. Each month, about 400,000 B2B technology buyers use over 168,000 verified reviews and ratings on TrustRadius.com to make informed purchasing decisions.

Workable is all-in-one recruiting software: a single system for teams to find, track and evaluate candidates. Quick to implement and easy to use, Workable accelerates the hiring process by finding the right candidates faster and improving hiring team collaboration. More than 20,000 teams have used Workable to source and evaluate 50 million job candidates in 100 countries around the world. Workable is trusted by teams of all sizes to meet their hiring goals on time and on budget, by reducing their time to hire.

The post Workable named Top Rated ATS by TrustRadius for 2019 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

It’s always been easy to apply access rights to hiring teams using Workable. But, with collaborative hiring on the rise, and data protection just as hot, we decided some enhancements were due.

Our new, upgraded Access Rights & Roles feature offers more detailed, fine-grained permission levels for a wider variety of users. Fully configurable, they support busier hiring pipelines. They’re also there to reinforce security and prepare you for an increasingly collaborative future.

Fine-grained access rights for growing hiring teams

As you scale up, or operate from different locations and across multiple departments, it becomes harder to control access to certain types of candidate data. Using custom pipelines or having recruiters with different responsibilities also adds a level of complication.

With our new access rights package, Pro customers can reflect and tame the growing complexity of their hiring teams. Providing hiring admins with more granular control, it ensures the right people get the right information at the right time. And that confidential information stays that way.

With more fine-grained levels of detail it’s now easier to:

• control who has access to your account level details
• organize your hiring teams and personalize access
• reinforce the security of confidential information, and
• minimize hiring bias.

So, what’s new?

Organize hiring teams faster and personalize access at scale

Every member of a hiring team has a unique role in the process. And this role should determine their access. Some members—HR heads, senior leaders—require access to everything; from account details to every job you’re hiring for. Others—interviewing peers, agency recruiters—need only limited access to candidates.

To make it easier to manage, we’ve added a range of new access rights options for customers with Pro accounts. Now, when you add a new member, you can assign both account-wide and role-specific details.

We’ve also included two new hiring roles—Reviewer and Hiring Admin. These are designed for colleagues who don’t need full access to a job to fulfil their part in the process—screening candidates for example, or posting a job.

How does it work?

When you invite a new member to Workable you now choose from 3 different levels of account access: All Access, Standard Access and Limited Access.

All Access is designed for senior people in your organization, often the Head of HR or an HR team lead. Users at this level have access to everything in Workable and their role on every hiring team is always Super Admin.

Limited Access is designed for peers of the role you’re hiring for. Users at this level have limited access to candidates, and no access to your Workable account details. Their role on every hiring team is always Reviewer, where they can evaluate candidates and share their feedback.

Standard Access captures the varied middle ground that applies to many members of your your account. Whereas those with ‘All Access’ can access everything, and those with ‘Limited Access’ will always have a restricted view, those with ‘Standard Access’ have their visibility set per job, department or location.

This means for example, that a member with Standard Access could be:

• a Hiring Manager for a job in your sales team in Europe, with access to confidential information, and
• a Reviewer for a sales jobs in the USA, where their opinion is valuable but access to everything isn’t required.

‘Standard Access’ is the most flexible option, and best suited for hiring team admins, hiring managers or relatively senior people in your organization. There are 4 hiring team roles available for those with Standard Access: Recruiting Admin, Hiring Manager, Standard Member or Reviewer.

Reinforce the security of confidential information

With our access rights package it’s easier to share confidential information with only the people who need it. This is because members can only view candidate information that matches their specific user permissions. So you can be confident that comments, financial details or specific terms of employment are only visible to those who need to have access.

We’ve also included a new feature that adds an extra level of protection to hiring pipelines. The ‘Confidential Zone’ option is available to all of our users. It enables admins to limit the visibility of emails and comments at certain stages of the hiring pipeline. Once set, emails and comments will only be visible to the person posting them and those with a similar or higher level of access.

Minimize hiring bias

Access controls can be a great tool for proactively challenging hiring bias. Which is why we’ve included a new Hidden Evaluations feature as part of this release. With this feature, people in your hiring team can only view other members’ evaluations after they’ve submitted their own. This removes any unconscious bias, and leads to a fairer and more objective assessment process.

Any questions?

We’ve packed a lot of new functionality into this launch, and we know there’s quite a bit to take in. If you want to find out more about how our Access Rights & Roles feature or our Pro package could work for you, get in touch!

The post Organize hiring teams faster with Workable appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Last month when Google announced its new Google for Jobs search tool, it wasn’t long before our customers were all asking the same question: “How do I get my jobs to show up in Google search results?”

It’s a good question – and we’d already started working with Google on the answer. That’s why we’re excited to announce that jobs posted through Workable in the US and the UK (plus a number of other countries) are now automatically recognized, and will appear in Google job search results.

What is Google for Jobs?

Aimed at making the job search easier for candidates, Google for Jobs is an enhanced search feature that aggregates listings from job boards and careers sites and displays them prominently in Google Search.

Now when you search for jobs in using the Google job search engine, you’ll view job listings in a dedicated space at the top of the search results, like this:

When job seekers click to find out more, they are taken through to the source, to read the full job description and apply.

Looking to get your job advertisement in front of the right candidates? See how Workable compares to other applicant tracking systems, like Lever and Greenhouse.

I’m a Workable customer, how do I get my jobs to appear in Google for Jobs search results?

Getting your jobs to appear in search results has never been easier. Workable customers in the US or the UK simply need to publish an open job on their careers site. Google prides itself on providing the most relevant information for any search or query, so, to attract the most relevant candidates, complete the job targeting options at the bottom of the Workable job editor when you post the job. These fields highlight the information that candidates are most likely to be searching for:

The more detail you add, the more relevant information Google has to match you to your ideal candidate pool. This is especially beneficial for those targeting niche or specialist roles.

The jobs you post will then be indexed by Google’s search engine and appear in search results automatically.

Interested candidates can view the job details and begin the application process via Google for Jobs. Easy for you. Easy for candidates.

Not a Workable customer yet? Discover why we’re the leading ATS for ambitious companies. Sign up for our 15-day free trial and start hiring better people, faster.

The post Workable makes it easy to get indexed in Google for Jobs appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Today we’re excited to announce the launch of our first video interview integration with our latest partner, Spark Hire.

Spark Hire is an easy-to-use video interviewing platform with 3,000+ customers in over 100 countries. It’s used by organizations to make better hires, faster than ever before.

Why use video interviews?

If you’re new to video interviews, these are some of the reasons why their uptake is gaining momentum:

More efficient candidate screening
With a full candidate pipeline and a busy hiring team, interviews can take not just time, but resources. Juggling interview schedules with multiple candidates and a busy hiring team is tough. The higher the volume of qualified candidates, the more complex this becomes. Video interviews with a tool like Spark Hire help you screen and evaluate candidates at a time that works for everyone.

After receiving your interview request, candidates can answer your questions on their own time. When they’re ready, you can review the completed video interviews at your convenience. This makes it easy to screen candidates prior to an on-site interview, and to compare candidates early in the hiring process.

For candidates who are applying remotely, video interviews can also save on budget by avoiding costly travel expenses for early round interviewing.

Better collaboration with the hiring team
It’s important to get feedback from hiring managers early on in the process. Workable already makes collaboration easier, with trackable communication on the candidate profile. Now with Spark Hire, Workable also keeps a record of the interviews sent and received. Share the candidate profile with your hiring team, and they can review everything from the resume and application form to the pre-recorded video in just a few clicks.

If your team is busy at certain times, or even out of the office, Spark Hire eliminates the issue. Hiring Teams can log in from anywhere to review the videos and leave their feedback.

A fairer, more consistent process
It’s well known that a structured interview is almost twice as effective as the common unstructured interview. Workable already provides interview kits and scorecards to help structure your process, and Spark Hire follows the same principles. By pre-setting your interview questions, every candidate has the same opportunity to succeed, by answering the same questions, in the same order. This makes it easy to compare interviews – and unlike a regular conversation, the recordings are available to re-watch when you need them.

Making the connection

Connecting your Spark Hire and Workable accounts will enable you to send one-way video interviews to candidates as they move through your hiring pipeline. When a candidate arrives at an assessment stage, you can send the video request directly through Workable. After the candidate completes the interview, you’ll receive a notification and you and your team can view the video directly from the candidate’s profile in Workable.

Wondering what questions you should ask? Our Guide to Structured Interview Questions could help.

More integrations coming soon

We have many more exciting integrations to announce in the coming months. Watch this space to learn more! If you’re a software provider and would like to integrate with Workable, find out more about our Developer Partner Program and apply to be a partner today.

The post Announcing our new integration with Spark Hire appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

When you’re hiring as a team, structured interviews provide actionable feedback. They ensure that every candidate has an equal opportunity to shine, and that they’re assessed accurately and consistently.

Here’s a speedy overview:

So how does it work?

When you create an interview kit with Workable, a scorecard is generated automatically:

This helps ensure that:

• interviewers are well prepared to assess the skills required
• all candidates are asked the right questions
• responses are evaluated using a consistent rating scale
• feedback is gathered in one place, ready for the next action by a hiring manager

I’ll give you a quick rundown of the details here — but do get stuck in and make some Interview kits of your own. It’s pretty hard to break something in Workable, and practice makes perfect…

Create the kits you need for each stage

Each company has their own way of hiring. You can create an interview kit for each assessment stage (phone screen, first, second, third interview), to ensure that every candidate is assessed consistently.

Create templates to assess shared needs

Companies have shared sets of values, departments have shared sets of needs. Workable account admins can create templates to be used company-wide, or per department. Share these with hiring managers as they add custom questions for the role, and keep a more consistent approach to the questions that you ask.

Automatically share scorecards with the hiring team

Scorecards are great – but not when the team can’t find them. Workable takes care of this automatically. As soon as candidates reach an assessment stage with a kit, the scorecard is added to the candidate’s profile, your Workable Agenda (which has your upcoming event schedule) and your Inbox. No need to hunt around for a printout, or something someone sent you six weeks ago by email.

Interview the way that suits you best

Everyone likes to interview differently. Some people prefer to take notes with a pen, others are happy to tap away on a keyboard. Some will write extensive notes while others feel confident leaving only a rating. Use Workable in the way that suits you best:

• Print the scorecard out, take notes on paper and add them to Workable when the interview is over
• Work online and add ratings — or add ratings and notes

Find out more about the pro’s and cons of interview scorecards and how to use them.

View the resume and scorecard side by side

When you’re filling in the scorecard online, make the most of Workable:  view the scorecard and resume side by side, and keep everything you need at your fingertips.

See individual or combined results

As soon as scorecards are complete, they’re available for review by the hiring team. View each scorecard individually, or see an aggregate view.

One member of the team unable to make the interview – but still has feedback? Ask them to switch to a basic evaluation, and that’s included on the group scorecard too.

Flexible, editable, fast

One of the most important things about designing interview kits was giving you the flexibility you need. We hope you’ll find that they match your process. As you build up a library of kits, the creation of a new kit gets faster. Import sections from other jobs, from the job requirements or templates — just create new sections when you need them. As always, let us know how you get on.

One final thing – if you are a regular user, you’ll spot that the job editor has also had a refresh! Don’t panic. I’ve written an article to guide you through the changes.

The post New release: Interview kits and scorecards! appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Candidate profiles emerge as the key points of reference throughout the hiring process. They keep track of how far along the pipeline the candidate has progressed, they store the resume, and they keep a full record of all the team feedback.

In short, Workable’s candidate profiles free hiring teams from the tyranny of the email inbox. Trying to remember who was really positive about a candidate and who had a few more questions? It’s a comment on the candidate’s profile. Not sure when the candidate said they could start? It’s on the job application form – available on the candidate’s profile. Need a link to their portfolio? Yep. Candidate profile.

And yet… email and calendars are still vital tools for hiring managers and recruiters. Why? Because the primary communication with a candidate usually takes place via email. And because your time is contested – you’re not just scheduling interviews with candidates, but meetings with your boss, calls with your team, clients and more.

Our latest updates tackle this brutal truth: you still need your external email and calendar when you’re recruiting. These apps are not dead yet.

Workable offers Google Apps integration

Our integration with Gmail has been online and live for a long time. If you’ve not used it yet, it enables you to reply to candidates from the place that suits you best – Workable, or Gmail. The two are synced, so that every email with a candidate is automatically tracked on the candidate’s timeline. You’ll also remain up-to-date whether you’re sending or receiving on desktop or Workable’s mobile app for iOS or Android.

A few months ago we launched an enhanced integration with Google Calendar. Now, when you’re inside Workable getting things done, you can check team availability (and your own), book a room, and schedule an interview time that works for everyone using your Google Calendar directly inside Workable. No need to switch apps and waste valuable time.

We also provide the option to customize your Google Calendar view inside Workable. If you’re not working weekends, and you have preferred office hours, customize your calendar to weekdays and your specified hours only. Reduce the clutter and focus on what matters.

We’re a busy team, you’re busy people – we don’t always shout loudly about every new feature. However, you could call our Google Calendar integration the big sleeper hit of the summer. With little promotion from us, it didn’t take long for the Microsoft Office 365 users among you to say, ‘Hey! We’ve heard these Google integrations with Workable really work! What about us?!’

Workable now offers Microsoft Office 365 integration

We take your feedback to heart, so we’re pleased to announce that Workable now offers a Microsoft Office 365 integration too.

The release includes two parts: Office 365 Outlook and Office 365 Calendar.

As with Gmail, the Office 365 Outlook integration allows for seamless communication with candidates via Workable, using your company Outlook email account. Activated by an administrator for your Office 365 account, again, this integration also includes the automatic 2-way sync between Workable and your Outlook inbox. This means that you can send an email from Outlook or Workable, but a full record is kept automatically on the candidate’s timeline in Workable and in your Outlook Inbox. Your hiring team stays up to speed, and everyone can see the information they need. You can work from Outlook or Workable and rest assured that you have all the information you need.

The Office 365 Calendar integration enables faster interview scheduling. Check up on your own calendar, see the availability of your hiring team and schedule interviews faster inside Workable. And just like with email, we offer calendar sync so that events created in Workable are also synced back to your external Office 365 Calendar.

We’re really excited about these updates. The feedback we’ve had so far about our Google Calendar integration has been fantastic. Scheduling interviews and calls is one of the main headaches for hiring managers and recruiters, so anything that can help numb the pain has to be good!

Let us know if you need any help, and how it’s working out for you and your teams.

The post Email and calendars for hiring: not dead yet appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Resurface Candidates compliments these sourcing features by looking to another source – your talent pool. Resurface Candidates uses Workable’s AI Recruiter technology to read your job description, identify what you’re looking for, and then find the best matches in your account before you even publish your job.

So, how does it work? It matches the candidates based on keywords, prior evaluations, as well as the sentiment of your team’s comments.

Expect to cut down your time to hire and improve your quality of hire with Resurface Candidates.

It’s easier than ever to re-engage and hire candidates that you already know. Start using it.

The post Introducing our new Resurface Candidates tool appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Demand for developers, designers and data scientists often outstrips supply in competitive talent markets like London. It’s why we’ve developed built-in sourcing tools like People Search and Auto-Suggest. We wanted to give our customers a head start sourcing software engineers and other hard-to-fill roles.

Working alongside our own built-in sourcing tools, our integration with co-hire enriches your talent search engine. It offers a simple way for start-ups and technology companies to initiate meaningful conversations with people they wouldn’t otherwise have access to. On average, 30% of messages sent to candidates on co-hire result in an interview; a powerful return which puts you one step closer to your perfect hire.

From profile to pipeline

“co-hire is the best platform we’ve come across for finding high-quality candidates for tech roles. The filtering ability is powerful and enables us to quickly target suitable candidates and filter out inactive ones too. We received a strong response from candidates actively looking for their next role.”
co-hire customer, Sam Hyams (co-founder at Springpod)

So, how does co-hire’s technical sourcing tool work? There are three simple steps:

1. Post a company profile
   This empowers you to share your story, mission, vision and values with prospective candidates. Include photos of your team to further promote your brand and add details of all relevant team members so job seekers know who they’re talking to.
2. Fill your pipeline
   co-hire uses a combination of community data and human intelligence to instantly suggest prospects who match your requirements and are most likely to respond to your interest. Use advanced filters to find and speak to the most relevant people for your company.
3. Reach out with meaningful comms
   Personalize each message and make more meaningful connections using tools provided through co-hire.

All your recruiting in one place

co-hire’s integration with Workable can be set up in minutes. Once in place, details of candidates you’ve sourced on co-hire feed straight into Workable, so all your recruiting is in one place. All you need to do is click the Workable icon next to a candidate’s name in co-hire. A list of Published or Internal jobs in Workable will appear. Select the relevant job and the candidate’s details will be exported to the Sourced stage in Workable along with their experience, education, skills, email address and resume.

More integrations coming soon

Yes! We’ve got even more integrations coming soon. Watch this space as we launch a series of new partnerships. If you’re a Workable user and have a tool you’d love to see integrated with Workable, let us know! If you’re a software provider, why not find out more about our Developer Partner Program and get involved?

The post Use Workable’s integration with co-hire for sourcing tech talent appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The automated workflow for creating the candidate longlist involves, among other steps, deep analysis of both the job description and candidate information. This is something our team has been working on for some time. In this blog post, I describe the data science techniques we use at each step in the process and how they combine to make Auto-Suggest such a powerful automated talent sourcing tool.

Understanding keyword extraction

The keyword or keyphrase extraction service is responsible for generating the summary of a job posting. It does this by capturing the most descriptive words or phrases within the job posting text fields (for example, title, description and requirement summary).

Usual descriptive elements of a job posting are the skills or certifications a position requires; the sanitized version of the job title, key tasks of the position and so on.

We attack the problem of keyword extraction using a supervised learning approach. More specifically, we train a binary classifier (currently an Extreme Gradient Boosting classifier) to evaluate whether a specific word or phrase is a candidate keyword or keyphrase. That means we evaluate the “keywordness” of the phrase. Having trained this classifier, we extract keywords by evaluating all words/phrases from the job posting and choosing the ones with the highest “keywordness” score.

In order to decide whether a phrase or word is relevant, the classifier makes use of the following information, among others:

• The term and document frequency of the word or phrase
• The appearance of the word or phrase in a gazetteer of known skills, job titles, education fields
• The appearance of the word or phrase within a specific HTML element
• Tendency for the word or phrase to appear in a specific domain (domain-descriptive phrases)
• The morphology of the word or phrase (for example, capitalized)

Query Terms (QuTe) and the semantic interpretation of data

The purpose of the Query Terms (QuTe) module is to provide a semantic interpretation of the data ‘living’ in our database. Following the paradigm of well-known embedding techniques [1][2], we represent each term with a real-valued vector and we train these vectors to attain meaningful values.

Our basic assumption is that data bound to a single entity (candidate or job) are relevant to one another and thus their representations should be similar. Starting with random initial vectors we iteratively optimize these representations seeking to maximize the co-occurrence probability of relevant terms. Clusters of semantically similar terms begin to appear after only a few passes over the training data (epochs).

The four semantic categories we focus on are job titles, fields of study, candidate skills and job keywords. We support multi-word embeddings which expose relationships analogous to the original Word2Vec paper [1]. For example, the skill ‘scikit-learn’ is clustered with other similar Python libraries such as ‘scipy’ and ‘matplotlib’. Similarly, the job title ‘machine learning engineer’ is placed close to semantically relevant job titles such as ‘data science engineer’, ‘data scientist’ or ‘machine learning scientist’.

Crafting complex Boolean queries with Query Builder (QuBe)

Using information from previous components in the pipeline, the Query Builder (QuBe) module generates an appropriate Boolean search query. This query is used to retrieve candidates directly from the web. In short, to increase recall we expand the original job description (title and keywords) using QuTe’s similar terms list. Then we use QuBe to search for candidate profiles among a large number of data providers and search engines. This component handles the tradeoff between the size of the response (number of returned profiles) and their quality in terms of relevance to the job.

Identifying relevant candidates with Matcher

Behind Auto-Suggest is a multi-step process which accumulates noise from all the individual components. To mitigate this we’ve built the Matcher—a classification mechanism which kicks in at the final step of the pipeline. The Matcher’s responsibility is to predict whether a candidate is a good fit for a job. Using signals from candidate profiles and job descriptions the Matcher identifies relevant candidates for a position.

At first, we transform the job / candidate pair into their corresponding vector representations. For each candidate we keep only their skills, work experience and education entries. The vector representation is the concatenation of the corresponding elements:

• A candidate skills vector is computed from the embeddings of the candidate’s skills.
• A candidate work experience vector results from the embeddings of the job titles, taking into account job duration and recency.
• A candidate education vector is derived from the embeddings of candidate’s field of studies.

Similarly, to compute a job description’s vector we combine the embedding of the job title and the keywords’ embeddings. Both the job and candidate vectors are then fed as input to the matcher.

We view the matching process as a binary classification problem and we employ negative sampling [1][3] techniques to build our training / evaluation datasets. A job / candidate pair is considered positive if a candidate applied for the job and recruiters marked the application as acceptable inside Workable. On the other hand, negative samples are built artificially by randomly selecting candidate profiles from the database. Our current implementation follows a stacking classifier architecture where the base estimators are a collection of neural networks and Gradient Boosted Decision Trees.

This blog post was written by Vasilis Vassalos and the Data Science team.

Vasilis is the Chief Data Scientist at Workable. He has a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University and is a Professor of Informatics at the Athens University of Economics and Business.

References

[1] ‘Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space’ Tomas Mikolov, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado, Jeffrey Dean. https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3781

[2] Pennington, J., Socher, R. & Manning, C. D. (2014). Glove: Global Vectors for Word Representation.. EMNLP (p./pp. 1532–1543),

[3] Goldberg, Y. & Levy, O. (2014). word2vec Explained: deriving Mikolov et al.’s negative-sampling word-embedding method.. CoRR, abs/1402.3722.

The post How we developed Auto-Suggest: the data science behind our new automated talent sourcing tool appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

In 2020, talent teams were looking for ways to diversify their sourcing channels and methods. With AI Recruiter, we helped customers immediately source 50 passive candidates from outside their existing network for every job.

Many companies faced unprecedented challenges due to the COVID-19 crisis. Unfortunately, with the pandemic came layoffs and furloughs at many companies. For customers trying to help former employees find a new job, we built Bridge, a tool that connects former employees with employers actively looking for candidates. 

The move to remote work made it harder for candidates to get a feel for company culture, meaning employer branding and careers pages became increasingly important in showcasing your company. With Branded Careers Pages, we help you put your best brand forward: flexible templates and customizable sections are included right in the Workable platform. 

As remote work opportunities increased, companies continued to attract talent globally. With language options, we made it easy for you to localize the entire candidate experience in the languages of your choice, available in English, French, German, Greek, Portuguese, and Spanish. 

Many HR leaders looked to advance diversity, equity and inclusion as their organizations continued to navigate the new world of work. To address customer requests and needs, Workable released anonymized screening: the ability to anonymize your screening process by hiding details like candidate name, background, and gender. Anonymizing this data in applications can help companies decrease inherent bias and increase inclusivity in their hiring practices.

To help customers connect with candidates more easily, we introduced two premium features: Video Interviews and Texting. Video Interviews streamlines remote screening efforts, helping candidates record responses to interview questions at their convenience. Personalize the experience with a welcome video or pre-record videos with prompts. It’s a flexible process proven to help you screen more candidates, faster. Texting encourages recruiters to message candidates directly from the Workable platform or app and track responses in real time on the candidate timeline, just like with email.

With updates to our hiring plan, you now have the ability to filter by hiring manager, requisition owner and status for more granular reporting. To make company growth simple, we introduced Department Hierarchy. Department Hierarchy offers centralized department management with hierarchical structure, meaning as your company grows, your hiring structure does too. 

Speed up executive sign-off and get candidate signatures faster with updated offer letter templates, approval workflows, e-signatures and more, right within the platform. We take compliance very seriously and make it easy for your teams to stay compliant, adding CCPA to our existing suite of EEO/OFFCP and GDPR features. 

What’s coming in 2021

We’re building out our product roadmap based on customer feedback, market research, and our overall product vision. With that in mind, we wanted to give a sneak peek at what’s to come in 2021.

We will continue our focus on DEI with the release of a native Assessments feature and customizable surveys for candidate experience and diversity metrics. We’ll introduce automation to current communications, meaning you’ll be able to automate emails and text messages based on hiring stages. We’re bringing a slew of enhancements to our current candidate database, and we’ll focus on developing a number of additional features based on your feedback. We’re thrilled for what’s coming in 2021 to Workable, and we hope you are too.

Questions? Don’t hesitate to contact us. 

The post 11 efficiency-boosting releases from Workable appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Last week we released our Pay Per Applicant job advertising model for Workable customers in the US and now it’s time to show the love to Workable customers far and wide.

In the last month we’ve released integrations to help Workable customers attract new candidates on a variety of specialty and diversity sites including Mashable, SHRM, Dribbble, and HireAHero. We also partnered with Looksharp to allow customers to specifically target new grads and college interns.

This week we’re excited to announce that we’ve expanded our job posting options for our international customers. In partnership with Beyond, we’ve added 55 new job posting sites, providing even greater reach to target the right candidates in 130 countries.

From Bumeran in Central and South America to TotalJobs in the UK, Stepstone in Germany to Bayt in the Middle East, Naukri in India and Jobstreet in Singapore, our latest release spans the globe.

We’re committed to making the job posting process as smooth and effective as possible, so you can expect more partnerships over the next few months. However, if there’s a site that you’re using that you think could be off our radar, please do get in touch.

If you’re on the other side of that equation – a job board with services to offer – and would like to discuss partnership opportunities, we’d love to hear from you too!

The post Find your next great hire on our 55 new international job boards appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

That’s why we’re excited to announce that we’ve been named a Gold level Preferred Partner by Glassdoor.

Getting the right candidates is always the most effective route to making a great hire. Workable’s seamless integration with Glassdoor provides the option to distribute all your open jobs automatically from within the Workable platform. Log in once to Workable, and perform all your hiring tasks in one go; no links to copy and paste and no data entry. For those hard to fill roles, we also provide the option to sponsor your jobs on Glassdoor — again, straight from Workable.

A better candidate experience

Getting your open jobs in front of the right candidates is one of the missions of Workable. Getting those candidates to apply is the next biggest hurdle, and Workable has always strived to make the application process as pain free as possible.

We don’t believe that a candidate should be required to enter page after page of details just to let you know they’re interested in your job. So for us, integrating with Glassdoor’s Easy Apply functionality was a perfect fit. Now, candidates can review a job posting, submit their resume and profile, and answer your prescreening questions straight from the Glassdoor site. It’s a near frictionless process—and it works! Since launch, our integration with Glassdoor Easy Apply has increased the number of successful applies for jobs posted on Glassdoor by nearly 300%.

Better data, better decisions

It was once written that no man is an island – and neither is the recruitment process for most companies. We believe that meaningful analysis of past recruitment activity will help you make more informed decisions about the allocation of future resources.

We’re working with Glassdoor to bring those insights directly into the Workable platform. Our next launch with Glassdoor will provide access to real-time data on the Cost Per Applicant, Cost Per Hire, and additional advertising metrics. Make data driven decisions to improve your job advertising spend and increase your ROI.

The post Workable becomes a Glassdoor preferred partner appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Assessments

Indeed Assessments offers both ready-to-go and custom candidate assessments to help you see which candidates have the skills you need. Choose from an extensive library of over 50 expert-designed, pre-built assessments or build your own to suit your particular hiring goals.
Set up a free account.

Geektastic helps you quickly identify the top candidates for your development roles. Candidates’ coding challenges are reviewed by highly talented reviewers to identify the top 10-20% of your applicants.
Start your free trial.

Interview Mocha makes it easy to assess multiple skills. Its enterprise-ready assessment platform includes 1000+ skill and aptitude tests that help you verify if your candidate is a good fit for the role. Trusted by leading brands worldwide.
Schedule a demo.

MindX identifies candidates likely to be high performers at your organization. It joins gamification with data science and organizational psychology to deliver an engaging, scientific assessment of work-relevant cognitive traits.
Schedule a demo.

Qualified offers pre-made tests or the option to customize your own. Its coding assessments provide a wide range of software testing, ranging from CS algorithms to specific technologies and frameworks like Node.JS and Ruby on Rails.
Request a free trial.

RightHire‘s high-quality, free pre-hire assessment platform enables employers to assess the job-specific cognitive abilities and work personality characteristics of their job applicants.
Try it for free.

ThriveMap is a culture fit assessment that enables better hiring decisions by measuring how your candidates like to work and comparing it to your team culture. The best teams are diverse, so they measure the work environments people thrive in and not personality.
Try it free for 2 weeks.

Background checks

Trusted Employees makes background checks smart, safe and easy. For 20+ years, its FCRA-compliant background checks have helped businesses hire the right talent with the latest technology and rigorous data quality standards.
Get started now.

Job boards & candidate sourcing

co-hire offers a simple way for start-ups and technology companies to initiate meaningful conversations with active candidates for hard-to-fill roles.
Get started.

Coroflot is the largest and most active site specifically targeted for the hiring needs of design-led organizations. Companies already hiring through Coroflot range from local operations to multi-national industry leaders.
Find your next designer.

Google for Jobs, the job search aggregator, is available in more countries (including the US and the UK). Which means that jobs in supported regions can show on Google’s listings.
Get tips on increasing visibility.

Indeed Sponsored Jobs offers further metrics making it easier for customers with this integration to measure and share campaign ROI. Get the performance data you need to optimize your hiring.
Sponsor a job.

Jobbatical helps you reach an exclusive database of talent ready to relocate to your company. A solution for cross-border hiring, it provides access to an exclusive database of business, tech and creative professionals.
Schedule a demo.

Jobbio enables companies to attract best-fit talent to its roles through smart advertising and content placement across an extensive partner network and careers marketplace.
Register now.

Jobsite is an award-winning UK job board and jobs-by-email service. Specializing in matching skilled professionals with high-level roles, it connects 7 million candidates to over 120,000 jobs across 35 industries every month.
Connect your account.

Jobs on Facebook provides a centralized jobs dashboard, which harnesses the power of Facebook’s vast and loyal social network. Post jobs to up to 2 billion potential candidates in one click.
Try the job board.

Referrals

Drafted helps you hire through referrals—the best source of talent for your company. It matches your open positions in Workable to talent in your company network and makes personalized suggestions about who to refer.
Schedule a demo.

Preferhired is referral software that makes it easy to fill those hard-to-fill positions. Leverage your company’s internal network and improve your stats, from retention rate and job performance to cost per hire and time per hire.
Try for free.

Video interviews

Human deciphers facial expressions for candidate analysis, using artificial intelligence. Focus on who the candidate is and minimize human bias and discrimination during the screening process. Increase time efficiency by 3x and cost efficiency by 5x.
Schedule a demo.

myInterview puts the candidate back into the recruitment process. Simple to use, quick to complete, with deep data insights, are just some of the reasons to give the free trial a go.
Sign up for a trial.

SkillHeart is the power behind candidate video interviews, which help you meet your job applicants earlier in the recruitment process. Save time and make objective evaluations with your team.
Create your account.

Onboarding

Click Boarding creates successful onboarding and transition experiences that engage employees, give them access to the information they need, and bring them into new cultures from day one — with any new company, department or team.
Schedule a demo.

Namely is powerful, easy-to-use HR software that enables mid-sized companies to manage their HR, payroll, benefits and talent management in one place. Its robust integration with Workable means that you can export data directly into their onboarding and HRIS tools.
Schedule a demo.

Personably helps you build productive teams by creating amazing onboarding experiences for new hires. It enables you to collaborate with people across the company to build the ideal process for different teams and levels. Schedule everything with a single click to make sure the right people are involved at the right time.
Learn more.

More integrations coming soon

You shouldn’t have to be a systems implementation expert to have a great experience across all of your hiring tools. We’re always working on new integrations so that everyone’s hiring tech stack works together. If you’re a Workable user and have a tool you’d love to see integrated with Workable, let us know! If you’re a software provider, why not find out more about our Developer Partner Program and get involved?

The post Check out the 24 Workable integrations in 2018 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Well, no more! Our new interview self-scheduling feature pares everything down to just one email.

Included in your initial outreach is a self-scheduling interview link. This empowers candidates to view, in real-time, the available slots in your calendar. After selecting a time that works they can book it on the spot.

With everything arranged that same day, you can cut your time-to-interview by 50% and use the other 50% on something other than admin.

A powerful interview self-scheduling tool for recruiters

With one small link you can now:

• book and confirm interviews faster and reduce your final time to hire
• minimize the possibility of errors through built-in checks and automated, real-time calendar sync
• engage and secure talent in your pipeline ahead of the competition
• provide a seamless, positive experience for candidates from day one.

So how does it work?

If you’re using the Gmail or Outlook Calendar integration with a Pro account, you’ll see a new ‘Self-Schedule Link’ option available in your email toolbar. This is the link you’ll send to candidates which provides them with a selection of viable timeslots.

Embedding the link in your email takes seconds. All you need to do is:

1. Click the ‘Self-Schedule Link’ in the email toolbar
2. Add details of the event to the short form that pops up
3. Select ‘Generate’.

That’s it. Just press ‘send’ and it’s job done. The integration between Workable and your external calendar will create a unique calendar for your candidate, showing only your available slots. Your candidate now has everything they need to progress their application to the next stage. And, with everything recorded on your timeline and automatic updates every step of the way, your end’s covered off too.

A seamless interview scheduling experience for candidates

Interview self-scheduling puts power back in the hands of candidates. It also adds pace to the hiring process. In one quick click, candidates can see at a glance available slots and event details—duration, name of interviewer, location and type of event—in real time.

When the appointment is confirmed, everything is summarized for the candidate in a personalized events page. This includes timezone information (for interviewer and interviewee), a map and directions.

With a fast turnaround and a smooth, seamless user experience, engagement levels are kept high. And, having delivered a strong candidate experience so early on, you get quality, fully engaged candidates secured in your funnel.

Advanced interview self-scheduling for high-volume hiring

Working hand-in-hand with our multi-part interview scheduling tool, we designed our self-scheduling feature with complex, high-volume hiring in mind. So it also comes with a package of supporting functions to reduce the additional admin involved in recruiting at scale. With these enhancements you can:

• Include the link in bulk emails
  Save time by sending the link to multiple candidates. With our automatic calendar sync you don’t have to worry about double-booking. As soon as one candidate selects a time slot, it’s removed from everyone else’s calendar.
• Arrange an event on behalf of someone else
  If you’re an in-house recruiter you can use the link to organize interviews for your hiring managers. Just select another user’s calendar when you fill in the details and they’ll receive all of the relevant notifications, invites and calendar events.
• Revoke the link
  Things change. We know. So we’ve made it easy and quick to withdraw your scheduling link if you have to. Just delete the action item from your candidate’s timeline.
• Set a clear timeframe
  Add pace to the hiring process and reduce overall time-to-hire by defining how long your self-scheduling link stays active.

Mobile-optimized interview self-scheduling coming soon!

Want to book interviews at speed, wherever you are? Well, here’s more good news. We optimize our interview self-scheduling feature for mobile so you can schedule on-the-go.

More resources:

• Interview scheduling email template

The post Cut scheduling time in half with our interview self-scheduling link for candidates appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

We secure our product – you shield your data

We know you can’t focus on hiring unless you’re confident that your recruiting software handles all candidate information securely and maintains data privacy. Add to that Europe’s GDPR regulations, that were put into effect as of May 2018 and made us all rethink how we store and process personal details. Now you understand why data security was one of our top priorities.

Although we are always looking to implement the highest security standards in our product from the get-go and in every new feature we build, in 2018 we went one step further: we are now officially ISO 27001:2013 certified. This means that our customers can be reassured that our tech, our infrastructure and our employees operate safely and securely. And for our customers who use various apps and want to access their data across different systems, our single sign-on (SSO) feature provides an extra level of security and a smoother user experience.

Whether you’re in Europe or elsewhere, we’re sure that you’ve heard a lot about GDPR over the last year. And you’ve probably wondered what you need to do and what you need to change in your procedures to be compliant. In hiring, specifically, things can get complicated considering you manage a ton of candidate data, from people who apply for your open roles to the ones you source or you want to maintain in your databases for future job openings. Workable’s GDPR features, released this year, do all the back-office work for you, so that you can, without any stress, focus on what’s most important: the actual hiring.

But data privacy doesn’t refer only to using secure tech or being compliant with regulations. It’s about ensuring that the right people have access to the right information at the right time. That’s why we built advanced access rights that help you organize your hiring teams and share confidential data only with the team members who need full visibility. For example, you can limit access to external recruiters, if you don’t want them to see financial details or specific terms, and you can hide candidate evaluations from interviewers until they submit their own evaluation, ensuring an unbiased evaluation.

Get better candidates, faster

“Finding qualified candidates.” If we asked recruiters about their biggest pain points, this would be among the top 3 answers – if not the most popular one. As a company that builds recruiting software, we always think of new ways to ease this pain. In 2018, we introduced a new dashboard inside Workable: “Find Candidates”. In a single page, you can see all advertising options to help you maximize your outreach to potential candidates. Here’s what it looks like:

You may have noticed “Campaigns” and “Auto-Suggest” in the above screenshot. “What are these?” you ask? Well, these are two of the AI-based features that we released this year to help you find new candidates beyond your traditional, tried sources. Let’s take a look at them one by one:

• With “Campaigns” you automatically get qualified candidates from Facebook and Instagram straight to your hiring pipeline. Share with us your open role and, based on the job requirements (like experience level and location), we’ll deliver a branded ad to people who qualify for the job. Instead of casting a wide net, we target potential candidates who have the desired skills and are more likely to be interested in your open roles.
• “Auto-Suggest” works behind the scenes, analyzing your job description to automatically generate up to 200 matching candidate profiles. This means that you can diversify your talent pool, as we’re looking for potential candidates in various online sources that you haven’t thought of or don’t have the time to explore.

…and there’s more to come

Stay tuned in 2019 for “Workable Referrals” – an internal job portal that turns your workforce into a recruiting machine. Find, track and evaluate referrals faster all through one standalone platform that syncs with your hiring pipelines and reports.

Interview scheduling takes time?

Not anymore! In 2018, we added new features inside Workable to help you schedule interviews faster and more accurately. These features automate the administrative tasks around scheduling and help you focus on the actual interview:

• Give candidates the option to self-schedule interviews: Why waste time sending back-and-forth emails with candidates when you can do this with a single email? Instead of trying to find a time that works for everyone and calculating different time zones (when interviewing remotely), give candidates access to your calendar: by clicking on the self-scheduling link, they’ll be able to view your availability in real time and book a slot on the spot.

• Schedule multi-part interviews effortlessly: When you conduct complex interviews with multiple stages and interviewers on the same day, scheduling them can get just as complex. In 2018, we took care of this challenge for you. From one screen inside Workable, you can book different meetings with different interviewers in different rooms for the same candidate. This way, you will minimize mistakes when scheduling interviews and create a better overall hiring experience both for candidates and interviewers.

Hiring from A to Z

When we talk about hiring and how an ATS can help with that, we mostly refer to posting jobs, screening resumes and managing candidate profiles. But, here, at Workable, we know that it’s more than that. Hiring begins long before you publish a job ad; first, you need to open a requisition, get approval and agree on budget and timeline. Also, it’s not really hiring until you welcome a new employee on board. And to do that, you need to craft an offer letter, send it to your best candidate and get it back signed.

This year, we released two new features that help you manage the entire hiring process inside Workable, without having to transfer data to and from spreadsheets and other systems:

• Hiring Plan: Set a transparent workflow for job requisitions and approvals and keep stakeholders in the loop. With real-time updates, reports, plans and data all in one place, you can manage and optimize your current – and future – hiring strategy from one centralized workspace.
• Offer Letters and Offer Approvals: From building your own library of offer letter templates, to enabling e-signatures and getting real-time notifications when the status of an offer changes, you can fast-track the workflow. Note that candidates can view and sign their letter from any device (desktop or mobile) to speed up the process even more.

Hiring is not a one-person job

And we’re very well aware of this. That’s why we keep our eyes and ears open for new partners; every time we hear about this great video interview platform that helps screen candidates faster or that coding tool that helps evaluate tech candidates more objectively, we’re working to integrate with them. In 2018 we integrated with 24 (!) HR tools and partners, including Jobs on Facebook and Indeed Assessments. Read all about our integrations.

… and that’s a wrap everybody! We’re saying goodbye to 2018 with 35+ product releases, but already thinking, building and working on our roadmap for 2019. Whether you want to share some feedback on our product, ask questions about existing and upcoming features or book a demo with our sales team, we’re always happy to hear from you. In the meantime, enjoy your holidays and have a great new year!

The post Workable’s year in review – best features of 2018 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

When you create a job in Workable, we walk you through the process step by step. From writing the job description and requirements, to creating an application form and advertising the job on multiple job boards.

If you’re familiar with the Workable interface, when you next log in, you’ll notice that the navigation to take you through each step has moved from the left, to the top of the page:

The keen-eyed among you will also spot two new tabs!  But let’s keep this simple – I’ll walk you through the changes one by one.

The job

If you’re a regular Workable user, the only change you’ll see here is that the panel to add extra details to boost job visibility has moved to the right of the page:

Everything else remains the same; add the name, department and job location. Enter the job description, requirements and benefits. Don’t forget you can also upload images to enhance your job ad — and if you’re wondering what to write our job description library, and guide to writing a job description will help.

Application form

Again, the change here is minimal – we’ve just increased the width of the page:

Decide which personal information you require, and whether that’s optional or mandatory. Include screening questions with yes/no, multiple choice or free text answers.

The entire application form is shown in basic preview on the right of the page. For a full preview, click the arrow in the circle towards the top of the page.

Advertise

For regular users, this is the first page where you’ll notice a real change. Posting to free and premium job boards is the same, but you’ll see a new panel on the right:

This panel contains options that were previously hidden under a ‘Share’ button at the top of the page. They’re super-useful, so we thought we’d make more of them – let me explain:

Website Connect: if you have an existing careers page and someone on your team is comfortable with code, Website Connect is a widget that keeps your careers page updated automatically. Every time you post or update a job in Workable, it will be reflected on your careers page. Choose which information to display and style it using our default options or add some customization with basic CSS.

Job shortlink: if you’re advertising on specialist or local job boards, you can still collect candidates in your Workable account. Use the job shortlink when you post a job and candidates will be directed to your Workable-hosted job description and application form.

Job Mailbox: as the name suggests, this is an email address created specifically for this position (whether it’s published or for internal use only). Share the address with recruiters, who can use it to submit one or more resumes for review, or with your team, who can use it to upload resumes directly to the Workable pipeline from their desktop.

Your Network

This is a new tab in the interface. It covers different options for sourcing candidates from your broader network. You’ll notice it’s divided into three separate ‘sub-tabs’: Referrals, Social Media, Recruiters.

Referrals
Referrals are one of the best sources of quality candidates, so it makes sense to ask your co-workers to get involved. The new interface makes this much easier — sending the email request is just part of setting up the job. You’ll see a default email message, which will be updated automatically with the job title and your name, or you create a message of your own.

Social Media
This is where you’ll find the options to publicise the job on your social networks; Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. Click any of the options to see a pre-written but editable message, containing the job shortlink.

Recruiters
This tab is the new home for adding recruiters to the job. You can invite existing recruiters to submit candidates, or add new recruiters to your Workable account.

Hiring team

Regular Workable users will see that there are no changes here. This is still the place to choose the co-workers you’d like on the hiring team for the job. Decide who should be a hiring manager – with access to confidential comments, and who should be a basic member.

Interview Kit

Last, but by no means least, this is a brand new tab housing everything you need to create an Interview and scorecard! A new feature, this has been requested many times by our users:

When you’re hiring as a team, a structured interview generates clear, actionable feedback. Every candidate is asked the same questions, and evaluated using a consistent scale. Click the ‘interview kit’ tab to find everything you need to prepare a structured interview. Add custom questions for every role, import sections from the job requirements, templates you’ve previously saved or other kits you’ve created for different positions.

When you’re done, Workable will automatically generate a scorecard for use by every member of the hiring team. See the results individually, or compare them via the aggregate view. Read more about the launch of interview kits and scorecards.

A speedy overview

This is just a quick overview of the changes – as usual, everything will become clearer when you jump in and start using the tools! We hope you find everything you need, but should you need a hand, please let us know.

The post The new look job editor appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Why?

I was part of the development team lucky enough to work on it, so here’s my take on the two key ingredients behind its success…

Take time to understand the problem

Love for a feature happens when you design something people simply can’t live without. They use it so much, they almost can’t remember what work was like before it arrived. But how do you get to that point?

The first step is by taking time to understand the problem.

In this instance, the pain point seemed specific and straightforward; recruiters spend too much time emailing candidates back and forth trying to lock in a time for an interview. But, before rushing to decode the problem in my brain, I needed to make sure I’d got it exactly right. I needed to empathise with our users. Which meant taking a step back to examine the challenge from different angles.

I started off by looping into the experience of our own in-house recruiters. They’re users of our product and only too familiar with the pain points of scheduling interviews. In the past year, they’ve:

• sifted over 8000 candidates (moving over half of those candidates forward)
• sent 3800+ emails to candidates, and
• arranged 300+ face-to-face interviews and 900 phone screens.

They had lots to share! So, after gathering their insights, we widened our research out to examine the physical environment. To gain a deeper personal understanding of the issues involved, we had to answer three key questions:

#1. Who’s going to use the feature?

From hiring managers to recruiters and admins, we know for sure that we have three to four different user types accessing Workable.

#2. When are they going to use it, and in what context?

Different user types perform different actions. We needed to establish at what point the problem arose for each user.

#3. What’s the optimal experience these people expect to have?

The effort it takes to complete the task determines the solution. Our task was to identify the feedback the platform should provide back to the user.

I want to stick to the last sub-point a bit: “What’s the feedback the platform should provide back?” This is a big checkpoint to tick. In general, we’re talking about scheduling interviews. But, for a recruiter, this is more than a task; it’s the first interaction you have with candidates. This is a biggie. You need to make sure that whatever button you press, you know what will happen next for you and your prospect. That the candidate experience, as well as your user experience, is 100% spot-on.

Don’t overdesign—put the user first

So, we had the problem specified. And we had a clear picture of the challenge. Then came the ideation phase. As a new designer on a team, it can be tempting to “obey your thirst to make an impact”. But, with Workable, product design is all about doing what’s right for the customer. We don’t design features just to design features. We design powerful new features that, governed by logic and function, make the process of hiring easier for our users.

Besides, Workable is an established platform, loved by customers all over the world for its intuitive design. All the component pieces were already there. My remit was to use my skill to design a feature informed by ease of use and a seamless, uncomplicated user experience. And that’s what I did.

What followed, was a big round of internal revisions to refine and perfect the experience. I had all the time I wanted to think about every last detail.

And it shows. Our self-scheduling link is truly loved. It’s loved because it solves one of hiring’s biggest pain points. And it does it without fuss.

Watch this space for news of more features to fall in love with.

This post was written by Andrew Chraniotis, Senior Product Designer at Workable.

The post Why it was love at first sight for our interview scheduling link appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

This integration optimally advertises your jobs on Indeed to increase the likelihood of hire by 4.5x (Indeed data, worldwide). Sponsored Jobs displays your jobs to candidates who are most likely to apply — helping you attract quality applicants.

Shine a spotlight on your need-to-fill roles

Workable already provides a free integration with Indeed that connects all your job postings to directly feed into Indeed. You can now use the new Indeed Sponsored Jobs integration to bolster your job postings. Sponsoring jobs can help you gain more visibility and attract more talent because they reach the candidates who are most likely to apply. Sponsored Jobs are 4.5X more likely to result in a hire.

Easily analyze and share campaign ROI

Sponsoring a job through Workable now provides the option to set a budget and end date for a campaign. Control costs, plus get access to the data you need to assess campaign performance.

See how many times your sponsored jobs have been shown and clicked on and what your average cost per click is, so you can confidently report on current performance and use that data to help plan future sponsored campaigns.

Want to sponsor an existing job? You can start today in just a few easy steps

Please note, a valid Indeed account is required before your Sponsored Job campaign can go live, so be sure to verify that your account is set up correctly at https://ads.indeed.com/job/ads.

• Create a Workable account or sign in to your current account
• From the Workable dashboard go to the Find Candidates page for a job
• Select the Premium Job Boards option, then Indeed
• Set the budget and dates for the campaign
• Once you’ve completed your first sponsorship in Workable, you should visit https://ads.indeed.com/job/ads to verify that your campaign is live

Get started now by signing in to Workable.

The post Workable’s new Indeed Sponsored Jobs integration boosts job visibility and analytics appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

We designed Workable to be an all-in-one recruiting platform, which is why we are excited to announce our integration with BountyJobs, for our customers in the USA.

Traditionally only available to large enterprise organizations, BountyJobs is the largest third-party recruitment marketplace in the world. Through this integration, you’re now able to pay a flat fee to post a job in the marketplace. Recruiters will review it, indicating their interest in working with your company to source candidates. You’ll choose your preferred recruiters and they’ll deliver viable candidates which you can move directly into your Workable hiring pipeline.

When you’ve found the right match, the successful recruiter is paid the pre-agreed recruitment fee, which is a percentage of the candidate’s annual salary.

BountyJobs streamlines and simplifies the recruiter engagement and management process. It’s easy to connect with a verified recruiter on a per-job basis.

Most importantly, the integration makes finding and engaging with recruiters a seamless part of your process inside Workable.

Key features include:

• Access: instant access to over 10,000 highly-qualified, pre-vetted agencies
• Efficiency: manage all your recruiting agencies with a single contract
• Visibility: track investment and measure return to refine your hiring processes
• Compliance: set your standard and confirm your agencies are taking candidates through your prescribed screening process

If you’re ready to get started, you’ll find BountyJobs in the ‘Find Recruiters’ tab, at the Advertise step for a job. Find out more.

The post Workable launches Recruiter Marketplace in partnership with BountyJobs appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

An exclusive database of global talent ready to relocate, Jobbatical helps companies hire beyond borders for top business, tech, and creative professionals. As many job skills are becoming global, Jobbatical addresses how and who to hire for strong global teams. They propose that hiring internationally casts a wider candidate net, finds the best fit candidate, gains fresh perspectives from international talent, and cracks new markets.

With 100,000+ people in their database, they offer a rich and skilled candidate pool for cross-border hiring.

A global hiring plan

Jobbatical offers employer branded solutions, opening the gateway to smart creatives across the globe.

Dedicated copywriters first draft and broadcast a bespoke job ad across their 100,000+ global talent pool. A 60-day campaign then follows, which includes:

• sharing the add on social media channels
• sourcing qualified leads from Jobbatical’s own candidate database
• filtering applications
• ongoing customer support.

Once you’ve sourced your dream hire, they’ll also provide an immigration service to help relocate them. 

Get integrated

If you’re already using Workable and Jobbatical, find out more about activating the integration. If you’ve yet to try Jobbatical, why not find out more.

If you’re interested in sharing your product or service with Workable customers, take a look at our Developer Partner Program.

Not using Workable yet? Track and hire candidates from around the world within the Workable dashboard. Sign up for a demo and see how it will work for your organization.

The post Workable partners with Jobbatical, a global job board and candidate database appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Scan any up-to-date infographic on referral programs and you’ll see in seconds that they offer a very strong ROI. With such a powerful pedigree, more companies are moving towards using third party software to manage their referral programs and better compete for top talent.

Recognising this shift and knowing how powerful and cost-effective referrals are, we’ve recently further expanded our suite of system integrations to partner up with online referral marketplace, Preferhired. This means that whatever the size of your company you can maximize the benefits of this powerful sourcing strategy without impacting resources or workflow. And without leaving Workable.

So, how does it work?

Automating rewards and referrals

Preferhired provides a fully automated approach to managing referrals and rewards. Their digital platform leverages referrals made by internal employees and external contacts.

Referrals are tracked across three stages of the hiring process: applied, interviewed and hired. At each stage, wherever there’s a successful outcome, rewards are made in real-time according to a customizable, pre-defined budget.

With a flexible framework and a customized approach, it’s easy to scale up or down to meet current hiring needs, lowering your risk of unwarranted spend.

Ongoing, two-way communication with referers at every stage of the process and timely, immediate rewards, wipe out the biggest threat to a successful referral program; disengagement and a subsequent reluctance to refer again.

Streamlined, simple and symbiotic

Having connected your Workable and Preferhired accounts, you can pull all of your Workable jobs into Preferhired and then share them across your internal and external networks. Your only manual task is to add in salary details and set a referral budget for each of the three key stages.

As soon as you activate the ‘Interview’ step in Preferhired, the complete candidate profile automatically filters back into Workable at the ‘Sourced’ stage. The hiring process continues as normal from there.

The two-way flow of data carries on throughout the process as and when changes occur. Any updates made to job descriptions in Workable automatically feed back into Preferhired. Similarly, as soon as a candidate is moved to the ‘Hired’ stage in Workable, they’re automatically marked as ‘Hired’ in Preferhired.

Candidates arriving via Preferhired will have ‘Preferhired’ listed as their ‘Source’ in Workable, making reporting easy and accurate.

Super social: mobilizing your existing network

The average employee has approximately 150 contacts on social media. Multiply this by the number of people in your organization – as well as the external contacts you’ve built up – and you’ve got a powerful sourcing network.

Preferhired’s social share functionality makes it easy and quick for referrers to broadcast and share openings with their wider network; a network of like-minded, similarly high-calibre candidates. And because there’s already a connection, there’s likely to be a better cultural fit.

Preferhired works on any handheld device, which means it’s easy to reach those 68% of job seekers who habitually use their mobile device to search for jobs. Another quick win.

Get integrated

If you’re already using Workable and Preferhired, find out more about setting the integration. If you’ve yet to try Preferhired, find out more.

If you’re interested in sharing your product or service with Workable customers, take a look at our Developer Partner Program.

Not using Workable yet? Sign up for a demo and see how it will work for your organization.

The post Workable integrates with online referral marketplace, Preferhired appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The missing link in the hiring chain

Companies can spend thousands on recruitment marketing, employer branding, job advertising and more, to find, attract and hire the best talent. Costs are even higher for hard-to-fill positions. Most also invest resources into providing an engaging, motivating and rewarding experience for their employees. But often, there’s a gap in between the two; a gap a lot of people (maybe you?) have experienced.

The time between accepting an offer and the first day is part of the candidate experience which is often overlooked. Why? Recruitment teams tend to move quickly onto making their next hire, while HR’s focus is on first day admin. Waiting in limbo, this broken link can lead to candidates feeling disengaged and unconnected.

Delivering a poor recruiting and onboarding experience risks your new hire becoming a no hire or a very short hire. The answer? Use software to standardize, automate and engage.

Creating successful onboarding experiences

Click Boarding’s onboarding software streamlines the administrative process for HR and the employee. From forms and checklists to tips and tools for engaging new hires, the result is a smooth and enriched onboarding and transition experience.

Sharing company information ahead of day one is a great way of reinforcing your brand and making an early, meaningful connection with new hires. Click Boarding actively engages employees by providing on demand access to everything they need. And the results speak for themselves, with companies seeing:

• 50% increase in employee retention and company loyalty
• 77% of new hires more likely to hit the first performance milestone
• 18% improved new hire productivity and performance

So, it’s not only saving on the high cost of a hire that doesn’t work out, it’s making every new hire more successful.

Why Workable and Click Boarding?

With Workable and Click Boarding working together, you have an end-to-end Talent Acquisition solution; from new candidate to successful new hire. Set-up is quick and straightforward. And, once activated, candidates moved to the ‘Hired’ stage of your pipeline will be automatically exported and created as new hires in Click Boarding.

More integrations coming soon

You shouldn’t have to be a systems implementation expert to have a great experience across all of your hiring tools. We’re always working on new integrations so that everyone’s hiring tech stack works together. If you’re a Workable user and have a tool you’d love to see integrated with Workable, let us know! If you’re a software provider, why not find out more about our Developer Partner Program and get involved?

The post Great onboarding starts with our new Click Boarding integration appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

This is a quick rundown of what we’ve released, so you can integrate the services you’re already using, or get some ideas about specialist systems that can add something extra to your process.

Job boards & candidate sourcing

Coroflot  is the largest and most active site specifically targeted for the hiring needs of design-led organizations. Companies already hiring through Coroflot range from local operations to multi-national industry leaders, including Fuseproject, Frog Design, Microsoft, Nokia, Landor, Nike, Intel, and Sony.
Find your next designer.

Jobbatical  helps you reach an exclusive database of talent ready to relocate to your company. A solution for cross-border hiring, it provides access to an exclusive database of business, tech, and creative professionals.
Schedule a demo.

Refferals

Drafted helps you hire through referrals – the best source of talent for your company. It matches your open positions in Workable to talent in your company network and makes personalized suggestions about who to refer.
Schedule a demo.

Preferhired is referral software that makes it easy to fill those hard-to-fill positions. Leverage your company’s internal network and improve your stats, from retention rate and job performance to cost per hire and time per hire.
Try for free.

Assessments

Indeed Assessments offers both ready-to-go and custom candidate assessments to help you see which candidates have the skills you need. Choose from an extensive library of over 50 expert designed, pre-built assessments or build your own to suit your particular hiring goals.
Set up a free account.

Interview Mocha makes it easy to assess multiple skills. Their enterprise-ready assessment platform includes 1000+ skill and aptitude tests that help you verify if your candidate is a good fit for the role. Trusted by leading brands worldwide.
Schedule a demo.

Qualified offer pre-made tests or the option to customize your own. Their coding assessments provide a wide range of software testing, ranging from CS algorithms to specific technologies and frameworks like Node.JS and Ruby on Rails. Use real testing frameworks for evaluating results to objectively screen candidates. Get your two-week free trial.

ThriveMap is a culture fit assessment that enables better hiring decisions by measuring how your candidates like to work and comparing it to your team culture. The best teams are diverse, so they measure the work environments people thrive in and not personality.
Try it free for 2 weeks.

Video Interviews

Human deciphers facial expressions for candidate analysis, using artificial intelligence. Focus on who the candidate is and minimise human bias and discrimination during the screening process. Increase time efficiency by 3x, and cost efficiency by 5x. Schedule a demo.

SkillHeart is the power behind candidate video interviews, which help you meet your job applicants earlier in the recruitment process. Save time and make objective evaluations with your team.
Create your account.

Onboarding

Namely is powerful, easy-to-use HR software that enables mid-sized companies to manage their HR, payroll, benefits, and talent management in one place. Their robust integration with Workable means that you can export data directly into their onboarding and HRIS tools.
Schedule a demo.

Personably helps you build productive teams by creating amazing onboarding experiences for new hires. It lets you collaborate with people across the company to build the ideal process for different teams and levels. Schedule everything with a single click, to make sure the right people are involved at the right time. Learn more.

There’s more to come!

Interested in sharing your own product or service with Workable customers? Take a look at our Developer Partner Program.

To learn about more integrations, check out our partners page.

The post Evolving the recruiting ecosystem appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Analyzing this data made us wonder. GDPR has changed the way we think about data. Is it possible that data could also change the way we think about GDPR? Could it, perhaps, be used for demystifying GDPR and kickstarting some industry benchmarking around some grayer areas—data retention, for example?

In a post-GDPR world, sharing (secure and anonymized) data like this can be a good way of navigating the new normal. So we’ve pulled together a bunch of our top level findings here, to start the ball rolling.

A new era of uncertainty

The only thing anybody’s really been certain of since GDPR went live on May 25th, 2018, is that no one’s really certain about anything.

How long can we keep people’s data for? Not sure, up to you. Decide what’s best, but don’t be unreasonable.

What do we do with our existing candidate database? Not sure, up to you. Decide what’s best, but you should probably delete it.

How do we ask candidates for consent? Not sure, up to you. Decide what’s best, but don’t do anything funky with their data.

How will this fundamentally change how we recruit? Not sure, up to you. Decide what’s best for you. And definitely review with legal counsel.

As a global company, we have to take GDPR seriously. We’ve always been secure. But, in preparation for GDPR legislation, it became more important for us to be able to show customers that we’re a robustly secure organization, dedicated to data protection. Which is why, in the past year, we’ve doubled the size of our compliance and security team, undertaken an arduous ISO 27001 certification process, and consulted countless legal experts. Not to mention built a new set of automatic compliance features for our customers from scratch. And we’ve also, quite literally, written the GDPR checklist for recruiting.

In the course of this all, we found ourselves asking obscure questions about legitimate interest and case law. HR Managers began acting as intermediaries between Compliance Officers, legal counsel and employees—responsible for implementing and enforcing compliance in the face of crippling fines. And, while GDPR legislators sought to provide guidance where possible and legal experts suggested some best practices, there were still many GDPR myths and gray areas. There was very little (dare I say) data to go on. Until now.

Establishing an industry benchmark for data retention

Leading up to GDPR, most of the customers we spoke to were (understandably) reluctant to delete the data they had. They were afraid of erasing years of hard work and losing good candidates to compliance.

Post-GDPR, we’ve found customers have confronted the dreaded database delete head-on; generally setting a data retention period of just under 2 years. This varies somewhat by region. Customers in the UK tend to be a bit more conservative (20 months), compared to their counterparts in the United States (26 months). But, generally speaking, 2 years has emerged as a good benchmark for data retention.

A measure of candidate interest

GDPR data may also have given us a good benchmark for candidate interest. While 60% of customers contacted their existing database with an updated privacy policy, only 3% of notified candidates have exercised their right to be forgotten. Deleting data can be painful, but it can also help us focus on the candidates who are still truly interested and engaged in the process.

Only 3% of notified candidates have exercised their right to be forgotten

GDPR gives candidates more power over their own information, and we’ve certainly seen that reflected in the data as well. Over 31% of customers have had at least one candidate delete their data via the application confirmation email—a number that will unquestionably grow over time.

We’re at the very beginning of a radical shift, that much at least seems clear. The data we’ve seen so far leads me to believe that GDPR will actually help us hire better. Candidates have more control over their data–and ultimately that’s a good thing. GDPR has also forced us to make tough decisions about the data we should have access to and how long we should have access to it. And, ultimately that’s probably a good thing, too.

Related Reading:

• A recruiter’s guide to GDPR compliance
• GDPR checklist: Requirements for recruiters and HR
• How to approach GDPR legitimate interest in recruiting
• How to source candidates in a GDPR-compliant way with Workable

The post Demystifying GDPR using data appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Learning from the front lines

Workable’s early adopter program is one of the tools we use in Workable to make sure that what we provide is as useful and intuitive as we want it to be. We try to incorporate as much feedback as possible from our users, and the early adopter program is one of the most straightforward ways to get that information.

One of the first such programs that Workable ran was for the internationalization feature, a complex and intriguing feature looking to branch the product out to other markets with different languages. Our researcher and product team went into that beta with many questions, but with careful planning and methodology they carved out a much better and more intuitive end product.

Since the goal of the early adopter program is to validate our designs and assumptions from the design phase and make sure that we always serve our customers, choosing the right people to participate and “test” our new feature is key. We have fostered great relationships with a lot of our customers and that helps with ensuring that the feedback we get is as honest and open as possible.

It was a great opportunity for me, since it looked like one of the first things I would get to do with this new product would be to actually talk to our customers about it! So we started gathering feedback and talking with the beta users and improving the product as we went on.

And along came COVID-19

Then everything changed. The virus started spreading and lockdowns were ordered throughout the world. Suddenly everyone started to work from home and use virtual tools for everything. It looked like it would be very useful to have one for interviewing as well.

There are not a lot of opportunities in someone’s life to know that they truly made an impact when it was needed. For everyone on the team it was clear that the tool we had been working on could be helpful in a time when everything was unknown and unprecedented.

Workable’s vision practically shifted overnight to that of being even more socially responsible. We knew that unemployment was going to skyrocket and that, on the other extreme end, some industries needed to hire people really fast. We realized we could help people find new jobs. Teams got together and worked tirelessly to produce Workable Bridge to help out employees that were laid off.

Scaling ourselves to help others

As for Video Interviews, our team quickly decided to offer the tool to any Workable customer who could use it, for free. It was designed for anyone to use – no need to be tech savvy. Candidates could record themselves on their phone, no fancy or expensive equipment needed.

In a time where it was nearly impossible to find an open slot in someone’s schedule, interviews could happen in an asynchronous way and then hiring managers could rate them in their own time as well. Ultimately, a top-notch user experience was key.

All teams involved went into overdrive:

• The marketing team worked day and night to make sure that our messaging was clear: We are not trying to sell anything to anyone – we truly believe our product can be helpful to businesses in their time of need.
• The product team maintained the rhythm, making sure that no loose ends would be left.
• The legal team worked on finding a way to make sure that no bureaucracy would exist for the companies that wanted to use it, since the product was technically still in closed beta.
• Account managers started connecting with their customers to inform them about Video Interviews.

The interest spiked quickly and numerous companies started using the product. Within the first three months, 264 accounts adopted video interviews, with 462 candidates being hired using the tool with an answer rate of almost 50%, compared to the industry standard of 30%.

Like many things in a COVID world, our implementation and feedback loop was accelerated, bringing Workable Video Interviews to the present where we incorporated into the product all of the lessons learned from opening our doors to the public one month early.

We only know that this made us better and strengthened the relationship we have with our customers.

Valia Lekka is a Senior Product Manager at Workable. She was part of the team that developed Workable’s Video Interviews feature.

The post Early adopter program key to Video Interviews success appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Automating the data collection, tracking and reporting process, Workable’s ‘EEO/OFCCP Survey & Reporting’ feature keeps you fully compliant – no spreadsheets required.

But what exactly are the EEO applicant tracking requirements and how can Workable support and streamline your capacity to meet them?

Equal Opportunity 101 and EEO compliance

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act 1964 – one of the laws covered by Equal Opportunity 101 – is the backbone of employment rights. It means that, as an Equal Opportunity Employer, you agree not to discriminate against any employee or candidate based on their race, color, religion, national origin, sex (including pregnancy), physical or mental disability, or age (40 or older).

The EEOC

An agency of the US Government, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) enforces federal employment discrimination laws. Its main tasks include tracking hiring data and fielding complaints from employees about possible unlawful discrimination.

Any privately-owned company, state agency, labor union or joint apprenticeship committee with 15 or more employees who have worked for them for at least 20 calendar weeks, has to comply with the EEOC laws. Employment agencies and recruiting companies are covered by the EEOC rules independently of their number of employees or whether they receive payments or not.

The OFCCP

Part of the US Department of Labor, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) ensures that employers doing business with the Federal Government comply with laws and regulations requiring nondiscrimination.

OFCCP regulations prohibit federal contractors and subcontractors with contracts exceeding $10,000 from discriminating in employment decisions based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin. It also requires them to make outreach efforts to hire and promote qualified individuals with disabilities, as well as Vietnam era and other covered veterans.

EEOC and OFCCP legislation does not only apply to the hiring process, but also to firing, promotions, harassment, training, wages and benefits.

EEOC compliance requirements

The purpose of the EEOC and the OFCCP may sound simple, but their joint mission creates a number of different requirements:

• the development of a written affirmative action plan
• the creation of an internal audit and reporting system
• the posting of several notices of non-discrimination and employees’ rights
• the filing of an annual EEO-1 report

The EEO-1 report

Probably the most daunting of all EEOC compliance reports and tasks, the EEO-1 report is a compliance survey. It requires certain companies to provide a record of their employment data categorized by ethnicity, race, gender, EEO-1 job category and designated salary bands.

The EEO-1 report is submitted both to the EEOC and the OFCCP and must be filed by:

• employers with Federal Government contracts of $50,000 or more and 50 or more employees
• employers who do not have a Federal Government contract but have 100 or more employees

Automating EEOC compliance

All companies need to be able to evidence EEO/OFCCP compliance when required, which means being consistent about tracking, storing and analyzing recruitment data. Automating this process saves time and ensures accuracy.

Here’s where Workable’s ‘EEO/OFCCP Survey & Reporting’ feature comes in:

Step 1. Collect voluntary applicant EEOC data

Enable the ‘EEO/OFCCP Survey & Reporting’ feature in your Workable account to start automating the collection of EEO data to meet applicant tracking requirements.

To do this, just go to ‘Recruiting preferences’, scroll down to the EEOC section and turn the ‘EEO survey’ on. If you’re an employer with a Federal Government contract you should then also enable the ‘OFCCP survey’.

Once activated, every candidate will be asked to complete a voluntary form immediately after submitting an application. If they skip the survey, Workable will send them a reminder email with a link.

An equal opportunities disclaimer will also be published on your careers site. You can customize this if you want to. Contact our support team with your personalized version and we’ll update it.

Step 2. Capture disqualification reasons

EEOC/OFCCP regulations require employers to record a reason for every non-selection of a candidate. By activating the ‘EEO/OFCCP Survey & Reporting’ feature, you’ll be prompted to do this whenever you disqualify a candidate. Just select an option from the drop-down list or enter your own.

The drop-down list automatically adjusts to match each stage of your hiring pipeline. But we’ve also gone one step further…

When applicants fail to meet one or more of the minimum qualifications you’ve pre-set for each position, they’ll be automatically disqualified and assigned a reason by the system. Which means you can focus your efforts where they really matter – on evaluating candidates who do meet the criteria.

Step 3. Produce the right EEOC compliance reports without hassle

Check your Equal Employment Opportunity data anytime via the ‘Reports’ tab. With a single click, you can export your data in a .csv format (useful when generating your EEO-1 report). You can also export a detailed log of all the EEO/OFCCP surveys candidates have completed for each of your positions.

Further Reading:

• EEO complete guide for employers
• What is EEO?

Using Workable’s Applicant Tracking System for EEO compliance

Using an Applicant Tracking System to automate EEO compliance saves time and promotes the security and accuracy of your data. It also improves the quality and consistency of your overall hiring process. With this taken care of, you can focus efforts where they really add value; using the data to assess and inform your company’s long-term hiring approach.

Not using Workable yet? Sign up for a demo and see how it will work for your organization.

The post 3 steps to painless EEOC compliance appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

• Fill your pipeline faster by proactively contacting passive candidates
• Scroll more – AI Recruiter will continue suggesting candidates
• Get improved results through our updated candidate matching algorithm

As soon as you activate a job, start finding candidates. No need to wait for your job to appear on boards, you can begin filling your pipeline right away. Add passive candidates and reach out personally or in bulk to introduce them to the job and your company. Take your candidate sourcing to the next level and expand your talent pool with AI-recommended passive candidates.

When you generate passive candidates for a job, AI Recruiter uses the title, job description and other post settings to find relevant candidate profiles. Profiles appear in a list for you to review. Add the best candidates to the Sourced stage of the job pipeline with a click. Plus, remove candidates who aren’t relevant to help train the AI.

We’ve also made improvements to how auto-sourced candidates are matched to your jobs. AI Recruiter has been updated to better understand your jobs’ requirements and extract matching skills from passive candidate profiles. Auto-sourcing continues to get smarter, with more and better data.

AI Recruiter is just one of the ways to source. Use People Search to manually look for potential candidates, post to 200+ job boards, get referrals from your team, advertise on social channels and more. No matter how you find candidates, Workable has you covered.

The post AI-driven candidate sourcing: AI Recruiter just got even better appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

When to choose snooze

1) When you’re candidate sourcing

We know that people use Workable to source candidates. This means that instead of posting jobs on our network of job boards, they’re pro-actively reaching out to potential candidates to see if they’re interested in a particular role.

Often there’s a great connection; the candidates are well qualified and interested, but they’re not always available right now. Or they seem like a good candidate, but after talking for a while it turns out this isn’t the role for them, they’re better suited to something you know is coming up in the future.

2) When you’ve found more than one great hire

It can happen. You find more than one great candidate but only have the capacity to make one hire. You might have a new opportunity coming up in a few months.

In both instances, you really want to keep a track of that candidate; to start building a relationship. We designed snooze to help with exactly this issue.

How to snooze

To snooze a candidate, first find the candidate’s profile on Workable. If you’re hiring as part of a team, add other team members as followers of the candidate. Next, find the option by expanding the toolbar at the top.

In the small popup window, you’ll see the option to set a reminder for a certain number of months, or pick a specific date.

Finally, add a note to remind you and your team of where to pick up the conversation. Maybe the candidate was on a training course for six months or travelling for a while – remind yourself of the details to add a more personal touch to your communication.

And that’s it. The candidate will drop to the bottom of the list in the candidate browser while they’re on snooze, just to keep your active candidate list tidy. When the time comes, you and anyone you’ve added as a follower will receive a notification to get back in touch with the snoozed candidate. You’ll see the notes you’ve added as a reminder to make sure you say the right thing at the right time.

The feedback so far

Just as we’d hoped the feedback on this has been great. It was high on the wishlist for quite a few people, so we’re glad we could help. Even better, some users have said that it’s a feature they didn’t know they needed – until they started using it. Now they’re using it all the time.

As always, if you’re using a Workable feature and have feedback, do let us know what you think. We love hearing from you.

If you’d like to read a more detailed explanation of how to use the feature, head over to the Snooze a Candidate support article.

The post New release: snooze a candidate appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

So, we’re entering the recruitment marketing space ourselves with Career Center – a new website focused on the jobseeker.

The Career Center has four main elements to it:

1. We’re helping answer jobseeker questions and concerns

First, it addresses common questions and pain points that a jobseeker or employee might have – such as:

• Best video interview tips for candidates
• The challenges of remote work (and how to overcome them)
• Getting back to work after a career break

There’s a lot more, of course. Ultimately, job hunting can be a little stressful for the best of us – and our Career Center wants to provide helpful and supportive tips to support jobseekers and employees wherever they may be in their career.

2. We’re helping candidates master the interview

We also have interview answer templates to help candidates best prepare for an interview and make a strong impression on a potential employer.

It may seem counterintuitive to give a candidate the “answers” to your interview questions ahead of time – but it in fact can benefit you because we’re helping candidates deliver the exact kind of information you need, so you can make a better decision on who to hire.

3. We’re guiding candidates to your open roles

When jobseekers arrive at our new website – be it via a network referral, a social posting, or even a basic Google search – they’re now just one click away from going to the Workable Job Board where all your job postings live.

This means more applications on your doorstep from candidates who are active, engaged and interested.

4. We’re helping you support your candidates

The recruitment process can be a stressful one, both for you and your candidates. It’s also a defining moment for them in terms of how they see you as a potential employer. If you step up and support them as a hiring manager or recruiter by sharing helpful content from Career Center, you’re showing them that you care about them and want them to do well. That speaks volumes for your reputation as an employer.

This isn’t the only way in which we’re bringing candidates closer to you. We are already making it easier than ever for candidates to apply for your jobs, keeping your past candidates top of mind whenever you open a new position in our ATS, and surveying workers to learn what they’re looking for in a job. And, of course, we’ll continue building helpful content for jobseekers and for hiring teams.

Think of us as your “employer concierge”. With thoughtful, engaging, and actionable jobseeker-facing content, we’re ultimately bringing more value to our customers by showing jobseekers that they’re just as important as you are.

Our enduring mission is to remove the barrier between talent and opportunity – and that barrier is shrinking even more with Career Center. Dive in and have a look!

The post Launching Workable’s Career Center: a website for jobseekers appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Our latest DEI feature, anonymized screening, focuses on the initial screening stages of the hiring process. When enabled, anonymized screening obscures a candidate’s name, address and phone number from the Candidate Profile and CV in the sourced and applied stages of the hiring pipeline.

Workable helps companies in 100+ countries create a more inclusive hiring practice with diverse candidate sourcing, anonymized screening and structured interviewing. Stay tuned for more to come in 2021, including customizable post-application surveys, enhanced reporting and native cognitive and personality assessments. Let us help you diversify your employee base and grow your business.

The post Introducing anonymized screening: Encourage inclusivity appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The pandemic pressed the Great Reset button on work. We’re entering a new era that calls for evolved priorities and preferences from employers.

To help leaders adapt, we surveyed 750 US and 500 UK workers to better understand what’s important to them in a job. We then compared the findings to the data from our original Great Discontent survey in 2021.

The results – in Workable’s brand-new Great Discontent 2.0 survey report – spotlight clear transformations in what employees now value most. Companies that tune in to their people’s changing needs will be primed to attract and retain top talent. Those that ignore the new reality risk driving their best people away.

Across both markets, one priority emerges crystal clear: employees are seeking stability. Commitment is a two-way street: when organizations commit, this breeds loyalty in return among today’s workforce.

With economic and geopolitical uncertainties abounding, workers crave a reliable income stream. Full-time roles are increasingly in demand, with a drop in self-employment and side-hustles. The active jobseeker herd has thinned as employees hunker down in their current roles – although they’re not entirely dropping out of the new-job sweepstakes.

Smart companies are promoting stability and security. This could involve highlighting a strong company history that makes one proud to work for them, robust plans for growth that tap into workers’ desire to grow and shine in their careers, and assurances around job security to show people that someone’s got their back.

Beyond stability, the data reveals evolutions in what attracts and retains workers in the US and UK today:

Flexibility

Flexibility has become firmly entrenched as the new normal. Whether it’s remote work, hybrid arrangements, or flexible scheduling, employees want options. After adapting so extensively through the pandemic, inflexible work seems unthinkable to many. Savvy employers aren’t just allowing flexibility – they’re embracing and perfecting it.

Society and humanity

The social and human elements of work matter more than ever. Employees want to connect with leaders who inspire them. They want collaborative relationships with colleagues who feel like family. Cold corporate machines have little appeal – workers seek warmer environments where they feel valued. Forward-thinking companies are strengthening culture, facilitating connections, and communicating with transparency.

Growth and advancement

Hunger for growth and advancement persists. Employees still want opportunities to continuously develop skills, take on new challenges and progress their careers. However, potential now outweighs paychecks for attracting new talent – highlighting the motivational power of personal growth. Workplaces that invest in people’s futures, instead of just exploiting their presents, have the edge.

Compensation

Of course, compensation still stands number-one atop the priority pyramid. While other factors have grown in importance, pay still matters. Fair compensation, generous benefits and updated rewards strategies are essential for retention. But they’re just one part of a bigger picture – financial incentives alone aren’t enough in today’s environment.

In many ways, the new era requires a back-to-basics approach. What prevailed before was often surface-level attractions and momentary exchanges. Moving forward, employees are seeking simplicity, clarity and meaning. They want to connect, contribute and grow. Employers that tap into these fundamentally human desires will be poised to flourish.

Those that cling to outdated assumptions risk losing today’s top talent to those that just “get it”.

This is just a high-level overview. The full data provides richer insights into the forces shaping the workforce. Check out the highlights!

Are you ready to not just survive, but thrive in the new era of work? Uncover more about what employees value most today – and how to align your organization with their evolving needs and preferences.

The post The Great Discontent 2.0: What workers want in this new era appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Our goal with the Workable settings pages was to examine and improve them in terms of information architecture. It is a fact that the settings pages had grown vastly over the last few years as more and more features were added to the product and they introduced more settings respectively. Good information architecture helps users understand where they are, what they’ve found, what’s related, and what to expect.

Testing the current structure

First things first: research! We ran a tree test on the current settings pages to understand which areas were in need of improvement. Most participants easily found basic settings such as where to change their profile photo or manage their email templates. However, most participants had difficulty finding where they would complete tasks such as: “You want to enable the Talent Pool option so candidates can send applications to your account mailbox” and “You want to change the brand color of your career pages”.

As seen in the pie tree below, participants were looking to enable the talent pool option in almost all areas of settings (they navigated to the blue and red circles). Just 10% found the right answer right away, 24% found it eventually and 66% did not find it at all (they nominated the orange circles). It took 36 seconds on average to complete this task, compared to just 10 seconds that it took them to complete some of the easier tasks.

We also ran a card sorting activity to see into what categories participants would group the settings content. The dendrogram below shows that participants created roughly eight groups of items with 70% agreement. There was no strong consensus for some cards like Interview locations, Access token and Talent pool visibility. The latter is an interesting finding because it shows that participants not only could not find this easily, based on the tree test discussed above, but also are not sure what group to place it in either, according to the card sorting test.

Designing the new experience

Equipped with the results discussed above and insights about what areas need improvement, we hit the drawing board. We ran a physical card sorting workshop with four Product Designers and myself, a UX Researcher. Our card sorting activity, however, had a fun twist: instead of using cards with content labels, we used cards with UI images. As seen in the photo below, we printed screenshots of each section of the settings and cut them up into individual cards. 

The reason we introduced the UI, which is normally not a focus for information architecture, is that we only had the “development budget” to move and rename sections without making any more changes to the system. In other words it was a given factor that we had to work with so we wanted it to be prominent for our decision making regarding the structure and order of the pages. 

The new grouping looked fresh and exciting, even though it was not easy to let go of the existing structure that was carved into everyone’s brain until now. We had to consider changes that were planned to come to the product soon, as well as differences in the settings pages that depend on the feature availability per customer. In a nutshell:

• Top-level groups were introduced to shape and deepen the structure: Recruiting, Company and Personal settings 
• A new dedicated page called Career Page was introduced, since these settings were previously under Company Profile
• A new page called Privacy was introduced, which gathered previously scattered privacy settings
• The Recruiting Preferences section became obsolete since all items have been moved to more appropriate sections
• Personal user settings that apply globally across the different Workable tools (ATS, Referrals, Bridge) have been placed into a new page called Your profile outside of the Workable settings 

Validating the new design

We were pretty excited with the new top-level groups (Recruiting, Company and Personal) and got positive feedback from our teammates and management team about the new design. We prepared mockups and a prototype to preview the experience in Figma, as seen below. 

As a final sanity check we ran another tree test with the new structure. To our disappointment but also expectation the new structure did not perform flawlessly. Most participants easily found basic settings such as where to change their company logo or manage their custom recruiting pipeline, but some advanced settings are so unique that there is no obvious group to place them in.

For example, a lot of participants had difficulty finding where they would complete tasks like: “Allow candidates to only see the 1st level of the departments structure in your job postings (e.g. Product instead of QA testing)” and “Change your time zone so you can accurately schedule events”.

Nevertheless, testing the new structure helped us identify potential problem areas and allowed us to make final improvements before launch. For example, users seemed to confuse the two pages in the Personal Group, Your Settings and Your Profile. We realized that these labels might seem a bit generic and interchangeable so we renamed Your settings to Your preferences, to be more specific.

We believe that the new settings pages will improve our customers’ experience by helping them easily find what they are looking for, discover options and manage powerful settings. Our goal is to make things easier now and in the future, as new features and more options are introduced in Workable.

Korina Loumidi is Workable’s Principal UX Researcher. She was part of the team that revamped Workable’s settings.

The post The art & science of organizing and labeling Workable settings appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.