The Bryq assessment offers a flexible and unbiased tool for organizations to make quality hires by measuring candidates’ cognitive ability and personality traits.

By utilizing psychometrics and information technology, Bryq provides a transparent and evidence-based evaluation of candidates’ cognitive ability and primary personality traits related to job roles and workplace performance.

This comprehensive assessment enables a deeper understanding of candidates’ fit for specific job roles and organizational culture, while mitigating conscious and unconscious biases in the hiring process.

Book a demo with Bryq today.

2. Welcome to this month’s Partner Profile. Could you introduce yourself with a brief bio?

Hello! I’m Chryssa Takou, Partner Relationship Specialist at Bryq. I joined Bryq almost a year and a half ago as a Business Development intern and recently moved to the partnerships team. I am passionate about using data-driven approaches to improve the hiring process and help organizations build high-performing teams.

3. As an integrated partner of Workable, Bryq leverages assessments to eliminate bias within the hiring process, promote internal mobility through career pathing, and grow and cultivate your company culture. Could you elaborate on how Bryq specifically does so?

Bryq, as an integrated partner of Workable, offers a unique solution to reduce bias in hiring. Our platform utilizes scientifically validated assessments to evaluate candidates based on their cognitive skills, personality traits, and job-related competencies.

By removing the reliance on resumes and subjective evaluations, Bryq enables companies to make more objective and fair hiring decisions.

Additionally, our career pathing feature helps organizations identify internal talent and create opportunities for employee growth and advancement, fostering a positive company culture.

4. What are some general trends you all are noticing in the assessment landscape?

In the assessment landscape, a prominent trend is the increasing adoption of data-driven approaches and technology to improve hiring decisions. Companies are recognizing the limitations of relying solely on traditional methods and are turning to assessment tools to make informed choices.

Skill-based hiring is gaining traction, indicating a shift towards valuing specific skills and competencies rather than solely focusing on formal qualifications. Soft skills, such as communication, adaptability, and emotional intelligence, are being prioritized over hard skills, as they are essential for fostering effective collaboration and driving innovation in dynamic work environments.

Another significant trend is the utilization of assessments to address bias and promote diversity and inclusion. By leveraging objective evaluation tools, companies strive to ensure a fair and unbiased selection process, resulting in the hiring of more diverse and talented candidates who can positively impact organizational success.

These combined trends aim to create a more robust and equitable assessment landscape, ultimately leading to improved hiring outcomes and better-matched candidates for various roles.

5. Now is your chance to brag about what’s on the horizon for Bryq. Any exciting product developments our readers should be aware of?

Bryq is constantly evolving and has exciting product developments in the pipeline.

We are thrilled to announce two major updates: Bias Audit and Talent Matching for Employees.

Bryq has successfully undergone a rigorous bias audit, ensuring a fair and unbiased assessment process for all candidates. Our commitment to compliance and ethics led us to proactively conduct this audit in alignment with the standards set by NY 144 to safeguard protected groups.

Further, Talent Matching is our newest feature that allows you to match existing employees with currently open positions within your organization, making Internal Mobility easier than ever.

6. Any closing thoughts you’d like to share?

In closing, I would like to emphasize the importance of data-driven hiring practices. By utilizing assessments and technology, companies can improve the quality of their hires, reduce turnover, and create more inclusive workplaces.

At Bryq, we are committed to helping organizations make better hiring decisions and build successful teams. We are excited to continue supporting organizations in their quest for better hiring decisions and a thriving company culture.

The post Workable Partner Profile: next-level assessments with Bryq appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Reflecting common applicant experiences with humor and creativity, they offer invaluable insights. These 10 popular candidate experience memes paint a candid picture of candidate experiences. Let’s not just laugh at them, let’s learn from them.

The voice of the internet is undeniably loud, highlighting key points where your recruitment process could use a bit of finessing, turning frustration into engagement. Let’s dive into this fun, yet enlightening journey through the meme-verse.

Let’s dive right in!

1. The no job / no experience catch-22

This crazy paradox is something candidates know all too well. Need a job? Get experience first. But how can you get experience without getting a job?

Candidates want to work for you – consider what else they can bring to the table if they don’t bring the experience you’re ideally looking for. Especially if it’s an entry-level job.

2. Navigating a world of bias

Don’t let unconscious bias cloud your hiring judgment. Pink hair does not necessarily matter, nor does a suit and tie.

What matters is you want the best candidate for the job.

3. So many rules, so little time

Candidates already feel like they’re navigating a minefield and that every single little thing they do might tip the scales towards or away from an opportunity.

Communicate with them throughout the process so they don’t feel like that.

4. Promising good money – later on

Compensation is huge in the minds of candidates – it’s the groundwork on which employment stands. Don’t offer less than the market value for a role with the “promise” of an increase later; candidates are smart to know that may not necessarily happen. Remember, it’s a two-way street.

5. You can’t always predict the future

There’s value in asking candidates where they see themselves in five years – but there are times where that question may not be the best option. We live in a fast-changing, tumultuous world and career changes are a part of that. Think about it in perspective: COVID-19 wasn’t even a real concept for many of us until early 2020 but it’s essentially changed everything in a matter of years.

6. Jobhunting is hard work

Candidates are putting in a lot of time, energy, and resources when looking for a new job. It’s also incredibly stressful. Be empathetic when you evaluate, and maintain that top-notch candidate experience. After all, they’re humans, and you’re human too.

7. Candidates will say what you want to hear

Let’s be real: candidates won’t work for free. They do have bills to pay and mouths to feed. What actually matters is that they’re there and they believe in doing a good job. Don’t judge them based on whether they pledge allegiance and all that stuff.

8. Don’t overpromise and underdeliver

If you’re taking too long to fill those urgent roles, that’s not only going to hurt you as a business trying to navigate things on three legs – it’s also going to hurt your reputation as an employer. When you say in your job posting that you want someone right now, you’d best live up to that promise.

9. Don’t ghost your candidates

This falls into a similar bucket as above. If you ghost them after putting them through a never-ending wringer of evaluations, assessments, interviews, background checks, and who knows what else – that’s just a bad look.

10. Forcing candidates to refill their info

And finally, our favorite – you have an ATS that asks candidates to upload their resume, only to force them to fill out all kinds of fields to “complete” their application.

But the good news is that’s not going to happen if you have Workable as your ATS – we’re ranked among the best of them in terms of resume parsing.

It’s all about candidate experience

Remember, behind every meme, there’s a nugget of truth wrapped in humor. Use these insights to enhance your recruitment process, making it more user-friendly and appealing. The Internet has spoken – it’s time to listen.

So, take these fun snippets of collective wisdom to heart, adapt, and innovate. After all, in the competitive landscape of talent acquisition, a streamlined and empathetic recruitment process can be your key differentiator.

The post 10 funny candidate experience memes – and what they mean appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

More than 600 people signed up for the event, titled Optimizing the candidate experience: A webinar with Spark Hire.

Meet the experts in that webinar:

• Melissa Escobar-Franco, VP of People at Workable
• Jackie Sirni, Senior People Operations Specialist at Workable
• Jeremy Tolan, Partnerships Manager at Spark Hire

A video of the hour-long chat is below – but if you want just the digestible highlights, read on to learn the key takeaways on how to make your hiring process more efficient:

Can you share some tips that you use for personalized communication with candidates?

Melissa: “It’s mostly about continuous engagement with your candidates’ entire journey from start to finish, and how you’re connecting with them. We always say that a recruiter is a candidate’s first friend when they connect with a company. How much more personal can you get when you have someone on the other end rooting for you?”

Jeremy: “Something that we do a lot at Spark Hire in our own hiring process is incorporate video in the email communication. A study from White House Research and Advisory found that viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to just 10% when they read it. So taking the time to add that video can really help personalize the process and is super effective.”

With all of the tools and automations that exist, do you see any challenges that may come along with all these personalizations?

Jackie: “Yes, it’s always going to make the recruiter’s life easier by having those automated emails built out, but you have to build them in a thoughtful way. For example, I know that sometimes the hiring process for entry-level positions can go very fast. The candidate could feel like we’re rushing through the process when really it’s just the natural cycle of it. So on that first touchpoint with the candidate, I tell them this could feel a little crazy. We can slow down if you need to, but we do want to fill this position pretty quickly. There’s a need to explain why we’re moving fast, but still make them feel like they have personalized communication with us.”

How do you leverage technology to create a positive and favorable hiring experience?

Melissa: “You really need to have a robust applicant tracking system in place. It’s really going to help you do your job and do your job well. Here are some specific technologies that we use within our ATS that I think are beneficial for both the hiring team and the candidates alike:

• Job descriptions: We have thousands of job descriptions in our tool so that we don’t have to start from scratch when it’s time to hire
• Interview Scorecards: These ready-made interview question packages will help you evaluate different elements of a job applicant’s candidacy for a role. They also ensure uniformity and accuracy in interviews.
• Assessments: You can also use these predesigned assessment tools to assess core competencies such as numerical reasoning, verbal comprehension, abstract reasoning, and so on.

Jackie: “My personal favorite tool within Workable is the self-schedule link. I could sing its praises for the rest of my life. Everyone has been in that moment where you’re trying to schedule an interview and your day gets busy, the candidate gets back to you at the time they’re available and you’re like, sorry, somebody already booked me for that time. Can we reschedule? With the self-schedule link, I send it to the candidate and they get it and book the interview with me within minutes of them getting it. Then it’s on my calendar, and I don’t have to think twice about it.”

Jeremy: “Video interviews are the main feature that our software provides, and there are two types of video interviews that are really helpful for organizations. One of them is a one-way video interview where you’re able to set up questions in advance so that candidates record video responses on their own time. The other one’s a live video interview, which most people are familiar with. We found that on average, the companies that are using Spark Hire’s one-way interviews have made their screening process five to seven times [faster].”

Q: Why is it so important to be transparent with your candidates about the interview process? What are organizations doing to be more transparent with their candidates throughout the process?

Jeremy: “Just put yourself in your candidate’s shoes. Applying for jobs can be a really stressful experience for candidates, so you want to set up an environment where you’re trying to relieve that as much as possible and make candidates feel as comfortable as possible, so being transparent plays a role in that.”

Jeremy (cont’d): “To add that transparency, something that I’d really encourage you to do is ask your team members to be involved in your process. Encourage them to connect with candidates that would be interested in speaking with a member of the team that they’d be joining. Having a candidate talk to a peer can be like the ultimate testimonial for your company. And it can be a great way to win that candidate over and have your organization stand out.”

Jackie: “A huge part for me is building out that interview timeline, and being honest about how long the process is going to take. So I always outline something about who they’re going to talk to and then I’ll give a little bit of information about who each person is in the process.”

Melissa: “We believe in transparency so much that we’re holding ourselves accountable to it. It’s actually included in our performance reviews in terms of how quickly we’re getting back to candidates, what are the touch points in between, what’s the quality of the feedback that’s being given, etc. We care about it so much that we are rating ourselves against it because we really want to do a good job there.”

The post Optimizing the candidate interview experience: Experts share their tips appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

By defining candidate texting, unveiling its usage, and laying the steps for how to get started, our friends at Verified First are sharing how candidate texting can improve communication and streamline the hiring process at any organization.

What is candidate texting?

Candidate texting is really all in the name – texting candidates throughout the applicant journey as a way of communication. Texting candidates can take the place of formal emails or phone calls or can be used in addition. These messages can remind applicants of important steps in the application process like:

• Completing job application forms
• Messaging to and from hiring team members
• Scheduling interviews
• Meeting deadlines (i.e. for completion of assessments)
• Filling out information for background checks
• Providing reference information
• Verifying personal information

This form of communication is all about meeting candidates where they are and reaching out to them with concise messages that get your point across quickly and effectively.

Why opt for texting

Candidate texting is all about efficiency. According to Indeed, candidates will respond to texts from recruiters in about three minutes. This span of time makes it five times more effective than a formal email response time. In doing so, candidate texting is more likely to get the ball rolling on the application process and shorten your overall time to hire rates.

Additionally, Aptitude Research’s Talent Acquisition Technology Buyer’s Guide found that companies who used texting as their primary form of communication with candidates improved their retention rates by 69%, and their time to hire was reduced by 70%. When it comes to the numbers, texting candidates could be the ideal move to improve turnaround times and beat out the competition for top talent.

How to incorporate texting in your process

Getting started with a new step in any hiring process can be tricky. Fortunately, utilizing candidate texting can be implemented in a short period of time once you know where to start. Here are some tips to help you build your candidate texting strategy and prepare to hit ‘send.’

1. Keep it short and to the point

Just like with texting outside of work purposes, a short message goes a long way. Texting candidates is ideal for specific information that can be asked in a few sentences. If you have questions that require a more detailed response from a candidate, save them for a formal interview.

Or if these questions can’t wait, a phone call might be the best method of communication.

2. Send messages only during business hours

It’s easy to text at any hour on personal time, but texting for business purposes is a little different. Texting candidates outside of business hours could come off as invasive or rude. Plus, candidates will expect a faster response time since it’s such a quick form of communication.

If you receive a text outside of business hours, be sure to either respond with an answer to their question or request, or send a response letting the candidate know that you’ll respond in more depth during business hours.

3. Text with a tone that reflects your organization

Texting etiquette is important when communicating with candidates. You might be itching to abbreviate phrases with simple acronyms, but it’s best to write out exactly what you mean. You can still curate a voice that is unique to your organization (and yourself) while remaining professional.

Some companies might allow for extra exclamation points or even emojis. It’s best to consult your brand voice strategy on how to curate your personal tone.

4. Ask candidates to opt-in

Although many people prefer talking via text, some candidates may still feel strange when recruiters text them without permission. During your preliminary points of contact, ask candidates how they would prefer to be communicated with.

If they’re open to texting, have them formally opt-in to your service. The point of opting in and out of any sort of communication format is to ensure that candidates feel that they have options.

5. Utilize screening capabilities

Texting candidates about completing their background check is a great use for this technology. Utilize your background screening provider and send applicants an applicant invite to complete their background check. Doing so through your provider will give you significant time back in your hiring process.

In conclusion

Texting candidates is a great way to streamline communication and decrease time to hire in your hiring process.

To learn more about candidate texting in your screening process, learn more about the Verified First and Workable integration.

The post Candidate texting in your hiring process: 5 best practices appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Since we’re a company specializing in recruiting, we were inspired by Halloween to ask around for odd occurrences during the hiring process – both from hiring professionals and job candidates. We got some juicy stuff, some funny stuff, and lots of weirdness. Here you go, 15 of the best interview horror stories we heard (and yes, we give out awards):

Recruiter/Interviewer horror story awards

The car-lock award

If you think interview no-shows are a nuisance, how about this?

I was interviewing a candidate when she told me she had forgotten to lock her car and asked for permission to go check on it. I said yes. She left and never came back or answered my calls.

— Neil B.

The attachment award

Too many irrelevant resumes means that you, at least, get resumes.

I’ve had people send me so many random things via our job application form – from cellphone bills to their entire university thesis.

— Angela V.

The chuckles award

Not all candidates take interview questions seriously.

I was interviewing a candidate and asked her the common question: “Why do you think we should hire you?” Her response was a laugh – a loud throaty laugh.

— Catherine C.

The family award

Speaking of work-life balance…

I was interviewing a 22- or 23-year-old student for an internship. He not only showed up with his mother, but also wanted to be accompanied by her during the interview.

— Stéphane V.

Interviewer stories are a warmup

We’ve heard these and many more interview horror stories from recruiters where candidates have done something odd or funny. But what surprised us was how many more stories came from the candidates’ side! It seems that when hiring teams are pressured to evaluate people and make good hires fast, they sometimes adopt downright bizarre practices or behaviors that put off candidates.

What’s the solution? Perhaps listening to the other side. Each hiring professional in the following stories has earned an award for odd behavior: If you’re a recruiter yourself, you don’t want to receive these awards. If you recognize yourself here, think of it as an opportunity to improve the process for everyone.

Candidate horror story awards

The zodiac award

Evaluating candidates is hard, but choosing dubious hiring criteria can put people off – go for a well-validated assessment instead.

I was asked what my star sign was. When I hesitantly replied, the interviewer commented that his son was the same one. Awkward silence followed.

— Lilian B.

The email confusion award

Communicating well with your hiring team is vital – mistakes happen occasionally, but candidates’ impression of your brand may be permanent.

I was interviewing with a manager for the role of flight attendant at an airline. Five minutes into the interview, I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. I checked it as soon as I left the interview – an hour later – and realized it was a rejection email from one of that company’s recruiters. I called them to see if it was a mistake – it wasn’t, they actually rejected me. I asked them why we had the interview in the first place. They couldn’t say.

— Anthony K.

The body image award

You expect candidates to be respectful and they expect the same from you. If something is irrelevant to their competency of doing the job, avoid asking about it.

I was once asked how much I weigh.

— Dimitris D.

I have been asked about my height.

— Sheila T.

The rampant sexism award

Sexism is an undeniable problem and everybody has the right to be treated with respect. Keep your questions strictly job-related and you’ll be more in line with proper protocol.

I was asked whether I believed in love at first sight. It’s a seemingly harmless question, but what does it have to do with the job? And would you ask a man that?

— Christina P.

I was once asked to sign an agreement that I wouldn’t have any children for at least three years. I had to agree as a condition to get hired. I didn’t, of course.

— Anonymous

I’ve had a really traumatic interview where they were asking me about my relationship status, when I plan to get married, when I plan to have kids (“…but you’re 30 so I imagine soon”), how I will manage work and home when this happens. It was awkward and terrible, especially coming from a woman interviewer who had a family of her own!

— Nikki D.

The K-Pop/Prada award

There is such a thing as a too-specific ‘ideal candidate’.

I was applying for an entertainment company and interviewed with the VP, a famous producer of K-pop. We were at his music studio – I was standing next to him in his ‘producing room’, listening to him talking about how great his music is and how he built the K-pop industry. At some point, he handed me the book “The Devil Wears Prada” and asked me if I could be exactly like the main character. I told him “no” because I find a lot of her actions unnecessary. Funny thing is I was hired and he ended up being a terrible boss – exactly like “the devil” in the book!

— Bora K.

The interrogation room award

Candidates are nervous enough as it is…

I interviewed at an embassy in Athens for an internship. They took me to a dark room with no windows where the only light came from a table lamp. I sat at a table while the interviewer was standing. When she learned I spent part of my childhood in Ukraine, she asked me whether I had any knowledge of Ukrainian child trafficking rings.

— Robert V.

The leopard heels award

Scammy companies dress their people in style – or do they?

I once applied to an ad from a dubiously named organization for a vaguely scripted job. They called me back the next day and a very attractive-sounding female said, “We’d like to have an interview with you and potentially offer you a job,” which sounded fishy to say the least. I Googled them and found they’re a scam that promises you huge bonuses and private plane rides, but essentially makes you sell door-to-door as a freelancer. Regardless, I decided to go to the interview for the experience and the giggles.

When I went to their office, I noticed that all the receptionists wore leopard heels and the interviewers wore laminated suits. The other interviewees were in no better shape: one of them had come to interview in sweatpants, with a take-away coffee in hand, and his girlfriend.

I was taken to the “Future Leaders Room” which, I swear to you, had a dingy old conference desk and posters of Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie on the walls.

They called me a couple of hours after I left the interview. I never picked up the phone.

— Panos R.

The bathrobe award

Really now, shipowner?

A few years ago, I was looking for a job while I was still doing my degree. One of the interviews I was called to was a PA job for a famous shipowner. The interview was at his house because he had his office there too. I hadn’t completed my studies then and he could see that on my CV. Yet, he started asking me “Why are you still on your BSc?”, “Are you wasting my time?”, “You are not qualified for this job, you don’t have any other work experience.” I told him that he was the one to call me and that he should have looked at my resume before he did. I yelled at him that I don’t take insults from anybody and left. Did I tell you he was wearing just a bathrobe the whole time?

— Anonymous

The Louis Vuitton bag award

Offered salary shouldn’t depend on what candidates are currently making – or what you think they spend on things.

I had just graduated from college and I interviewed for the position of the CEO’s PA at a big pharmaceutical company. My first interview was with the existing PA, and my second interview was with the Marketing Director and another manager whose position I don’t recall.

When I went to the second interview, I carried a Louis Vuitton bag that my mom had given me as a graduation gift. The Marketing Director was asking common interview questions, when the other manager suddenly interrupted asking “Do you think it’s a good idea to bring that bag to an interview?” I realized he was referring to the fact that my bag was expensive and that we were in an economic crisis. I said that it was a gift and I didn’t think much about bringing it or not, it was just my bag. He then asked me, “So if we take your bag into account, what salary should we give you?”

Every answer that formed in my mind was very sarcastic but I settled with: “Whatever salary you think I deserve for the work I’ll do. You shouldn’t worry about what I do with it.”

A few more professional questions came from the Marketing Director, with the final question from the creep being: “What kind of car do you drive?” I replied “X car, it’s not expensive, is it?” “No, but it’s fancy,” he replied.

I didn’t get the job, but I wouldn’t have accepted to save my life.

— Eleni K.

The concept of reality award

The conversation might have been stimulating anyplace else.

Back when I was still an undergraduate student of informatics, I was looking for a part time job. I found an interesting job opening at a well-known insurance company for part-time assistant. I sent my CV and they called me a few days later, arranging an interview with Mr. K.

I arrived at the building and entered the main office – there was no reception room. They had an open space plan with boxed offices, but everyone was gone at that time except an old man in the back. There was complete silence.

The old man noticed me and stood up from his little cubicle. When he came closer, I noticed that his hair was standing on end, as if the man was experiencing great desperation or a mini-electrical shock. Half of his red tie was hanging behind his back.

He asked typical questions regarding studies and previous experience. He had a printed questionnaire full of checkboxes. He was writing down his notes as I answered. He wasn’t actually looking at me. But suddenly, he stopped, and looked at me straight in the eyes. The tie fell forward and he tossed it again behind his back. Then we had the weirdest exchange:

“Are you smart?”

“Yes, I consider myself smart.”

“If I considered you dumb, would you still be dumb or smart?”

“Everyone can have their opinion, that doesn’t mean every opinion is reality though.”

“But what is reality?”

After a few seconds of silence he continued ticking some checkboxes and rushed to say “Thank you Ms. T., bye!” Needless to say I was so relieved I left that building. I was sure I wouldn’t be offered the position and I was grateful for that.

— Gina T.

The really scammy scam award

Sometimes, you just know it won’t work… don’t let desperation get to you.

I was a 19-year-old college student and looking for a marketing internship. I applied and interviewed for many roles but didn’t land a job. Out of desperation, I sent out numerous applications in a single afternoon. Needless to say, I hadn’t done enough research on each position to know what I was getting myself into.

After a couple of days, I received an email to interview at a marketing company. At first, I was excited, but after looking closer at the position I spotted a few red flags. The company didn’t have a website, or any online reviews, and I couldn’t find any indication about what they actually did. The position wasn’t clear either, all I remember is they wanted someone with “a passion for marketing, high energy and an entrepreneurial spirit.” I should’ve trusted my gut, but I held out hope that this might be legit, so I went to the interview.

I drove and parked outside of the company offices which were in the basement of a small building on a busy road. I make my way down to the basement where about 15 other people around my age sat in a lobby. They were all there for interviews.

An overly cheery woman at the front desk checked me in on her long list of interviewees. She spent the next ten minutes hyping up our group, asking us about our hopes and dreams and praising us for having more drive than our peers for looking for an internship. There were uncomfortable smiles all around as we watched people be ushered in and out of interview rooms, each lasting no longer than five minutes.

Then, it was my turn. The creepily happy woman walked me into an office. A man behind the table shook my hand and spent the next five minutes asking me the most cliche interview questions: “Why are manhole covers round?” and “How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?” He explained this position was an opportunity to “be my own boss” and “work my own hours.” I’d be working off commission so I’d have to be a go-getter in order to make connections and sales (and there was no limit in how much money I could make). The role? I’d be going door to door selling phone plan contracts for big-name telecommunication companies. This was no marketing internship.

I got out of there and blocked the company’s number from my phone. I’ve learned since that this company holds creepy pep rallies every week where they teach bizarre sales acronyms that you have to repeat and chant as a group. It acts a bit like a cult as it works you to the bone and makes you depend on the community.

My advice to other desperate college students like me: trust your gut and don’t go to sketchy interviews like this. I accepted an amazing (and legitimate) marketing internship a few weeks later.

— Carolyn M.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably either laughing or shaking your head with all these hiring horror stories. Well, people are strange, what’s important is to learn from our experiences. Until next Halloween!

Bonus: How to be the worst interviewer – The worst interview questions

We’d love to hear your own stories! Tweet to us @Workable or share a post with us on Facebook or LinkedIn.

The post 15 job interview horror stories that you won’t believe appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Hiring the wrong person could be a costly mistake, in terms of both time and money. An employment background check can help provide reassurance that a chosen candidate is qualified for the job and is a good fit for your organization.

What are background checks for employment?

Background checks for employment are a screening tool used to verify job applicant information through official legal records.

Incorporating background screening as part of the hiring process helps employers reduce the risk of potential liabilities and can bring more clarity and validation to hiring decisions.

However, in order to use background checks as a prerequisite of employment, screenings must be carried out in accordance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), a federal law that governs the production and use of consumer reports as a hiring tool. FCRA protects employers from claims of unfair hiring practices and job candidates from discrimination or privacy breaches.

Additional resources on background checks for employment:

• How to run a background check with Workable
• Demystifying employment background checks

Benefits of pre-employment background checks

Hiring a new employee is an investment in the future of your organization and it’s a process that involves a significant number of resources. Aside from the time and money spent, hiring the wrong candidate can have a negative impact on employee morale, client relations, brand reputation, and sales.

Verifying that a potential candidate has the appropriate education, work experience, and background before extending a job offer can help protect your company and its culture.

How do background checks work?

Background checks verify an applicant’s identity by using information such as their Social Security number and date of birth to conduct a search of court records, financial records, or public records databases. Manual contact may be made with educational institutions, professional organizations, or previous employers, as well.

These searches are usually conducted by a human resources professional using a background check company, a consumer reporting agency (CRA), or with software such as a human resources information system (HRIS).

The FCRA and state laws have strict guidelines about how background checks are conducted, so it’s important to research requirements to avoid legal risks.

Create your own background check policy:

Employee Background Check Policy Sample

What can be checked?

Pre-employment screening can cover many different areas of interest, including:

• Employment history
• Education verification
• License/Certification check
• Criminal history
• Driving records
• Credit check
• Drug screening
• Social media activity
• Identity

State laws vary in regards to what information can be checked, so research local and federal guidelines before proceeding.

Employment background check process

Background checks are normally conducted at the point when you’re ready to make an offer, but some companies will perform a background check report on several candidates to help guide employment decisions.

There are four main steps to take to ensure compliance:

1. Disclosure: Candidates must be notified that a pre-employment screening is a pre-condition of an offer.
2. Consent: The candidate must provide written consent and must receive notification of the agency conducting the check, as well as their rights under the FCRA.
3. Investigation: Once the candidate has provided consent and sufficient personal details, the report is compiled using relevant sources.
4. Review: You will receive the report for review, which will typically be marked either “clear” as a sign to go ahead and employ or “consider” to indicate that something of concern has been found.

Learn more about the employment background check process:

• The 8 employer essentials on employment background checks
• Speed up background checks with our Trusted Employees integration
• Background check update to candidates email

What can cause a red flag on a background check?

Finding a red flag on a background check shouldn’t automatically disqualify a good candidate. If you have questions about something revealed by the background information, it’s always a good idea to ask the candidate about it and allow them the opportunity to respond.

Here are five red flags that may be worth additional discussion:

• Criminal record
• Inappropriate or unlawful social media activity
• Inconsistencies between background information and resume
• Negative comments from former co-workers on reference checks
• Poor credit history (particularly relevant if the position requires corporate spending or money management)

To comply with the FCRA requirements related to adverse action, you must provide candidates with copies of their reports and have a process in place for candidates to dispute report findings.

For more information, read Background check red flags.

Performing a background check for employment helps hiring professionals make informed decisions, however, it also helps your organization maintain a safe work environment, protect company assets, reduce the risk of liability claims, and comply with federal, state, local, and industry regulations.

The post Background checks for employment: What, why, & how appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

In fact, some surveys tell us that as many as 54% of all members of Gen Z want to become freelancers or start their own business. The number of self-employed people in 2021 was up 34% from 2020 to a staggering 51 million people in the United States. That’s roughly 15% of the entire population in the country working for themselves.

Cultural factors such as the rise of side hustles and part-time employment opportunities available through the Internet and social media are contributing to these numbers. More than two-thirds (68%) of those who began freelancing in 2021 were either millennials or Gen Z. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that self-employment is due to rise quicker than average employment growth over the next 10 years.

Employers need to catch up

During the pandemic and this challenging employment market, employers must reckon with these trends and consider how to incorporate this cultural shift into their recruitment policy.

During the pandemic and this challenging employment market, employers must reckon with these trends and consider how to incorporate this cultural shift into their recruitment policy.

While some effects of these trends can certainly be traced back to timing and the pandemic, the broader move towards virtual work and self-employment is a permanent one.

Those who choose the freelance and self-employed route are doing so for a variety of reasons. Employers need to understand what those are, and think about how to replicate them in their own workplaces if they want to remain competitive in the talent market.

There are, of course, benefits and drawbacks to self-employment and business ownership. Let’s first look at the main benefits:

What are the advantages of being self-employed?

1. Flexible schedule

Our collective understanding of work-life balance is changing to prioritize more time with family and better mental health. One of the themes we saw over and over again in the research we shared in our Great Discontent report was that candidates increasingly value a flexible work schedule.

This trend is reflected in candidates’ preferences – and often, their need – for jobs that allow them to work when it’s most convenient for them.

Flexible work, of course, is one of the hallmarks of self-employment. By definition, the contractor/client relationship prohibits clients from dictating how and when the contractor does their work, as they do for their employees.

2. Remote work

Despite some predicting that remote work would end en masse as soon as the pandemic did, we haven’t seen that occur. Instead remote work, like COVID-19, appears here to stay.

Candidates in our recent survey responded that, like flexible work, remote work options were very important when making the decision on where to work. Many are flat-out turning down jobs that are requiring employees to return to work in-person. And as is also the case with flexible work, countless self-employed people choose to work remotely.

Remote work also reduces or eliminates time spent commuting – we found that to be a perk in the Great Discontent survey as well. It’s also a benefit in other areas, as commuting is bad for our mental health, our finances, and the environment.

3. Better balance of caretaking/parenting challenges

Self-employed people can choose to work when and where they please. This is a bonus when it comes to caring for other family members – especially parents of young children.

They can take time off to take children to doctor’s appointments, or for a leisurely lunch with a friend, without needing to justify their actions.

4. 100% ownership of your business

Freelancing allows individuals the chance to create and retain their business’ value. This compared to a full-time employment scenario, in which a person rents out their labor to build value for a company, but retains no ownership stake or long-term financial investment in the company’s success.

The self-employment model potentially offers more financial stability and opportunities for wealth generation in the long term than traditional full-time employment. In fact, in a recent Upwork-commissioned study from September 2020, 60% of freelancers said they make more than they would in a traditional full-time job – and that percentage is up seven points from 2019.

5. No red tape or corporate politics

Excluding the red tape associated with handling your own business affairs like taxes, self-employment is refreshingly free of the red tape and politics associated with the corporate world.

When you’re outside of the corporate hierarchy, the contortions that full-time corporate employees must go through to manage social expectations, coworker relationships, and bosses are none of your concern.

This can be remarkably freeing, especially for introverts or others who are averse to the petty politics that often govern an office’s social structure.

6. Uncapped earning potential

Very few traditional full-time professions offer the benefit of uncapped earning potential, though this is one of the coolest and most convenient benefits of freelancing.

Freelance work, and therefore one’s income, can be scaled up or down depending on a person’s income targets for a given month. Your nanny is on vacation so you need to focus on taking care of your three children this month? Scale down for less responsibility and more free time. Looking to save for a down payment on a home? Scale up by looking for more, or higher paying, clients.

7. Ability to do work you’re passionate about

For many, self-employment represents the opportunity to do work they’re deeply passionate about. Often we are skilled in areas that we’d enjoy working in but in which there are no real full-time jobs available. Freelancing can give individuals the opportunity to combine their unique skill sets and pursue work they’re uniquely qualified for.

We see this play out in the arts industry specifically, where rates of self-employment are significantly higher than of all other professions – with 30% of artists working in freelance, according to a report from the National Endowment for the Arts. Full-time, profitable jobs in the arts are few and far between, but working as a freelancer can offer a better income and more job opportunities.

8. Freedom and control over one’s own career

A freelance career offers complete freedom. Lost interest in accounting and instead prefer to start a business doing wedding floral arrangements? Go for it! Want to cancel all your Friday meetings and go to a spa? No one’s stopping you!

It’s never been easier to start freelancing with zero startup capital, making this an open-source opportunity available to anyone with a solid internet connection and a willingness to work hard.

9. Pride in a job well done

Freelance work offers rewards based on a job well done, rather than simply showing up to work every day. Because it’s so results-focused, freelancers feel a sense of pride and ownership when they complete a project.

Got all that? Good. Now, let’s look at the main disadvantages of running one’s own operation.

What are the disadvantages of being self-employed?

1. Lack of insurance/benefits

One of the most difficult (and expensive) issues to navigate as a freelancer is finding benefits. With the widespread prevalence of employer-offered healthcare in the United States, leaving one’s job and finding healthcare on the open market can feel scary and risky. Self-employed people often end up paying more for healthcare.

Self-employed people also miss out on other financial benefits offered by employers, like 401K matching, stock options, temporary disability insurance, and vision/dental care.

2. Fluctuating income and work load

This one is a double-edged sword. While a variable work schedule can be harnessed for benefits like scalable workload and uncapped earning potential, it can also be difficult to cope without financial literacy, a healthy emergency fund, and the tenacity to get through some lean months.

3. Risk and stress

Likewise, some find that the risk inherent to business ownership, innovation, and self-employment is simply too stressful to cope with. That’s okay! What works for one person doesn’t work for everyone, and we all have different levels of risk tolerance depending on our financial situation.

While risk is to some degree a key component of any business venture, many self-employed people testify that they actually feel freelancing gives them financial security they never had while working a traditional full-time job. No one client makes up the entirety of a freelancer’s income, and should one client go under, they are easily replaced.

4. Loneliness and isolation

Psychologically, working for yourself is quite challenging. To use a common phrase, the buck stops with you. If something needs doing, you’re probably the one who does it.

While you can pick up many unique and helpful skills in this situation, it can also be lonely and isolating to deal with everything about your business on your own. There’s no one to hand the reins to when you want a break.

5. Tax disadvantages

There are financial advantages to traditional employment that employees take for granted. For example, employers pay half of the payroll tax due for their employees. The other half is generally automatically withheld from an employee’s paycheck. But self-employed people pay both parts themselves in the form of self-employment tax. The difference? Freelancers pay an additional seven percent of gross revenue to taxes, or 15.3% in total. That’s a major financial disadvantage.

Self-employed people also have to manually withhold their own taxes and pay them quarterly throughout the year to the IRS and their state’s department of revenue.

6. Added burden of business development

Freelancers must regularly spend time marketing their services to other businesses. This can add to your workload, but without it, it may be difficult to find new clients. Some find this cycle exhausting.

Use this to your advantage

As mentioned above, a key talent attraction opportunity for employers here is to incorporate the benefits of self-employment, and emphasize the things they can offer in a job that self-employment does not.

Employers suffer when they struggle to hire or retain great people, and employees suffer when their employers don’t respect their full lives and personal responsibilities. Creating a more balanced working relationship benefits everyone involved.

Employers suffer when they struggle to hire or retain great people, and employees suffer when their employers don’t respect their full lives and personal responsibilities. Creating a more balanced working relationship benefits everyone involved.

How employers can attract candidates with the benefits of self-employment

1. Fast-track the hiring process

Getting rid of unnecessary red tape is an easy way to emulate the freedom self-employed people enjoy. And furthermore, everyone hates it when the hiring process takes too long.

2. Support a collaborative culture

The managerial hierarchy of large corporations can be exhausting, confusing, and demoralizing. Creating a more collaborative culture, where employees of all ranks feel listened to, can give a taste of the creative freedom self-employed people enjoy.

3. Offer ownership stake in the company

Partial or full ownership of the fruits of your labor is a key element of financial freedom, and while small business ownership offers this in spades, traditional employers typically do not. But they can. This desire for ownership stake is a significant reason people work at startups – because they offer the chance at partial ownership which can become extremely profitable down the line.

There are also other methods of sharing ownership for companies that aren’t public, like tying bonuses to company performance.

4. Compensate fairly and competitively

With record inflation this past year, employees across the country are hurting financially. Finances are one of the most commonly cited reasons employees give to explain why they’re switching jobs. Reevaluate your compensation structure to make sure it truly is fair and generous in today’s environment.

Unpredictable finances are a major factor that drives people to leave freelancing and seek traditional employment. You can take advantage of this angle by offering a generous, regular paycheck.

5. Give flexible work and remote options

Flexible and remote work are now the norm for most white-collar workers, and if you don’t offer these perks, you’re falling behind. Keep in mind, too, that many people become freelancers because they can’t cope with the rigid work schedule most employers require.

Whether because they deal with a chronic illness or because they have young children to care for, flexible work is the answer for many who struggle to balance personal and work responsibilities. If you already offer flexible or remote work options, sweeten the deal with a home office stipend or student debt repayment assistance.

6. Encourage creativity and independence

Creative or entrepreneurial employees often leave to start their own businesses in part because their unique contributions go unappreciated or ignored within the narrow-minded managerial structure.

If you can show employees that those qualities add value to the company and are appreciated, you’re more likely to keep them. Everyone likes to have autonomy and agency at work.

7. Create purpose and engagement

What does your company serve? Whose lives do you benefit? Do you manufacture products that destroy the environment or rely on inhumane, cheap labor?

People are highly motivated to give their time and energy to causes they believe in. Emulate the feeling of purpose and pride a person feels when they do work they know will make a positive impact.

8. Foster community and team building

Many self-employed people struggle with feeling isolated. There is nothing quite like working on a team of intelligent, hard-working people to collaborate on a common goal. Present your company culture as a real employment benefit – because it should be.

9. Give praise where it’s due

Self-employment is often thankless. Retain your employees by showing them that you support them, financially and personally. Spotlight employees who are doing great work and offer opportunities for growth and higher education for everyone.

If your organization is struggling to find candidates right now, as so many are, take note of the trend towards self-employment. There are real cultural and economical factors driving many highly qualified candidates to choose self-employment right now. If you want to work with them but aren’t willing or able to do so on a contract basis, you can use this insight about advantages of self-employment to tailor your recruiting messaging for today’s labor market.

The post Starved for talent? Support the freelance lifestyle at your work appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

What does ‘problem solving’ mean?

Problem solving is the ability to evaluate and resolve issues in an efficient manner through the use of critical thinking. When faced with a challenge or an unexpected situation, it’s important to have the decision-making skills necessary to resolve the problem by using creativity, collaboration, or complex reasoning in order to adapt and identify a solution.

Problem-solving interview questions and answers

Why problem-solving skills are important for employees

Problem-solving skills are an essential part of an employee’s ability to effectively perform in a workplace environment. On a day-to-day basis any number of complex problems can arise — from interpersonal challenges among coworkers to identifying potential client issues, effective problem-solving is critical to high quality job performance.

The ability to evaluate different perspectives and brainstorm possible solutions to a problem in order to find the correct answer can define an employee’s ability to perform under pressure and excel in their duties.

On a larger scale, it is vital for a team of employees to be capable of sharing perspectives and collaborating as a group to achieve a common goal when faced with more complex problems.

A lack of willingness to readily address a problem, or lack of focus when doing so, can be dangerous; issues within the workplace can easily grow out of control if not quickly or properly solved.

Interview questions to measure problem-solving ability

Interview questions that gauge a candidate’s ability to navigate complex issues and perform under pressure are essential to understanding their ability to perform effectively within the workplace. To get a better understanding of a candidate’s decision making and critical thinking skills, incorporate problem-solving questions into your interview process.

Problem-solving interview questions reveal how a potential hire reacts when faced with a challenge, and how they respond to a stressful or unexpected situation.

Ideally, these questions should present scenarios that could happen in the job the applicant is being interviewed for. This gives both the interviewer an idea of how the candidate would perform in the workplace’s conditions and the candidate an idea of what types of problems they would need to solve in order to perform their job.

Being able to adequately judge the mindset of an applicant is important, as analytical and results-oriented candidates can more readily meet the demands required of them in an environment that regularly presents them with problems to solve.

How to measure problem-solving ability with pre-employment assessments

Problem-solving tests allow recruiters to evaluate how a candidate approaches complex issues, analyzes data, performs under stress, and reacts to having their beliefs challenged — which can reveal a lot about a potential hire.

As you ask problem-solving questions, observe the steps the applicant takes in approaching the problem and identifying the solution. Candidates who provide creative answers or offer solutions to ensure that the problem wouldn’t happen again are more likely to be innovative employees who are willing and able to think outside of the box to contribute to the growth of the business.

Also, include technical questions to gauge a candidate’s aptitude for the specific role they’re interviewing for and ask for examples of problems they’ve solved in prior roles and how they worked with teammates to do so. The ability to communicate, collaborate, ask for help, and commit to overcoming challenges are all benchmarks of effective problem-solving skills.

How Workable can help you assess problem-solving skills

Workable is an all-in-one hiring tool that streamlines and optimizes the recruitment process. Hiring professionals can automate tasks like posting to job boards, scheduling interviews, and sending follow up communication to focus on developing an in-depth understanding of each applicant’s strengths and weaknesses.

Take the time to measure the problem-solving skills of potential candidates with Workable’s assessment tools and hire the right person for the job in less time.

The post Why you need pre-employment problem-solving tests appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

So, we partnered with AI-fueled background check software Checkr for a webinar to talk about ways in which you can make your hiring process more efficient.

More than 930 people signed up for the event, titled, aptly, 6 Ways to Make Your Hiring Process More Efficient. The event took place on Thursday, May 12.

Panelists included:

• Emily Gibson, Director of Talent Acquisition at Red Canary
• Scott Jennings, Director of Industry Strategy and Market Development at Checkr
• Damien Smith, Director of Customer and Community Marketing at Workable (moderator)

ZeShaan Shamsi, Partner at the People Collective, was scheduled to speak on behalf of People Collective co-founder Matt Bradburn, but was unable to attend.

A video of the hour-long chat is below – if you want just the digestible highlights, read on to learn the key takeaways on how to make your hiring process more efficient:

Table of Contents

1. How do you prioritize when hiring for multiple roles?
2. How do you make your job descriptions match reality?
3. How do you make the most of each interview?
4. How do you shorten feedback loops?
5. How do you keep candidates engaged?
6. How do you prevent delays in background screenings?

1. How do you prioritize when hiring for multiple roles?

Most companies hire for more than one role at a time – a quick glance at Glassdoor or LinkedIn proves that. But when you’re an SMB and you have just the one recruiter – or even just a single HR practitioner – in your entire company, you need to prioritize your job openings.

Emily was quick to the point: it’s about what’s most important for the business at that point in time – and she meets regularly with her executives to determine that.

“I think there’s always a fight for the prioritization across leaders, and the way I start with it is: ‘What is going to get the business farther?’” she says. “What do we really need right now as engineers, as sales folks? What is going to help us move farther faster?”

“I think there’s always a fight for the prioritization across leaders, and the way I start with it is: ‘What is going to get the business farther?’”

She cites an example from Red Canary where there’s currently a big push to hire more software engineers.

“How do I potentially deprioritize and have some of those conversations with leaders – so that my recruiters can stay focused on what is the true need with the software engineers, and make sure that we’re dedicating enough recruiter screening time and sourcing time to get those candidates in the pipeline?”

Scott talks about the annual operating plan or AOP which is in place at most organizations – and how that’s a major factor in prioritizing which roles to fill. Details such as investments for an upcoming period can dictate priority.

“If you are looking to make big investments in, let’s say product-led growth, then certainly you’re going to have to invest in engineers and folks that are building product. If you’d like to expand into new markets, you’re going to have to look at the go-to market team and understand, okay, there’s sales, there’s marketing, there’s customer success. What are the investments that we need to make in order to get to the outcomes that we plan for in that AOP?”

Much like the hiring plan, the AOP serves as a prime directive – and a tangible one, too, Scott says.

“It’s a physical planning document that everybody should be using as the North Star. And as a result of that, it’s a more objective way to have a conversation with leaders within the organization that all want their reqs prioritized. And of course, then you want to revisit that plan on a regular basis as it changes.”

2. How do you make your job descriptions match reality?

In the above-linked Reddit article, the lack of symmetry between job descriptions and the actual job is a major gripe among candidates.

With that, Scott emphasizes the importance of clearly describing what you’re looking for in your ideal candidate because simply asking for an A player or a rock star doesn’t tangibly nail what you’re looking for.

“Of course,” he emphasizes, “everyone wants an A player.”

Instead, be clear and deliberate in your job descriptions.

“What are the basic tenets of what you have to have experientially in order to deliver on the role?” Scott asks. “Make sure that those are front and center, and that you’re not necessarily laundry listing every single thing that you need.”

Also, consider what qualifications you really need.

“Chances are you don’t need a PhD for most jobs. So if you list it there, that can be a little intimidating and perhaps keep people away from that role.”

Emily agrees.

“I always encourage my recruiters to look at the position description and probe on some of those pieces in the intake meeting as well. So if you know, it’s often [that] you can get an outdated position description or maybe the requirements are not as stringent as they initially were.”

And at Emily’s company, the emphasis is on skills rather than background.

Salary is another component – and being based out of Colorado, Emily’s company is directly impacted by the recent salary transparency law. This requires companies in Colorado to post salary ranges within the job description – and that’s something she welcomes.

“I have loved that because it’s been an incredible opportunity to be transparent up front and also allow candidates to self-select in, or self-select out based on that and have very transparent conversations right off the bat around compensation and motivation as well.”

Scott, meanwhile, warns against over-templatizing job descriptions – especially in rapidly updating times.

“Boilerplates can be really dangerous in particular as the business changes. So you start out with this framework that maybe worked, I don’t know, 24 months ago. And then all of a sudden you have all these new roles and you put this framework out there and it doesn’t really match what you’re doing in 2022.

“If you’re using that 2019 boilerplate, it’s time to revisit it and stop trying to copy and paste and put a little bit more legwork in making sure that the roles that you have not only reflect what you’re looking for, but also sound exciting based on real world scenarios in 2022.”

“If you’re using that 2019 boilerplate, it’s time to revisit it and stop trying to copy and paste and put a little bit more legwork in making sure that the roles that you have not only reflect what you’re looking for, but also sound exciting based on real world scenarios in 2022.”

3. How do you make the most of each interview?

In what moderator Damien calls a “candidate playland”, it’s crucial that the time to fill a job quickly but at the same time being comprehensive.

This means it’s important to get as much out of every interaction you have with a candidate. So we asked the panelists – how do you do that?

Emily stresses the importance of prep work to identify what’s needed from those interviews – including identifying skill sets and other elements to support a hiring decision.

“Align with the hiring manager on what those needs are, the information that they really need, to feel comfortable moving forward with the candidate so that we’re not wasting anyone’s time.”

“Align with the hiring manager on what those needs are, the information that they really need, to feel comfortable moving forward with the candidate so that we’re not wasting anyone’s time.”

And it’s also important to be respectful of the candidate’s time and futureproof any potential issues – Emily cites a rhetorical example of getting to the fourth interview in the process only for the candidate or employer to learn that they’re not a great match or they don’t have the right skill set.

“How do we fix that a little bit further upstream?” she asks.

Scott doubles down on that message.

“How do you get to where you need to be, having the fewest steps possible, with the most efficiency possible?” he says, adding it does become difficult when bringing C-level employees or VPs in for the executive interview especially when hiring at scale. When there are a few jobs to be filled or a number of candidates who make it to that executive interview stage, that can clog up that executive’s calendar and this ultimately bottlenecks the entire process.

“In today’s market, I don’t even think that makes sense. There has to be a way of doing more with less, and that’s getting the right people involved in the process to evaluate the skills that are important for that particular role.”

This is crucial for the candidate experience and decision as well.

“We’ve all probably been there in some way, shape or form where there’s two companies you may be interviewing with. And in the end, you end up going with a company that out-executes the other one, because they were quicker about it,” he says. “Not necessarily because they were better.”

4. How do you shorten feedback loops?

Likewise, endless feedback and communication can slow down the recruitment process. So, how do you shorten those feedback loops between recruiting, hiring managers and cross-functional stakeholders?

Scott emphasizes the importance of having a quick sync right after an interview – especially when doing numerous interviews in a short time.

“Number one, you want the freshness of that feedback to be correct. Otherwise you’re going to get very generic and unhelpful feedback. Number two is if you kind of rally everybody together, you’re going to get a pretty good consensus pretty quickly.”

Tech is a huge boon here as well, especially for those who can’t participate in these quick syncs.

“There’s a way to reach out to the interview and say, ‘You just had the interview. Put your feedback in here. Please attend this meeting.’ And if all of that can be managed within a technology ecosystem, I think you are increasing your likelihood of success.”

“There’s a way to reach out to the interview and say, ‘You just had the interview. Put your feedback in here. Please attend this meeting.’ And if all of that can be managed within a technology ecosystem, I think you are increasing your likelihood of success.”

The other important benefit is that you can circle back to the candidate quickly.

“At the end of the day, you want to make sure that that feedback is shared, good, bad, indifferent in some way, shape or form. And I think that quick feedback loop, the very quick sync and then having technology to fill in the gaps is the right way to go.”

Emily has other strategies in place at Red Canary – including a kickoff meeting to set expectations on collecting feedback and when.

“Just defining those SLAs up front, I think also getting the buy-in of how important their feedback is and why they’re a part of the interview panel so that they feel like they are an important part of the process.”

And then, after that, establish a recurring sync for the hiring team.

“[It’s] having that weekly cadence to connect with the hiring managers. So if they’re having one offs, we’re collecting that information and understanding when the debriefs will be so setting those up, scheduling them ahead of time so that there is if schedules change and things happen as they always do, you at least have that defined time to connect with everyone to gather that feedback pretty quickly.”

5. How do you keep candidates engaged?

Of course, there are breakdowns in the process and there are inevitable delays – which means the candidate is potentially left hanging. You don’t want that happening, but if you do, how do you keep those important candidates engaged between stages in the hiring process?

It’s all about setting expectations from the get-go, says Emily.

“You can’t always define the timeline in which things will happen, but you can say, ‘Hey, here’s what the process looks like today. And so they know how many interviews there will be and, and they can start to plan throughout that process.”

“You can’t always define the timeline in which things will happen, but you can say, ‘Hey, here’s what the process looks like today. And so they know how many interviews there will be and, and they can start to plan throughout that process.”

Regular email or text updates throughout are important as well – even if it’s not a direct update about the candidate’s status in the process, says Emily. It’s about keeping candidates engaged with the brand.

Again, proactivity is important – including reaching out to the candidate before the final interview for a quick connect.

“If there are any outstanding questions, concerns, or things that have come up, they feel incredibly prepped going into that final meeting to succeed.”

Scott agrees, and points to technology as a huge differentiator especially since it’s difficult to maintain connections with each and every candidate in the funnel.

“[It’s] to have some type of capability to reach out to the candidates, keep a pulse on the candidate and then have some form of AI wrapped around those techs, where there can be some interactivity without necessarily having to have a recruiter engaged.”

“Because without that communication, there’s going to be a lack of transparency. And without transparency in the funnel, there’s going to be candidate fallout.”

And it doesn’t matter where a candidate is in the funnel – or even whether they’re ultimately hired or not, Scott adds.

“If you keep that pulse with a candidate, there’s going to come a time, your company’s scaling [and] you might need their skill set. So the more communication, the better.”

Emily points out the importance of letting candidates know that you’re available at any time.

“It is a two-way street. Just because I’m not reaching out, please don’t take that as a lack of interest or a lack of excitement about your background. … I think that’s helped me be successful because it truly enables the candidate to reach out.”

The consequence of not keeping in touch is pretty significant, Scott notes.

“This is just the concept of ghosting. Employers ghost candidates, and candidates ghost employers, and it’s extraordinarily frustrating. So whatever you can do to provide that feedback and transparency, you should do [it].”

“Employers ghost candidates, and candidates ghost employers, and it’s extraordinarily frustrating. So whatever you can do to provide that feedback and transparency, you should do [it].”

6. How do you prevent delays in background screenings?

Background checks have long been a standard element in the recruitment process and are usually intended to check a jobseeker’s criminal record, educational background, employment history, and other areas before extending a job offer. There are times when it can unnecessarily delay a job offer – and lead to anxiety on the part of a candidate.

So, a speedy background check process is crucial. As a representative of a company that conducts background checks as a service, Scott knows more than most.

“It’s a very scary process for a candidate who is looking for a position to pay their bills and live their life. With all of that in mind, you want to have the ability to properly set the candidate’s expectations on what a background check is.”

A speedy background check is crucial, he adds.

“I assure you if it takes, you know, five, 10, however many days, that candidate is going to be in several other hiring funnels – and they’re going to get hired by the time that background check [comes] back, because so many organizations are looking to hire quickly.”

“I assure you if it takes, you know, five, 10, however many days, that candidate is going to be in several other hiring funnels – and they’re going to get hired by the time that background check [comes] back, because so many organizations are looking to hire quickly.”

He notes that Checkr offers a modern AI-supported background check process – including the ability to predict when a background check is scheduled to come back to the employer. That’s a huge benefit in setting expectations.

Scott also urges employers to consider how important it needs to be to check someone’s background.

“If [a candidate’s record is] not relevant to the job, filter it out because the benefit for the business is that you open your candidate pool because one in three Americans has a criminal record. […] There’s your hiring shortage right there.

Emily agrees on the overly stringent emphasis on background checks. Still, if you do need to carry out checks, it’s important to choose the service wisely – because you don’t want any avoidable delays in the process.

Plus, you’re evaluating a person who is juggling other priorities – including their current job, where they need clarity on whether or not they can give their notice.

“If you do have delays because what was expected or needed upfront, [and] wasn’t communicated appropriately, then the candidate has given their notice and now you’re stuck feeling like you might need to compensate them for a week or two that they’re not working because you’re simply waiting on their background check and they’re like, ‘Hey, I’m losing money now. Like I’ve given my notice. I’m done. This is not my fault.’”

Again, she’s grateful for Scott’s company.

“Thankfully, we have a great partnership with Checkr. We’ve not had any challenges with turning those [background checks] around really quickly and have the appropriate level of monitoring.”

The post 6 ways to make your hiring process more efficient: Experts share their tips appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Even experienced hiring managers can benefit from interview skills training. Here’s how to build an effective interview training plan for hiring teams:

Persuade managers that they need training

Experienced hiring managers probably know how to build rapport with candidates and discern candidate potential. But, more complex interviewing techniques like combating biases, using structured interviews and avoiding cliche questions don’t always come with hiring experience.

Related: Structured interview questions: Tips and examples for hiring

Schedule a meeting with hiring managers and discuss the status of the hiring process, as well as how they approach interviewing. Give them some pointers on what they can improve. Research can give more weight to your recommendations. For example, if you want to convince a hiring manager to try structured interviews, you can present them with research that shows that structured interviews are better hiring tools.

Give hiring managers an interview preparation checklist

Create different interviewing checklists for hiring managers:

1. Can I talk about the company’s strategy, mission and structure?
2. Can I answer questions about perks and benefits?
3. Do I know what the job description involves?
4. Have I coordinated with my team?
5. Have I read candidates’ resumes?
6. Do I know what interview questions I’ll ask?
7. Are my interview questions reviewed by HR for legality?

Train interviewers

Train hiring managers to combat biases

The best way to combat biases during interviews is to be aware of them. This can’t be achieved overnight – it takes time and effort. A good start would be to help interviewers discover their hidden biases:

• Encourage them to take Harvard’s Implicit Association Test
• Show them educational videos like this one by the Royal Society, the UK national academy of science:

• Re-enact ‘bias experiments’ during a training session. For example, see how this YouTube video presents a version of an experiment that English psychologist Peter Cathcart Wason used in his study of confirmation bias:

• The New York Times also published that experiment as a puzzle game, giving you a detailed explanation after you’ve played.

Train hiring managers to understand structured interviews

Structured interviews are more objective and legally defensible than unstructured interviews. Interviewers who use this interview format should learn how to prepare behavioral questions, understand rating scales and score candidates consistently.

Here are some ideas to help interviewers understand structured interviews:

• Self-study. This structured interview guide has all the information hiring managers need to structure their interview process.

• Experiments. Advise interviewers to familiarize themselves with the interview scorecard format your company uses. If you use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), encourage interviewers to login and create their own scorecards.

• Practice. Mock interviews can help inexperienced hiring managers familiarize themselves with an interview setting. For example, hiring managers can practice brief note-taking to avoid being distracted by their notes during actual interviews.

Teach hiring managers about body language

Being more aware of candidates’ nonverbal cues can help interviewers refine their interviewing skills. For example, if candidates’ body language suggests they’re anxious, interviewers can make a conscious effort to put candidates at ease. It’s a good idea to train interviewers to control their own body language too. Even if hiring managers think candidates are unqualified, they shouldn’t let their body language negatively affect candidate experience.

Get professional interviewing help

Several companies offer training courses and seminars that can help your interviewers:

• InterviewEdge specializes in behavioral interviewing training
• Recruiting Toolbox offers custom-built interviewing workshops
• Select International helps interviewers improve their structured interview skills
• The Lou Adler Group provides workshops inspired by its performance-based hiring principles

Investing time and effort into interviewing skills training for managers will be worth it. As a result, your team will make better hires, promote your employer brand and improve your candidate experience.

The post How to conduct interview training for hiring managers 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.

Luckily, Workable’s applicant tracking system can help you do just that. Let’s look at six ways in which Workable’s features make a great first impression for your employer brand.

1. Keep candidates informed

A common gripe of candidates is that there’s a lack of communication throughout the hiring process – in other words, they feel like they’re being “ghosted”. In fact, 77% of jobseekers say they’ve been ghosted during the jobhunt according to a 2021 Indeed study.

Why is this important?

How do you feel when someone stands you up? Not very good, I’ll bet. That’s how candidates feel when you don’t keep them in the loop during the hiring process. That’s going to come back to bite you because they’ll share those negative candidate experiences throughout their network.

Suddenly, dozens or even hundreds of other candidates may think twice about applying for a job with your company. That’s not a good thing, especially when the Candidates Per Hire trend is lower than ever before. You need every candidate you can get.

How Workable helps

We get that you’re short staffed and your hiring team is overburdened with other work commitments. That’s why our Automated Actions function can be useful for you – you can set up automated emails to go out at different triggers in the hiring process. For example, an email goes out when an application is first filled out, an interview is scheduled, or even when a candidate needs to be informed that they aren’t being moved forward to the next stage.

Our in-app texting capabilities come in very handy as well – the ability to send and receive quick text messages are a boon for both candidates and the hiring team because it’s much easier to answer questions and address concerns right on the spot.

2. Put power in the hands of the candidate

Much of the time, the stages of the recruitment process – including schedules, communications, etc. – are dictated by the hiring team, not the candidate. For example, a “don’t call us, we’ll call you” situation is telling the candidate to go and sit in the waiting room until you’re ready to bring them in with an update.

Why is this important?

That puts the candidate in a powerless situation, which can make them feel dehumanized or undervalued in the hiring process. Much of that dehumanization comes from lack of control in the hiring process. Instead, give candidates some trust and power as you work with them.

If you make the process more of a two-way street, giving candidates the ability to schedule interviews and interactions in a way that fits their schedule and keeping the channels open for their feedback, that speaks volumes for what they’ll think about you and the role going forward. They’ll be thinking, “Wow, this company does care about me as a person. Could be a good place to work, after all.”

How Workable helps

While our Video Interviews feature may seem counterintuitive to this as it’s a one-way video interview process, it’s actually the opposite – you’re giving the candidate the freedom to complete that stage of the process at a time and place that works best for them.

Likewise, our self-scheduling functionality gives candidates the power to choose whatever time works best for them for an interview of any kind, be it with a recruiter, a hiring manager, or an executive. This is especially powerful when the candidate is already working and you don’t want to make them feel uncomfortable by scheduling a time during their workday.

3. Speed up the hiring process

The hiring process, of course, takes time. You don’t want to rush to a job offer – you want to be sure you’ve evaluated all the potential great hires who’ve applied to your roles, and then discuss internally about which ones to move forward on and which ones ultimately get the job. But there’s a flip side to doing all that – it lengthens the time to a job offer.

Why is this important?

Right now, it’s a candidate-driven market. That means candidates have the luxury of choosing jobs rather than jump through hoops to land that dream position. The Time to Fill trend is also dropping steadily every month and has been for a long time now. And 81% of candidates actually expect the whole thing to wrap up within two weeks.

If you make them wait longer than they’re willing to wait, guess what? Your candidate drop-out rate will increase. And it’ll also reflect poorly on your employer brand because, as stated earlier, they do get together and share horror stories about their jobhunt experiences.

How Workable helps

Again, the self-scheduling and asynchronous video interview tools are huge here. There’s a lot of time spent in the back-and-forth communications trying to find a good time for a conversation – especially in the screening stage when the pipeline is at its widest. That can be easily avoided with the self-scheduling option.

Likewise, one-way video interviews not only give candidates the opportunity to contribute something right away on the spot and – if you’re working on location – cuts down on any unnecessary commuting time for the candidate. And because they’re recorded responses, video interviews can also be reviewed at any time by any member of the hiring team – even during evenings or a lunch hour on the phone.

Plus, because you can centralize all communications in a single place in Workable’s ATS, you don’t need to chase opinions and feedback for days on end or spend resources and time trying to bring everyone together into the same room. Everything is contributed in one place, in written form, giving the opportunity to manage the recruitment process asynchronously between members of the hiring team.

4. Manage it all remotely

We live in this brave new world (which is seemingly renewing every month) where remote work has become standard practice. In fact, Workable’s 2020 survey found that the shift to remote work would be one of the biggest paradigm shifts coming out of the pandemic – and it’s true. Remote work is here to stay.

Why is this important?

This development has been welcomed by candidates with open arms. The focus on remote work has evolved into an overall emphasis on worker flexibility both in schedule and location – and companies will need to adapt to that. This includes adapting the hiring process to this new reality.

How Workable helps

Workable’s ATS has full end-to-end remote capabilities and every aspect of it – including signing contracts, assessments, background checks, and more – can be conducted virtually. This is a fantastic first impression for candidates who will appreciate the efforts by your company to ensure fully remote capabilities throughout the process.

5. Ensure a bias-free experience

We are humans; therefore, we’re subject to bias. It’s usually not deliberate – in fact, it’s unconscious in many ways – but it does lead to a selection process that favors some candidates over others based on personality, race, gender, age, and many other elements that affect hiring decisions.

And again, because we are humans, we can’t always count on ourselves and others to mitigate this bias. We need to standardize the process through technology.

Why is this important?

Biased hiring is rampant, and despite the work put into mitigating it, it’s still a problem. A lack of precautions sends the wrong message to the candidate, and also results in a less diverse workforce in your company – and in your leadership – that will be plainly visible to the diversity-conscious worker. Neither are good for the candidate experience.

How Workable helps

Our Assessments tool standardizes testing and scoring for personality, emotional intelligence, problem-solving, and critical thinking. This gives you a more objective, measurable perspective on a candidate’s soft skills to help you make a better decision on those hard-to-gauge elements of a candidate’s qualifications for a job.

Anonymous candidate surveys are also a valuable tool to track the demographics of candidates through your hiring pipeline. This gives you the opportunity to identify stages where bias may occur and rectify them.

Workable places a huge value on DEI initiatives, and we take that into account when designing our software. Have a look at the ways in which we can support your diversity, equity & inclusion goals.

6. Showcase your employee experience

Candidates often research companies before they decide to apply – and they’re especially interested in what it might be like to work for you before they start talking to you. This includes mission/vision statement, product/service, org structure, benefits, interview process. It’s the first impression that a candidate has of you and can set expectations going forward.

Why is this important?

It’s important in a number of ways. First, this enables the candidate to decide to apply based on what they learn about your company – and therefore save them time (and yours) if they decide your company isn’t the right fit for them.

Second, if they do decide to apply based on what they’ve learned, that frees up the time you’d normally spend on trying to sell a candidate on the job during a screening call or an interview, thereby speeding up the process.

How Workable helps

Jobseekers will go looking for your careers page when looking for a job, and that crucial first impression can make or break it for them. This is your opportunity to promote everything about what it’s like to work in your company.

Workable’s Careers Page Builder feature gives you all the tools you need to throw together a great careers page from scratch – and without requiring any real design expertise to boot. You can include your company mission and vision, describe your product/service, describe your organizational structure, share information on compensation and benefits, embed employee videos, and even details on the expected interview process.

Interested in learning more about how Workable can help you build a top-notch candidate experience? Give our ATS a free 15-day spin or request a demo with one of our representatives.

The post 6 ways Workable helps you create a great candidate experience appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Then in 2020, many people took their work home, and some moved from California to Kentucky.

But their job didn’t change, and the pandemic continued for too long, and now, no one wants to come back to the office. Just what do you do about salaries now that the employee can choose their own cost of living?

Since salary is top of mind for many active and potential jobseekers, it’s an important discussion.

So, let’s look at the options you have as an employer when considering salary structure:

Option 1: Ignore location when considering salaries

Historically, all salaries were local because everything was local. Your clients lived next door, and you couldn’t charge more than they could pay. Today, whether you are in manufacturing or app building, your clients could be anywhere across the globe.

So, it makes little sense to determine a salary based on where someone lives when their labor brings revenue from elsewhere. (There are, of course, strictly location-based jobs: plumbers, retail workers, dentists, etc.) But even a manufacturing plant could be supplying products for New York City just as easily as it supplies products for Nebraska.

With these thoughts in mind, you calculate salaries based on the value the person brings to the company – regardless of where they sit. Whether in an office or from home, it’s all about value.

This can be difficult to calculate – with a salesperson, it’s easy: it’s a percentage of how much they sell. It can also be easy for a manufacturing plant – how much product do they produce? But what about your HR person? Your IT person?

While good people in these positions bring value to the company, that value can be hard to calculate. Just how much money does your HR person save you by ensuring your company complies with employment laws? The answer could literally be millions. But, no one calculates it that way.

Fortunately, you don’t have to do too much fancy math to figure this out. Take your current salaries and advertise new positions based on those salaries. If qualified people apply, great! You’ve found the right compensation. If only unqualified people apply, bump it up. If you get 100 overqualified people applying, you’re probably offering too much.

Option 2: Location is everything

Google said they would vary salaries based on location as part of their return-to-work program. If you stay in California, you’ll make more money than if you relocate to Texas.

You can buy a much bigger house in Texas for a lot less money than your tiny San Francisco apartment, so people are pretty okay with that.

But, what if you currently operate out of Texas and say, “Everyone who wants to can work from home!” and then someone moves to San Francisco? Most companies will balk at increasing a salary when someone moves. It’s worth noting that Google’s headquarters are in a costly location (San Francisco) so they save money by following this plan.

Towns that have been inundated with big-city refugees are tired of watching their housing prices soar as big-salaried Californians snap up properties. It can be devastating for local groups.

Option 3: Think hybrid

The best solution is a hybrid one: you need to consider both location and national salaries for jobs – especially those in high demand that can be done remotely. While it may not seem fiscally responsible to pay more than you absolutely have to, the Great Resignation means that you may have a hard time keeping people if you’re not willing to be on the high end of compensation market rates.

People who need to be onsite – either full time or a couple of days a week – will need to live close by and you can look towards more localized salaries. People who can literally live anywhere won’t want to take a lower salary just because they’ve moved away.

Be very clear about your salaries when hiring. And be honest about remote working opportunities. Candidates don’t like the bait-and-switch technique where you advertise the position as “remote” but then switch that to in-office or even hybrid.

And, as far as keeping costs down, remember, if an employee is working 100% remotely, you don’t need to pay for space for that employee. You’re saving money on office costs – pay that forward in the form of higher salaries.

Shifting salaries, shifting locations

This may all become a moot point as local market rates start to disappear – at least for jobs that can be done remotely. Even if you require your accountant to work onsite, you may find that you’ll have to pay the same amount as someone in a wealthier area would. Right now, salaries are changing, and we’ll see how it plays out.

And while people clamor loudly for remote work opportunities, there is no guarantee that those preferences are fixed. When it’s just you and your spouse working from home, it can be pleasant. Add three kids and a dog, and you just might look forward to the office every day.

Related: What about salary transparency? See Suzanne’s take on that as well.

And people are moving – from California, Illinois, and New York (among others) to Idaho, Florida and Texas. As things shift around, the most important thing is for you to pay attention. If you struggle to hire or retain staff, you’ll need to change how you do things. If you’re open with your salary ranges and working conditions and get plenty of applicants, you’re doing it right.

Remember, if you wait to adjust until some expert tells you what you should do, you’re too late. And that may mean paying based on location and it may mean paying on skills only. You’ll have to pay attention and get ahead accordingly.

The post Salary based on location versus pay for value: which is better? appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

It was a tough decision in the end, of course, but that now means you have four high-quality candidates that you could consider for another, similar role in your organization.

The benefits of resurfacing past candidates

The value of resurfacing past candidates may be already clear, but let’s quickly walk through those tangible benefits one by one:

1. Candidates are already pre-vetted

The candidates in your system have already been evaluated – especially the finalists – even if it was for another, different job. Your hiring team is already familiar with them – and notes can be shared with new hiring team members. In short, these candidates are already pre-vetted, enabling you and your team to get a head start on evaluating them for a new role.

2. Your time to hire is quicker

Because candidates come pre-vetted, the time it takes from that first application to the first day of the new job will be markedly shorter. You may not even have to post the job ad again – just start reaching out to those past candidates and close the loop on the whole process.

3. It can be a better candidate experience

It’s a great experience for candidates, too. Jobseekers who are contacted for new opportunities with you will be encouraged to know that they won’t have to go through the whole evaluation period again from scratch. That’s very attractive to candidates exploring multiple opportunities or are weary of the job search.

Plus, it’s always nice to know you’re wanted. That’s a powerful message to a candidate.

4. It saves time and money

The recruitment process can be time-consuming and expensive. All the costs associated with posting a job ad and other tangible expenses, combined with the number of hours invested in the process by members of the hiring team, can add up.

You’ve seen our tutorial on how to calculate the ROI of an ATS. Some of those expenses can apply here as well to show the ROI of resurfacing past candidates. There’s a huge amount of time and resources saved by recontacting candidates you’re already familiar with.

5. You know they’re interested

These are candidates who have already gone through the process with you. They’re already more familiar with your company now, and if you’ve communicated your side well, they clearly want to work for you. Otherwise, they wouldn’t apply, right?

The risks of resurfacing past candidates

With every new solution, new challenges arise. There can be risks in reconnecting with past candidates. Let’s go through those risks one by one.

1. Reconnecting can be awkward

It’s just like when you break up with someone – and then you text them later to check in on them and see about going on another date. Awkward, right?

The same applies here. The ego of a rejected candidate may be bruised and they may feel put off by the fact that you’ve just contacted them again for another role.

Fair enough. Put yourself in their shoes. You’d feel like you were the “second choice’ because the other person didn’t work out or something like that. Not good for a candidate experience, and doesn’t bode well for your employer brand.

2. The new job is ‘less’ than the old one

It’s possible that the new opening you’re reaching out to candidates about is at a lower pay grade or requires less experience than the original job they applied for. That’s not a great message to send to a candidate: “You’re not good enough for that role, but perhaps this lower-paid, less interesting job in the same company will be a better fit for you.”

Would you go for an opportunity like that? Probably not.

3. There are data privacy issues

Thanks to social media, outbound marketing efforts, and other developments, data privacy legislation – and awareness – is popping up everywhere. At best, people can be wary and feel invaded when contacted out of the blue. At worst, they may be suspicious as to how you got their contact information and challenge you on that point even publicly. Again, not a good look for your brand.

The best practices of resurfacing past candidates

OK, now that we’ve been through the good and the bad – let’s go to the best practices. How can you do it in a way that wins the best candidates to your team? Let’s start:

1. Preempt the potential awkwardness

Every interaction with a candidate – even though they’re not yet an employee – impacts their impression of you and your employer brand. Everything counts – your timely messaging, your friendly, engaging manner, the time in between stages, setting expectations, the whole bit.

Making a strong positive impression on the candidate may actually increase their willingness to work for you. If you end up selecting someone else for the job, the candidate may be disappointed but responsive when you tell them you’d love to keep their resume on file for potential future openings with the company.

2. Clarify that it’s not a “rejection”

No one likes to feel rejected – whether you’re turning down an expression of affection, a project proposal or, of course, a job application. It may be a candidate market right now, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting when you tell a candidate, “Sorry – you were great, but we went with this other person instead.”

It does matter how you do it. You can outright reject the candidate, and they’ll walk away in a huff, and you’ll never hear from them again. Or you can turn it around and explain that they aren’t actually being rejected – it’s just that they weren’t the right fit for this specific role that you’re hiring for. But you would love to keep their application on file because your company will be opening up more roles very soon (see above).

Related: Learn how to reject candidates without burning bridges

3. Allow candidates to self-select in

When you’re hiring at scale or turning away dozens of candidates in the screening/first interview stage, you may not have the time or opportunity to engage each and every one of them using the above two tips.

That’s where you can include an option in the application form giving candidates the opportunity to self-select in for future opportunities with you. This can be a checkbox, a verbal agreement, or something else. Note that this may be a requirement in some jurisdictions due to privacy laws.

4. Look at notes about candidates

A good practice for members of the hiring team is to keep clear and consistent notes on candidates after an interaction with a candidate be it an email, interview, screening call, or another form of communication. If those notes are comprehensive, that’s where you should look to get a good understanding of whether candidates are interested in a specific role with your company or in being part of your team overall.

Read more: How to document interview feedback for your hiring team

Maybe you’re looking to fill a similar role (i.e. another opening in sales) or you’re hiring in another area altogether – one way or another, these notes will help you hugely in predicting their interest in pursuing a new opportunity with you.

5. Engage only the top-shelf candidates

Finally, you don’t want to give false hope to those middle-of-the-road candidates who probably wouldn’t have gotten the job anyway. If you do that, you’re wasting their time – and yours as well. That leads to a poor experience and could reflect badly on your brand as an employer.

It’s better to only reach out to those star candidates who you sincerely think will be great fits for the new role. When you’re looking at those resurfaced candidates, ask yourself if you’d hire them on the spot. If the answer is yes, reach out to them. If it’s no, then move on.

6. Set clear messaging and expectations

This best practice is probably the most important. You don’t ever want to send a clumsy message to a jilted candidate and leave them with even more questions than answers. It’s worse if you skip over the reality that you rejected them the first time around.

Instead, be clear in your language so the candidate has all the information they want and need. In a friendly email, you can cover the following points, for instance:

• Your previous relationship – include quick details about the previous job, who they communicated with, and the conclusion of that process
• Why you’re reaching out to them now – include information about how they opted in for future opportunities and that you have a new role they might be interested in
• Details about the new job – include job description, who the position reports to/works with, salary (if applicable), and other related details
• Why they’re a great fit for the new role – this one is especially important. This is also your opportunity to address issues around lower pay grades, different responsibilities, and other question marks the candidate might have.
• A timeline – ideally with preset dates for interviews and a decision.

Here’s an example of how all of that can be addressed in a short, punchy email:

“Hi [candidate], I hope this email finds you well. We talked with you previously about job X, and you expressed your interest in staying in touch.

While we ended up going with another candidate for job X, we’d love to meet with you again about job Y in our company. I’ll be honest – it’s at a lower pay grade/has different responsibilities than job X, but there are elements of this new job that we think you’d be very excited about.

The job description is attached, and the role will report directly to our CMO. We’re looking to make a hiring decision by Thursday, January 10.

If you’re interested – and we hope you are – please book a time with me at [calendar link].”

Remember, you’re both professionals talking about a business arrangement in the end. You’re both mutually interested parties; if you go about it right, you’ll attract those candidates and hopefully win them over in quick time.

Getting candidates for a job is no longer as simple as posting a job ad. You can now market your company and role to them, you can source new candidates, and you can get back in touch with candidates who are already back in your system.

The post Starved for workers? Resurface your top candidates from past job openings appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

And there’s a lot of work to be done yet. One of Amy’s core objectives going into 2022 is to maintain employee retention and engagement while at the same time tripling the size of the business throughout the year.

In her words: “We’re going to have some enormous growth.”

In the midst of all of that is keeping her team members – both current and future – motivated.

This means, she says, “investing in all of our people to ensure that our culture is one that everybody’s super excited to be a part of and where they can grow their careers and do some of the best work of their lives, and have a lot of fun in the process.”

Doing that in a high-volume tech hiring space is a big undertaking – but she’s succeeding in the venture with a combination of expertise and street smarts.

On surviving the Big Quit

One of the significant developments of 2021 is, of course, the Great Resignation in the United States. Quit rates in the country are at an unprecedented high – reaching as high as 3% of the total working population with upwards of four million workers handing in their notice every month from July 2021 to November 2021.

Add to that an increasingly loud voice among younger workers about their disillusion with current work culture – so succinctly and blatantly on display in Reddit’s Antiwork community (which employers do need to pay attention to).

While obvious, this does signal a clear shift in the talent market. The onus is no longer on candidates to prove their worth to an employer; it’s now on the employer to position themselves as a place where people want to work. So, the question bears asking: what’s the employee value proposition that you can offer to make your job opportunity more attractive to a prospective employee?

For Amy, that value prop includes the working environment that you’re creating for them.

“I think the trend in 2022 is that people are going to look for companies that want to invest in them,” Amy says. “They’re going to look for companies that are flexible and aren’t going to require that they go into an office that they don’t want to go into, that will continue to afford them the flexibility that they’ve all grown to appreciate.”

And this isn’t going to end anytime soon. In fact, it marks a paradigm shift that employers need to adapt to. The Great Discontent report released in mid-2021 shows that flexible work options is high up the list of things that candidates value in a job, with 37.5% of US workers saying it’s one value proposition that would attract them to a new opportunity.

And SMBs that think about their employees first are the ones that’ll get ahead in the new talent game, says Amy.

“Companies are starting to realize how important engagement and investment is in their people,” she explains. “And those are the companies that are winning. And so if you were to talk to those companies, they would probably report lower than market averages in terms of loss. And the reason is because they have the formula. They understand what they need to do.”

Amy does offer a caveat – this needs to be done in a way that supports both ends of the equation.

“[Employers] have to create a trusting environment and a supportive environment and still be able to drive productivity and all the things that are core and critical to the business in an effective way. So I realize that there’s a balancing act here. Employers want to be able to maximize the return from the people.”

There’s tangible proof of the ROI in all this. A 2017 Gallup study finds that highly engaged employees lead to a 17% increase in company productivity, and 24% less turnover in companies in high-turnover sectors.

Amy doubles down on that message – because of that clear ROI, companies need to put in the work to meet those new expectations in the talent market.

“[That’s the] balancing act for 2022 that people really have to figure out.”

On investing in your workers

So how exactly do you ‘invest’ in your people? One area surging in popularity in 2022 is learning and development. In a survey commissioned by Workable and TalentLMS, 91% of tech workers want more learning opportunities from their current employers and 58% cited “skills development” as one criteria in choosing who they want to work for. It’s also a top motivator for tech employees.

And there are other ways to attract and engage employees – Amy shares a few more with us.

The value of connection

Amy stressed several times the importance of ensuring that workers feel connected to the company, whether that’s in a remote environment or otherwise.

“First of all, you have a full-time person dedicated to building the community, whether it’s different activities, whether it’s different communication strategies; there’s a number of different things that have to happen in order for that to be done effectively.”

We’re humans after all – the sense of community in the workplace can be a powerful thing.

The value of compensation

In the above-mentioned Great Discontent worker survey, 63% of workers cited salary as the reason why they’re looking elsewhere for a new job – and 62% say it’s the top factor in their decision to move to a new job.

It’s clear: companies must think about compensation in their value proposition.

“I do think you have to pay people competitively for the market, for their job. And so if you’re underpaying people and you’ve gotten away with it so far, you probably won’t continue to get away with it because people are starting to realize what they’re worth because of how hot the market is.”

This doesn’t mean giving raises across the board, she cautions. It’s more about fair market value.

“You have to pay people what the market suggests they’re worth or they’ll find a company that will.”

The value of people

Ultimately, whether it’s salary, learning & development, or connectivity, what people officers need to be thinking about is the ‘people’ factor. Employees are people too.

“If you’re treating people the way they want to be treated and they feel connected to your mission and connected to the business, they aren’t leaving. People that are leaving because they don’t feel connected. They don’t feel appreciated and they feel like there’s better opportunities for them.”

When your employees take pride in what they do and feel part of a larger mission, that can be even more motivating than a straight-up higher salary – if you’re one SMB that may be challenged in your ability to offer higher wages, this can be a good workaround.

On proactively sourcing candidates

Now, let’s get to the other challenge of the Great Resignation – the dwindling number of candidates that we’re seeing in our Hiring Pulse data and elsewhere. When you take a month’s candidates per hire and compare it with the average CPH of the previous three months, there was a negative trend in that data every single month in 2021:

It’s doubly a challenge for companies like the one Amy works at when high-volume hiring is part of the overall company strategy.

“We don’t have much of an employer brand [because] the company’s only three years old. And so our lower candidate pipeline, I would attribute to not having a strong employer brand because we’re a new company.”

But that means the work is cut out for Relay Payment’s recruitment team, which has resorted to fresh strategies to bring new candidates into the hiring process under Amy’s leadership – at high volume too.

“We get a lot of hires from referrals. I would say 30% of our hires in 2021 were referral-based,” Amy says, adding that they offer bonuses to team members who have successfully referred a candidate who ultimately gets hired.

The lack of a strong, recognizable employer brand is a challenge facing many SMBs, and Amy is well aware of that. She has ways to get around that.

“Our recruiters have had to work really hard to source candidates proactively because people don’t know us well enough to have a big application pipeline.”

So how do you do that? A ton of stuff, says Amy, who cites LinkedIn Recruiter – which she admits is expensive – as a tool to get the word out about a job, and external recruiters when they need to make a niche hire or when time is of the essence. Searching for candidates in Google using related keywords is also an effective strategy.

On growing the team that grows teams

But that’s a lot of work, of course. Amy has a solution for that: Hire more recruiters.

“I actually just doubled the size of my recruiting team in the last week,” she says. “I hired my first dedicated recruiter last summer. I hired a second recruiter in October [2021] and I just hired two [in early January 2022] that will start [in February]. So I’ve gone from one recruiter to four in like eight months.”

The reason being – if you have more team members dedicated to the specific goals in recruitment, you’ll draw more applicants for your open roles.

“The volume of people that you’ve got building your brand and sourcing and building pipelines will also help generate an enormous amount of activity as compared to having fewer people.”

“The volume of people that you’ve got building your brand and sourcing and building pipelines will also help generate an enormous amount of activity as compared to having fewer people.”

Anyone in sales and marketing will understand Amy’s thinking process here. If you want to see increased conversions (i.e. hires), you not only have to bring in the right kind of candidate via referrals and online search – you also have to bring in more candidates.

“For us, it’s about bigger pipelines. We want bigger top of funnel. So how do you invest to get your top of funnel big enough, such that if you have 90 of a specific type of role that you want to hire in a year? [This] is what we’re doing with our AE team. We’re going to add 90 AEs [in 2022].”

And even with the candidates-per-hire metric steadily dropping month over month in 2021 and 2022, any SMB worth their salt – including Relay Payments – will want to have a healthy selection of candidates for any given role. Amy is vividly aware of that.

“If you do the math to back into 90 hires, what do you need your funnel to be? It’s gotta be enormous.”

That’s hiring and retention at scale in Amy’s world. What’s yours? Share your workplace story with us and you may see it get published!

The post Hiring at scale in tech for 2022: A top CPO shares her tips appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

1. Employees have options

Take this story: CEO said, “If you want to work from home, go work somewhere else,” so most of my team and I did just that.

The writer details how even people hired to work remotely were told they had one year to move their families to a town with an office. The employees responded by quitting in great numbers.

Is this a true story? Maybe. The number of people who quit may be an exaggeration, but it may not be. With more than 60,000 upvotes, though, it’s clear that this resonates with people.

This is a case where the CEO thought that the employees would fold and do whatever the company said. It turns out your power over your employees is limited. With lots of people hiring (the writer says he found a new job with a 50 percent pay bump), you have even less power than you did a few years ago. Don’t make an ultimatum thinking your employees will back down. They have options they didn’t use to have and a whole lot more guts.

If in-office work is important to your business, ask your employees how to go about it. Would quarterly all-hands meetings work? Monthly regional get-togethers? If it won’t, accept the turnover.

2. Insults are not the way to go

There’s this sign, for instance.

Whether this was put up by an out-of-touch owner or an angry employee, who knows? But, combined with the glut of “no one wants to work” signs and people struggling to fill positions, it’s not a smart thing to insult employees.

Or this handout from McDonald’s that reminded employees that “tax returns don’t last forever.” Yes, this is a true principle, but it’s insulting to your employees. The last thing you want to do is insult the very people you want to work for you.

You may think your employees just need to know that it will be harder to find a job again if they quit, but it comes off as condescending.

3. Don’t keep secrets

Not explaining things can also cause problems. “In the absence of information, people make stuff up,” says HR consultant Brenda Neckvatal. So, assume that when someone has a ridiculous complaint, it’s not that they are stupid or whiny, it’s that they don’t know what is going on.

Take this tweet from Jon C. Stone.

One reason people insist that you use the proper channels to change things is because they have control of the proper channels and they’re confident it won’t work

— Jon Stone (@joncstone) June 8, 2020

It’s now circulating on /r/antiwork and drawing considerable attention.

First, we need to acknowledge that in bad businesses this is absolutely true. But, in good ones, systems exist to make things better, but your employees may not understand why.

For instance, if Jon comes to his manager and says, “Look, I’ve done the research, and the market rate for this position is 10% higher,” he may feel like his manager is putting him off by saying, “I need to talk to HR.”

But, here’s what the employee doesn’t understand and you can explain to him that the manager doesn’t control the budget, jobs vary greatly even within the same title, and the company can’t adjust Jon’s salary without adjusting a bunch of other people’s as well.

Plus, it may be time to pull out the books and show that there just isn’t money left. Not all companies have fatcat CEOs that can give up a million without blinking. For companies with under $10 million in revenue, the CEO earns under $200,000. He may still be angry after you explain, but at least he’ll know.

Another place where behind the scenes processes can make things look insensitive or downright mean is with layoffs. This person said he was laid off because he didn’t meet his boss’s vision.

This is a clear case where there could be explanations, suggestions for improvement, and perhaps some coaching. But, the manager chose to use a vague term like “vision.”

4. Listen to your employees

One very important note about listening to employees: Don’t do employee engagement surveys if you are planning to ignore the feedback you receive. This person posted an obscene rant on an employee survey (click at your own risk), and again and it demonstrates the frustrated feeling employees have.

If you’re not planning to make any changes based on the results from an employee survey, do not do the survey. It’s bad to ignore your employees’ feelings, but it’s even worse to ask them about their feelings and then ignore them.

You likely won’t be able to resolve the above employee’s concerns – because the damage appears to be done. But, for every employee that spews vitriol, there are undoubtedly others who feel neglected and abused. Listen to them.

At a bare minimum, tell your employees what you learned and what things you will address. No company can solve all employee complaints (nor should they – sometime employees are unreasonable), but you can let people know that you hear them.

Don’t spend your life at /r/antiwork. But keep in mind that there are humans here who are hurting. And even if you run the best company ever, they influence your employees. So, keep an eye out, make changes, and communicate with your employees. Honesty truly is the best policy.

In short: people – including disgruntled employees – will be more likely to accommodate imperfections if they understand that you are trying.

The post 4 lessons for employers from Reddit’s Antiwork community appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

An applicant tracking system (ATS) streamlines the hiring process by automating and organizing each step along the way, making it easier to connect with qualified candidates more efficiently. Using an ATS benefits your talent acquisition strategy in the following ways:

1. Automate boring and time-consuming administrative tasks

One of the greatest challenges of finding new employees is the sheer amount of work required. It’s far more involved than simply reading resumes and making a list of questions to ask during an interview; it involves posting listings for job seekers to find, follow-up messaging, interview scheduling, and other tedious tasks that are important but don’t feel like a productive use of time.

2. Improve collaboration and easily involve relevant people in the hiring process

Due to the many tasks involved, it’s fairly common for multiple people or departments to be involved in the hiring process. Aside from the administrative aspect, including relevant managers and team members in the decision-making process is an effective way to protect and promote company culture, as well. ATS software offers a collaborative space to evaluate applicants, offer feedback, and more.

3. Say goodbye to wasted time on non-relevant candidates

Correctly identifying top talent takes time. There are so many different facets to what makes a candidate a high-quality hire — do you want the smartest person in that stack of resumes if they lack the ability to communicate effectively? Is the most experienced candidate a good fit if they’re incapable of accepting feedback? An ATS can help you strike the right balance between cognitive ability and personality with assessments that offer a deeper look at candidate data.

4. Reduce recruitment cycle and time-to-hire

Streamlining the recruitment cycle and reducing time-to-hire helps minimize the distraction of hiring efforts and maximizes productivity. Collecting and assessing recruiting metrics helps deliver actionable insights about your hiring process, and can highlight potential bottlenecks or recurring patterns. Using an ATS to collect and report data can help answer valuable questions about how your business is handling hiring and what improvements could be made to speed up the process.

5. Streamline your hiring process and make it predictable

Regardless of how refined your talent acquisition strategy is, the process of finding, processing, interviewing and onboarding ideal candidates involves a lot of moving pieces. Writing a job description, posting job openings on social media, scheduling interviews, and guiding new team members through the onboarding process could easily involve four or five different departments. It’s easy for confusion to crop up along the way. One of the most significant ATS benefits is organization; the system ensures that no follow-up email or interview appointment is forgotten and helps create a replicable routine around fulfilling hiring needs.

6. Scale your hiring pipeline without losing your sanity

Growth is good for business and managing an abundance of potential candidates is a nice “problem” to have. ATS software can create and scale a talent pipeline strategy so that you can source, attract, and screen hundreds of candidates more efficiently and effectively.

7. Supercharge employer branding

Although the main objective of the hiring process is for prospects to impress you, the reverse is true as well—presenting your company well can help attract top talent. Having a branded job board, customized emails, and a polished look for all collateral and communication that relates to recruitment assures candidates that your business is established, professional, and trustworthy.

8. Offer a better candidate experience

The functionality of an ATS can help streamline the hiring process from the candidate’s perspective, as well. Prospects can initiate the application process via mobile or desktop, receive follow-up communication that keeps them informed, and offers greater flexibility in scheduling interviews. Using an ATS benefits your business and its prospective employees by making the process more convenient and keeping all parties informed along the way.

9. Put an end to hiring bias

Creating uniformity around the talent acquisition process helps prevent hiring bias. An ATS ensures that everyone is going through the same steps, which protects candidates (and employers) from the risk of unconscious bias. Eliminating unconscious bias in the hiring process provides the opportunities that come with selecting from a larger pool of talent.

10. Measure, report and improve

Good data helps drive better decisions. The ability to track and report recruiting analytics can help you refine the hiring process and improve your quality of hire. Tracking metrics that relate to time of hire, candidate sources, and diversity surveys helps accurately gauge the productivity and performance of your hiring process.

11. Make compliance easy

Build inclusive hiring processes and demonstrate compliance with EEO/OFCCP/GDPR guidelines with ATS tools that optimize job posts, expand your hiring reach, and help navigate local, national, and international regulations. Automated tools and reports take the administrative effort out of compliance.

12. Sourcing tools

Job boards are an important piece of the hiring puzzle, but an ATS can help expand your reach even further by using AI and public data to search, sort, and deliver qualified candidates before your job listing is even posted. Reach passive and existing candidates as well as valuable prospects with instant sourcing.

13. Integration with job boards

Attract more candidates with automated posting to hundreds of job boards and social media platforms. One click can help you instantly reach millions of prospects without the time investment of finding, visiting, and posting job openings on sites across the internet. Diversify your applicant pool and stand out in a crowded hiring space with job board integration features.

Ready to discover your own ATS benefits? Let’s grow together. See Workable in action.

The post 13 ATS benefits and what they mean for your business appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Here, in a nutshell, are the rulings on each case:

In Biden v Missouri, the Supreme Court held that the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) does have the authority to require all health care workers at institutions that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding to get COVID-19 vaccinations, unless they get medical or religious exemptions. If they fail to do either, then they could be fired.

Perhaps the more talked-about case, National Federation of Businesses et al v Department of Labor, Occupational, Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) et al, led to the opposite conclusion. The OSHA mandate required that employers with at least 100 employees had to require their employees to either receive COVID-19 vaccines or test weekly and wear masks.

Why such diametrically opposite rulings for such similar mandates? It all came down to whether the entity in question had the authority to mandate the vaccine. Regarding the OSHA mandate, the Court ruled OSHA did not have the authority, because, the Occupational Safety and Health Act (which created the OSH-Administration) “empowers the Secretary [of Labor] to set workplace safety standards, not broad public health measures.”

The Court further reasoned that “Although COVID-19 is a risk that occurs in many workplaces, it is not an occupational hazard in most … COVID–19 can and does spread at home, in schools, during sporting events, and everywhere else that people gather. That kind of universal risk is no different from the day-to-day dangers that all face from crime, air pollution, or any number of communicable diseases.”

Therefore, per the Court’s reasoning, the OSHA mandate would “significantly expand” OSHA’s authority beyond the limits set by Congress in the OSH-Act.

While multiple states argued that DHHS did not have the scope to issue such a mandate, the Court noted that “healthcare facilities that wish to participate in Medicare and Medicaid have always been obligated to satisfy a host of conditions that address the safe and effective provision of healthcare, not simply sound accounting.”

How then, does the US Department of Health and Human Services have the authority to issue and enforce a similar mandate? In this case, the Court cited funding requirements. The hospitals in question receive Medicare and/or Medicaid funding. The DHHS has always had authority to set conditions both for funding and for “the safe and effective provision of healthcare”.

So what do you do as an employer now?

What do these rulings mean for employers? Unless your business is a hospital receiving Medicare or Medicaid funding, the ruling in that case (Biden v Missouri) will have no impact.

Similarly, if your business has fewer than 100 employees, neither ruling impacts your business.

If you are an employer with more than 100 employees, then your business is no longer subject to the OSH-Admin mandate.

That does not mean that you do not have an obligation to take reasonable steps to protect your employees from COVID exposure. Vaccination or other safety protocols might well be necessary to achieve those ends, in which case you might still be obligated to take the same measures, but OSHA will have to jump through more hoops if it wants to take action against your company on that basis.

Need more support? Check out our mandatory vaccination and workplace safety policy template, which is free for you to use and customize for your own organization.

Janette S. Levey, ‘The Employer’s Lawyer’, has over 20 years of legal experience, more than 10 of which she has spent in Employment Law. She is licensed in NJ and NY and also works with employers anywhere in the country on any federal employment law issues to ensure that employers are in the best position possible to avoid litigation, audits, employee relations problems, and the attendant, often exorbitant costs. Feel free to visit Janette’s website or to contact Janette by email, janette@janetteleveylaw.com or phone, 732-902-0728. 

The post US Supreme Court’s mixed ruling on vaccine mandates: What do you do now? appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Note: Workable’s Hiring Pulse also identifies a drop in candidates per hire:

Some companies and industries are certainly faring better than others, but the hundreds of customers and HR leaders I’ve talked to throughout this year all agree – this job market is unlike anything they’ve seen before.

Fortunately, after a year of this upturned hiring market, there may finally be some glimmers of hope. No, it’s not that employees aren’t going to stop quitting. The latest quit numbers are still at record highs and those types of numbers don’t just fall off overnight.

An opportunity for employers

There might just be something like a “Great Return” in our future. Meaning, the tide will turn – at least somewhat – back to employers’ favor and a portion of those millions of workers who quit are going to come back to their old jobs, industries, and careers.

That’s what I and other company leaders are thinking – and hoping for – right now. And while it’s too early to know for sure how it’ll happen, lots of employees who quit this year will return (or be willing to return) under the right conditions. Most of those conditions have to do with aspects of the employee experience that were already outdated or broken.

So, based on what I know about the employee experience and how it’s played a role this past year, these are the three conditions I can see bringing talent back after the Great Resignation:

1) Company culture issues are being addressed

First off, the company culture issues that drove employees away in the first place have been addressed.

Health concerns, toxic team members, poor management, low pay, employee burnout, lack of career growth, lack of diversity and inclusion – these are all top reasons workers have been quitting their jobs during the pandemic. Notice that these are all factors that companies can change and improve as long as they make a real effort.

Whether that means creating new systems and policies, investing in management and skills training, and/or letting go of toxic team members, now’s the time to face these issues head on or else continue to experience talent struggles.

For employees who were otherwise satisfied with their role but “rage-quit” due to one of these culture issues, you can likely lure them back by focusing on fixing what was broken and creating a positive culture where they can thrive. Employees who haven’t completely abandoned their careers might find their way back.

2) Work-life flexibility is now supported

Secondly, employees are getting the work-life flexibility they need in their lives, in location and schedule.

The shift to remote work last year turned out to be a really great setup for many workers and just as productive as in-office work. Employees got so accustomed to it that many decided to quit instead of give up working from home.

It’s important to note though, that it’s not that people wanted to trade in office life with working at home in their pajamas. What they really wanted was the flexibility and freedom that remote work affords them. No more long daily commutes, more opportunity to be with and care for loved ones, choice in where, when and how they work, all while saving money and escaping from office distractions and micromanagement.

Companies that give employees this freedom and flexibility (and set employees up for success through things like remote-friendly internal processes and a remote stipend) will definitely see more workers returning and staying than those that don’t. You can already see companies recognizing this by the uptick in remote jobs and companies going fully remote or hybrid.

3) Comp is now more attractive

And finally – compensation packages and perks are actually competitive and enticing for employees, as well as meaningful and inclusive.

Being underpaid and given odd random perks like ping pong tables and gift cards (or nothing at all) were sadly the norm before the pandemic. And since employers have long held bargaining power in the job market, workers had no choice but to accept it.

Well, the tables have completely turned and candidates now have the upperhand. Demand is so high for workers nowadays that there’s a growing trend of candidates ghosting companies because what companies are offering – in pay, benefits, hours, or other conditions of the job – simply isn’t competitive.

To get workers to return, it’s time to offer pay that actually goes above and beyond market rates and give personalized perks that employees would actually enjoy.

How to offer competitive pay doesn’t need explaining, but perks are more complicated since every employee has unique needs and preferences. A great solution is to offer one or more flexible stipends to help set your company’s compensation package apart.

For example, you can offer a monthly health & wellness stipend that employees can use however they want to support their own wellness journey from emotional, mental, physical, spiritual, etc. This variety of health support is crucial in times like these and leading companies like Microsoft, Webflow, EventBrite, and Investopedia all offer wellness stipends to their employees.

Another idea is to offer a remote stipend that covers employee costs for everything employees would get in an office such as food, internet, technology, productivity, and learning, where they get to choose everything themselves. With more employees working remotely and expecting the company they work for to be fair and inclusive, this would both surprise and entice workers who are searching for greener pastures.

Conclusion

There’s no denying that we’re in an era where employees are seeking change in their work lives and are more than willing to pursue it. For many employees who have decided to leave their jobs for different career paths or for early retirement, that’s exactly the right move for them.

However, I’m willing to bet that for the large number of workers who quit that don’t fall under those two categories, many will make a return to what they left behind under the right conditions.

If your company addresses these three conditions above, you’ll be a top contender in recruiting the talent that’s so difficult to hire these days and also be more successful at keeping the talent you already have.

Amy Spurling is the CEO of Compt.io, an employee stipends platform that offers flexibility in perks and benefits for employees.

The post A ‘Great Return’? 3 conditions that may bring talent back appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

We’ve seen a volatile transition from one presidential administration to another. We’ve seen the increased awareness of issues in the form of Black Lives Matter, Stop Asian Hate, and other socially dynamic movements. We’re still navigating a terrifying virus.

And what’s happening among all this is that we’re experiencing an upheaval of the way we operate as a society – both at home and in the workplace.

What’s also happening – and something you’re likely noticing as an employer – is unprecedentedly high levels in job quit rates in the United States, coupled with equally striking levels in job openings. This graph from the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) speaks volumes:

People in the United States aren’t merely changing jobs. They’re bowing out of the traditional workforce altogether. It signals a discontent unseen in our history.

“The Great Resignation” is no longer a prediction; it’s a current reality, and it’s evolved to a Great Discontent. It’s becoming more challenging to motivate people to stay in their jobs, and harder to attract candidates to new roles. Data from the Workable network confirms this as well.

We see this, and we want to help you – the employer – overcome this challenge. After all, you need your people.

So we surveyed 750 people in the US – some employed, some self-employed, some unemployed, all more or less employable – to understand the most important factors influencing their career priorities. And now, we have results.

We identified four major themes in the dataset:

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.

Major takeaways include the following:

• Want to attract people? Increase the salary, and build up the perks and benefits. 63.4% say it’s the reason why they’re looking for other opportunities, and 62.2% say salary, perks and benefits represent the top factor influencing their decision whether to accept a new job.
• Build strong teams with people who work well together. Relationships with colleagues is the number-one most attractive factor about a potential new employer (37.1%), and a major area for improvement at their current employer (31.3%).
• Make it worthwhile for your workers to stay. Seven out of 10 (70.7%) respondents say they are either actively or passively looking for work, and 54% started looking just in the last half year.
• Pay attention to your younger workers. More than two out of five (42.8%) of those aged 21-29 say they’re actively looking for a new job, compared with just one quarter (24.7%) of those aged 50-59.
• Establish remote work and especially flexible schedules as a permanent policy. Both are highly valued by workers, with 58.2% saying flexible schedules are important to them – particularly because it’s easier to integrate personal and professional lives.
• Keep an eye on the potential disconnect between you and your employees in the importance of flexible work. Nearly half think their employer will ultimately return to in-office (44.7%) and set schedules (46.8%).
• Support your employees’ home lives as well as their work lives – especially if they’re women. Females are more than twice as likely as males to cite family priorities as the reason why they’re not working (39.4% vs. 19.3%).

Read more: check out our in-depth analysis of what matters most to workers in the United States in a job. Or stay tuned for the next excerpt from our Great Discontent survey report for the US.

Interested in seeing what’s going on at the other side of the pond? Check out our UK version of the Great Discontent report in its entirety.

The post Great Discontent: It’s time to evolve your US talent attraction appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

We’ve seen a volatile exit of the UK from the European Union in the form of Brexit, combined with a terrifying virus, both of which have shaken our society at the foundation – leading to economic and social upheaval at home and in the workplace.

What’s also happening – and something you’re likely noticing as an employer – is a mass talent exodus in the country, with one study by Workable partner Personio finding that four out of 10 UK employees will leave their job in the next six to 12 months.

This puts the onus on you, the employer, to take action, and quickly, says Personio CEO Hanno Renner:

“As businesses look to emerge from the crisis in a position of strength and turn the tide on the costs of a potential talent exodus, they now need to come up with a long-term people strategy. By prioritising their people and taking a more strategic approach to people management, employers can prevent an impending talent drain and drive their business performance as well as the wider economy.”

“The Great Resignation” is no longer a prediction. it’s a current reality, and it’s evolved to a Great Discontent. It’s becoming more challenging to motivate people to stay in their jobs, and harder to attract candidates to new roles. Data from the Workable network confirms this as well.

We see this, and we want to help you – the employer – overcome this challenge. After all, you need your people.

So we surveyed 500 people in the UK – some employed, some self-employed, some unemployed, all generally employable – to understand the most important factors influencing their career priorities. And now, we have results.

We identified four major themes in the dataset:

Money still talks

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

Flexy is sexy

Flexible work arrangements are important to many workers – and especially more so for women – 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.

Major takeaways include the following:

• Want to attract people? Increase the salary, and build up the perks and benefits. 70.1% of workers say that’s one of the top reasons why they’ll bolt to a new job.
• Build strong teams with people who work well together. Relationships with colleagues is the number-one most attractive factor about a potential new employer (47.3%), and also the top area in need of improvement at their current employer (31.8%).
• Make it worthwhile for your workers to stay. Three quarters of respondents (74.6%) say they are either actively or passively looking for work right now – and 56.6% started looking within the last half year.
• Pay attention to your younger working population. More than two out of five (41.7%) of those aged 21-29 are actively looking, compared with just 12.9% of those aged 50-59.
• Establish remote work and especially flexible schedules as a permanent policy. Both are highly valued by workers, with 53.8% saying flexible schedules are important to them – particularly because it’s easier to integrate personal and professional lives.
• Mind that disconnect between you and your employees in the importance of flexible work. Nearly half think their employer will ultimately return to in-office (44.7%) and fixed schedules (46.8%).
• Support your employees’ home lives as well as their work lives – especially if they’re women. Females are more than six times as likely as males to cite family priorities as the reason why they’re not working (41.7% vs. 6.7%).

Read more – check out our in-depth analysis of what matters most to workers in the UK in a job. Or stay tuned until next week for the next excerpt from our Great Discontent survey report for the UK.

Interested in seeing what’s going on at the other side of the pond? Check out our US version of the Great Discontent report in its entirety.

The post Evolve your UK talent attraction and survive the Great Discontent appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

But we’re also seeing many companies planning to return to an in-office setup – in that same survey, 52.8% of US and 44.7% of UK workers say their companies probably will return to the office when things return to “normal”. And HqO has already done that, back in the spring of 2021.

We joined Chris for a chat about HqO’s own RTO strategy, and we’ve pulled together the main takeaways from that conversation.

Remote work is not be-all and end-all

Despite remote work being one of the top-touted paradigm shifts for 71% of businesses in our 2020 New World of Work report, Chris says that isn’t a universal sentiment among companies or even workers. He suggests that the work-from-home phenomenon may just be an experiment that ultimately proved the value of in-office work in the end.

“There’s a lot of evidence behind work from home being increasingly challenging and not sustainable,” says Chris. He shares two statistics to back this up:

In Oct. 2020, Google found that their engineers produced 30% less code during the pandemic.

Colliers International released a survey of office professionals in early 2020 stating that 23% of respondents say their productivity had declined when working remotely.

He calls those numbers “mind boggling”.

The impact of remote work on trust

“I think most people are productive, don’t get me wrong,” Chris says. But, he does see the need – and appetite – for a shift back to in-office work.

For example, trust in the employee base took a big hit in the remote-work world.

“I’d love for someone to defend the idea that trust and empathy have not been shattered [when] working remote,” Chris says, “especially when all your interactions are either over Google Meet or Zoom or Microsoft Teams.”

And while trusting your employees is essential to success in a remote-work environment, Chris does take a pragmatic approach about the realities of remote work for a business that needs its employees to be available when needed.

“I’ve heard of stories … for some hybrid or remote employees where they’re talking about their colleagues on social media, going to the beach in the summertime, taking half of the workday to golf, heading to bars and restaurants in the early afternoon, all this happening before the workday ends.”

And that can actually hurt the overall morale in a company’s workforce.

“You’re seeing all that empathy and trust just be completely ripped apart. And I think you’ll hear more of those scenarios entering 2022.”

And even a hybrid solution isn’t the perfect solution.

“What’s going to happen when your boss wants to be in the office three to four times a week. Your team is on board with that, but maybe you’ve moved or maybe you’re just not comfortable. And you want to go in one to two days a week. What happens there? I think that’s going to be something that a lot of companies need to think about.”

The impact of remote work on mental health

The trend towards remote work has made it difficult for some companies who want or need their employees to return to on-site work.

Consider the worker backlash Apple experienced when shifting operations back to the office – although the Delta variant meant a delay in their RTO strategy, Apple still plans to return in January 2022.

And there are legit arguments for a return to office. Remote work can lead to burnout, if a June 2020 survey from Monster.com is any indication. That survey found that 69% of workers who were working from home during the pandemic experienced burnout, up 35% from early May 2020.

Of course, there are different factors at play here – the struggle to separate work responsibilities from home responsibilities and working at home with children, for instance. Plus, throughout 2020, there was a lack of options for personal leisure such as attending sporting events, going on trips or eating out, and other pursuits as societies locked down; which of course made life difficult for millions.

The power of camaraderie

While Chris acknowledges that remote and hybrid work are here to stay and there’s always going to be a place for it, there’s one significant common denominator that he’s learned from his role at HqO: the power of connectivity and teamwork between workers when they’re in the same physical space.

“These employees thrive in an office culture,” he explains. “It’s a no-brainer. The energy is so contagious. That’s fueled by probably our let’s-go rallying cry and our values as well. It’s something that we hit on just about every single day here. So that stands for learning excellence, truth, speed, goodness, and ownership.

“You get to be part of that office banter. And I think you saw that a little bit coming in and our employees and being loud a little bit. I think that’s more effective, face-to-face if that’s your manager or somebody that’s underneath you, one of your team, and just be part of that experience.”

Again, the Great Discontent worker survey backs this up – 37.1% of US workers and 47.3% of UK workers both pointed to relationships with colleagues as one of the most important factors that would attract them to a new role.

There’s room for both

HqO isn’t alone in that thinking, Chris adds. There are other companies moving back to the office as well. Unlike Apple’s experience, Chris emphasizes that there’s a lot of support for HqO’s own RTO strategy, as they added two floors to their office space during a time of aggressive growth.

“I’ve actually been really pleasantly surprised with the number of people [interested]. My team engages with that and are desperate to be back in office. … I think that the thing that people miss the most are the people in the office themselves. Bottom line, that’s never going to change.”

While the priority placed on remote work options continues to be high for many potential candidates, Chris finds that there’s no shortage of applicants who specifically want to return to the way things were.

In fact, Chris says that when the expectation was set in March of this year that HqO was going to have an office-first culture, people didn’t leave. In fact, they stayed engaged. If pandemic safety was a concern for an employee, Chris emphasizes that the doors are open for a conversation about that.

Flex work is the way to go

Plus, he adds, office-first doesn’t mean being in the office five days a week. Rather, it’s about worker flexibility – which needs to be given no matter what.

“There’s going to be some things that come up. If it’s a doctor’s appointment or the unplanned parts of life – stay home, do your work. I’d probably take it a step further and say, ‘Hey, if you know, you’re super busy and you just have that heads down work to do,’ you can take that day to stay home and actually do it. Cut back that commute time, whatever it is, and go back into the office the next day.”

There’s also flexibility in terms of work schedules – again highlighted in our Great Discontent worker survey as a significantly higher priority than remote work. That’s the reality at HqO as well.

“There’s some days that, maybe you want to come in a little bit early, so you can take off at four or maybe you’re coming in at 9:30, 10 o’clock depending on what you do and you’re leaving the office at 6, 6:30 at night.

“So there’s that degree of flexibility, but I’d say the core hours, where it’s just what everybody’s here, is that nine to five block.”

The Great Resignation and its impact

Chris is pragmatic about the reality that remote work certainly has its appeal and that the great talent shuffle is very real. He acknowledges Texas A&M professor Anthony Klotz’ prediction of the Great Resignation and that the transition to a post-pandemic workplace means many workers will prefer to leave their jobs than go back to the way things were.

However, he adds, there’s a new problem for companies who want to remain remote. He shares a story about one HqO partner in Boston about how that company’s employees are regularly being poached by companies in San Francisco, New York, Austin and Seattle.

“So now,” Chris says, “you have Boston companies that have shifted to remote that are now competing with other cities, which is just like, ‘Man, how much more complicated can this get’?”

RTO is a big differentiator

So, for in-office companies like HqO, there’s an opportunity in the unique employee value proposition of in-office work. The in-office strategy is actually a specific attractor for some talent, says Chris. He adds that HqO’s hiring teams are actively looking to recruit people who do want to work in the office.

“I’m listening for people that want to be challenged and make that significant connection there,” Chris explains about HqO’s own hiring strategy, emphasizing the importance of being proactive and innovative in recruitment marketing.

“I think, if we’re going to go out there and we’re going to attract some of these folks that want to be an office, we have to direct message folks,” Chris says.

“Again, so many people are hiring right now. You need to give your company a chance to stand out, really spark that curiosity from somebody.”

The post Return to office has huge benefits, says one talent director appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

He said he was incarcerated. I didn’t know what to say, so I said something like, “Oh, that’s nice,” and continued to ask him about his previous work history. Talk about awkward!

Here’s what I should have done. I should have taken a pause and collected my thoughts. In this situation, you had to have a clean record to work in the department he was applying for. If you were in my shoes, you could say, “I’m sorry, but the position you’re applying for requires passing a background check. We have other positions where this isn’t a requirement. Would you be interested in learning more about these opportunities?”

NOTE: Check out these tips for background check best practices. 

Conversations about compensation

There are also those uncomfortable conversations around compensation, especially if you work for an employer who pays less than market rates. As a hiring manager, you’re not quite sure when to bring this up, and as a candidate, you’re unsure if you should ask questions regarding pay.

Wasting people’s time is no good, which is why I encourage my clients to discuss pay when they’re screening candidates, especially if the person they’re speaking to appears to have significantly more responsibility than the job requires or if they’re coming from a major city and my client is based in a small town.

Hiring managers can start the conversation about pay by asking, “What are you looking for in terms of compensation?” Let’s say a candidate’s salary expectations are slightly higher than what you’ve budgeted for. Probe further to see if there is something else you can offer them, such as a signing bonus, or additional benefits.

Suppose a candidate’s expectations far exceed your salary range. In situations like this, honesty is the best policy. Tell the candidate that it appears you are too far apart in terms of compensation. Ask them if they have any flexibility regarding pay. If they say no, it’s best to thank them for their time and end the interview.

NOTE: Sometimes you do have to navigate other tough questions – check out these other tips to handle tough questions from candidates like a pro.

Conversations about pandemic policy

A new awkward conversation has recently moved into the mainstream for hiring managers, courtesy of the pandemic. The need to address company policies concerning vaccination requirements and back-to-office decisions is unsettling for many.

To avoid legal problems, hiring managers are well-advised to check with their HR departments regarding how to best handle this topic. My suggestion is to state your company policy, including details about whether the role is remote, hybrid, or in person. You can also share information on vaccination policy, masks in the office, and other considerations around COVID-19 workplace safety. Follow this up by asking, “Will this present a problem for you?”

If a candidate takes issue, and your policy is firm, then you’ve reached a standstill. Let the candidate know that your company’s position is firm, and that you’re unable to proceed.

Awkwardness during onboarding

Early in my career, I was being onboarded by a company that walked me around their large facility and failed to mention where the restrooms were. It wasn’t until I absolutely had to go that I mustered up the courage to ask my boss where the bathrooms were located! A checklist, in terms of what should be covered for new hires on an employee’s first day, will prevent you from making the same mistake.

Another avoidable uncomfortable conversation that occurs during the onboarding process is when the employee discovers the job they’ve been hired to do is vastly different from the job described to them during the interview. In my experience, most employees won’t say anything when this first occurs. They’re thinking, “Surely things will get better.” Usually, this is not the case.

How to get ‘unawkward’

In my newest book, Can We Talk? Seven Principles for Managing Difficult Conversations at Work, I write that you have to have the courage of your talent. Make an appointment with your boss. This small step will propel you into action. Then, think about what you’d ultimately like to see happen as a result of your conversation. Knowing this will help you stay on track during the conversation.

Another challenging work conversation that occurs during onboarding happens when one of the parties quickly realizes a hiring mistake has been made. Let’s say you’re the hiring manager, and you promptly conclude you hired the wrong person. If you’ve noticed this, there’s a good chance the employee is feeling the same way.

Honestly, honesty is the best policy. If you’re the manager, pull together examples of why you think this person is a mismatch for the job. When speaking with the employee, allow them to resign, as there is no point in taking this person’s ego down a few notches while taking away their job.

Awkward conversations in the workplace aren’t disappearing any time soon. The sooner you get better at managing these awkward conversations when hiring, the better it will be for those candidates you move through the recruitment process and ultimately, into your workforce.

For more than 25 years, Roberta Matuson, president of Matuson Consulting, has helped leaders in highly regarded companies, including General Motors, New Balance, and Microsoft, and small to medium-size businesses, achieve dramatic growth and market leadership through the maximization of talent.

The post How to manage awkward conversations when hiring appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

But hiring managers across all industries are losing time and money in the struggle to fill their (often urgent) tech-related positions.

The talent battle and the mounting skills gap

When researchers at McKinsey & Co. sought to understand the apparent skills gap, they separated relevant technology skills into seven separate ‘battlegrounds.’ Offering CIOs across the globe their choice from the seven, they asked survey respondents what will matter most to their organization in the next three to five years.

The largest percentage of CIOs ranked data analytics, IT, mobile, and web design as the fields with the most talent mismatch – the highest amount of need and the lowest amount of supply.

Quantified, McKinsey’s experts are predicting a global deficit of 3.5 million cybersecurity positions by the end of this year. They expect that demand for agile skills in tech-related roles will outnumber supply by four to one, and the need for big data talent will be roughly 60% greater than the available labor. For a sector that’s shaping our post-COVID future, it’s not the demand-supply curve that one would expect.

Real continuous learning: evolution as we speak

The numbers paint an alarming image, but they don’t say much in the way of why. A crucial consideration is the rapid mental upkeep that the ongoing modernization of technology requires. A candidate today is required not only to have in-depth knowledge of existing systems, but also to understand how to transition from one system to another. Outdated programming languages, shifting organizational needs, and new-to-market vendors make intensive continuous learning a part of every tech-adjacent role.

Hiring managers and employers might ask themselves, then: are we supporting that learning? Generally, most leaders understand that training, re-skilling, and upskilling are all lifeboats in choppy COVID-19 waters. Turning to existing team members for new needs is not only cost-efficient, it’s necessary for a healthy corporate culture. 82% of global executives seem to understand that, but only 27% of McKinsey’s respondents said they’ve seen their employers pursue a talent transformation within the last two years.

Filling those seven areas of tech-related needs will require an artful combination of re-skilling, up-skilling, and open-minded recruitment methods that draw on alternate sources of talent. For post-COVID tech talent recruiters and hiring managers, below are a few promising ways to extend a talent search.

The post-COVID tech talent search: talent comes from anywhere

New candidates could determine the course of a company’s recovery; it’s crucial that employers remain open to talent in all of its many forms, shapes, sizes, and funnels. Beginning on a local level, accredited educational institutions should be a feature of every recruitment scheme. Developing relationships with nearby colleges and universities can help hiring teams engage early candidates and better understand the candidate’s skill set based on curricular offerings.

The pandemic has also shifted the educational landscape, bringing with it long-awaited changes. A number of options now exist on the market for certification and needs-aware training, helping candidates at any stage of the career train move toward the specific needs of their local job markets.

Partnering with training institutions, employers can not only engage with a self-motivated pool of applicants, they can help training professionals understand the nuances of what their local business ecosystem is seeking.

From soft skills training to advanced coding languages, local and virtual training courses are alternative talent pools, and recruitment teams should make every effort to be involved at the early stages.

The new professional ecosystem: a holistic approach

The current shortage landscape calls for non-traditional solutions. At the talent sourcing phase of the recruitment process, hiring managers can capitalize on educational settings, training platforms, and online certification offerings to find incredible talent that will be perfectly positioned to make an early contribution.

The vetting phase, too, requires new techniques. The number of self-taught IT professionals is higher than ever and continues to rise. Many candidates go through short skill acquisition programs that don’t hold the same weight as a formal degree on a resume.

Read more: Tech recruitment in London: Luring and sourcing top tech talent

But one look at their portfolio might make it clear that this is a candidate the company can’t afford to lose. Opening up the recruitment process not only to different sources of talent, but also different forms of credentials, is a crucial part of post-COVID tech talent hiring. Portfolios and skills tests should be as important, if not more important, to the hiring team.

To better understand the performance of the candidate outside of their credentials, hiring managers can involve senior IT executives within the company in the recruitment process. Roles are growing more sophisticated and malleable; it’s likely that the current employees know best the kind of competence and skills that would make the most beneficial addition to the team.

Tech-focused candidates want to speak the language of tech with other tech professionals. Rather than trying to get a full recruitment team up to speed, involving senior tech executives, and maybe those anchor hires, is the superior strategy.

Read more: Wooing top tech talent: Recruiting in the Boston tech scene

Technology is driving business success and post-COVID enterprise relevance. But it won’t be a linear path to securing a well-staffed and well-supported team. Non-traditional strategies, from talent sourcing to skills assessment, will be needed to build a robust, diverse and competent team.

By partnering with education institutions and local training programs, giving due weight to a candidate’s portfolio, and involving tech professionals throughout the recruitment process, hiring managers and employers will have what they need to appeal to top talent and compete in the post-COVID hiring arena.

Pablo Listingart is the Founder and Executive Director of ComIT, a non-profit organization designed to help people overcome employment barriers and re-introduce themselves to the local market. With an extensive network, ComIT builds ever-changing courses tailored to industry needs, connecting promising graduates with companies in need of local talent.

The post Post-COVID tech talent: the gap and the bridge appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

But even for the most abstract tests, there are still best practices that can ensure you can learn what you need to know about a candidate.

Enter science and technology. Since you’re digitally transforming your entire recruitment process, it makes sense that you can and should digitize your assessments as well. Plus, you want to have a standardized process like in every other stage in the recruitment process.

Workable’s cognitive and personality assessments are specifically designed to fit in seamlessly within that environment to ensure you make the right hire for your business. There are five areas where you can test candidates:

1. Workplace personality
2. Abstract reasoning
3. Verbal comprehension
4. Numerical comprehension
5. Attention & Focus

The first of these, of course, is the personality assessment, while the other four are for assessing cognitive abilities.

These tests weren’t designed on a whim. A great deal of background and research – including input from international psychology experts – have gone into the design and development of these tests.

We know you want to ensure these assessments are valid and rooted in science before using them in your recruitment process, so we’ll give you some quick highlights to save you the time of researching the deeper material. Once you understand the science, you can then think about how you might include them in your process – please see our resources at the end that can help you with that.

Personality test science and methodology

Workable’s personality assessment is deeply rooted in scientific methods, and is built on the Five Factor model of personality testing accepted in psychology circles worldwide as the de facto model of personality.

The five factors come from statistical analysis of the adjectives used to describe people across five dimensions – and have been translated to many languages and cultures. They are:

1. Agreeableness
2. Conscientiousness
3. Extraversion
4. Openness To Experience
5. Emotional Stability (or Neuroticism)

These factors are sometimes referred to as the acronyms OCEAN or CANOE. They’re not based on an either-or measurement, but rather, on where a test-taker places on a scale or continuum. It’s been scientifically linked to predictors around health, education and on-the-job behaviors, which makes it a valuable test to evaluate candidates for a role.

Workable’s version of the Five Factor model goes deeper, analyzing 16 additional areas that are selected and modified to be most relevant in the selection process. Workable’s personality assessments have also been analyzed for consistency using Cronbach’s alpha testing and other indexes. For some quick context, this is a common statistical analysis designed to ensure the validity of Likert scale surveys (i.e. sliding-scale or continuum surveys).

Many questions have been adopted from the public domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), which have contributed to questionnaires in more than 850 published studies. The IPIP scales have demonstrated high internal consistency metrics along with strong correlations with the scales of many established personality questionnaires. (You can examine the comparisons here.) This further validates many of the scales we measure in our personality assessments.

Cognitive test science and methodology

Professionally designed by testing experts at Psycholate, Workable’s cognitive assessments are likewise modeled after common cognitive tests in the industry.

The verbal and numerical comprehension question sets have been professionally designed by testing experts, and cross-checked by psychologists with a background in psychometrics to ensure validity and accuracy. Other tests were also performed including the above-mentioned IRT testing and parameter estimation, and items that met the criteria were added to the abstract reasoning and attention & focus question banks.

Meanwhile, for the abstract reasoning and attention & focus assessment tests, multiple prototypes were created and tested, contributing to the final version that a candidate sees when they take these tests. Again, these tests were professionally tested and reviewed by psychology experts to ensure each test meets psychometric and industry standards of quality.

Cronbach’s alpha testing was also applied during design and pilot stages.

Real-time scoring, adaptability and length

These tests are not simply scored via ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ answers. Rather, they utilize the universally recognized Item Response Theory (IRT) framework. It uses complex statistical algorithms with each question having a measured level of difficulty and quality metric based on historical data.

Scoring for all four cognitive assessment tests is conducted using the Expected A Posteriori (EAP), which allows for real-time scoring of the candidate with each question answered, and updating upcoming questions based on that scoring. This means the next question is presented based on previous answers.

An adaptive test will estimate the candidate’s ability after every new response based on answers up to that point. It will then adjust and display the most suitable or relevant question to match that just-estimated ability level. As a result, an adaptive test is shorter because it only asks the questions that are needed, without burdening the candidate with potentially irrelevant questions.

Also, unlike preconfigured tests with a set number of questions, an adaptive test decides when to stop based on answers received up to that point. IRT scoring offers not only a score for the ability of a candidate; our assessments can also calculate the positive or negative quality of this score via the Standard Error of measurement (SEm).

Obviously, a score based on more items is more reliable. So Workable’s adaptive tests will stop once a candidate’s score reaches a satisfactory and measurable level (i.e. a low enough SEm) or when a maximum number of questions (for example, 20) has been reached in order to protect the test content.

This all ultimately means that each individual candidate will experience a different and unique set of questions. Along with other measures, this ultimately assures test security: It’s practically impossible to replicate the exact same test or create a cheat sheet to assist in ‘passing’ a test.

There are safeguards in place to ensure that the same question isn’t asked twice in the same assessment.

Want to learn more?

This is, of course, just a summarization of the main science and methodology that have provided the foundation on which Workable Assessments is built. Now that you have a high-level understanding of the science behind the tests and what they’re testing for, it’s now time to think about how you might incorporate that as an essential tool in your hiring toolbox.

If you’re interested in learning more about our assessments feature – or even taking it for a test drive – don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

Finally, if you’d like to learn more about some of the concerns around assessments from a candidate’s perspective and why you needn’t worry, we cover that in this article. Meanwhile, here’s a tutorial on how to conduct a post-personality assessment interview.

The post Workable Assessments: The science behind it all 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.

For instance:

• When hiring and onboarding employees remotely, how can employers be sure that they’re hiring who they think they’re hiring?
• Is the person participating in the interview the same person whose credentials were outlined in the resume/application that was submitted?
• Is the person taking pre-hire tests or assessments the actual applicant?

These risks associated with candidate identity are not outside the realm of possibility. Some companies are already taking steps to help ensure that their new hires are who they say they are – with some utilizing technology and others applying innovative non-tech-related tricks to help weed out the tricksters.

Eight steps to verify candidate identity

Here are eight real-life strategies companies are taking to ensure candidate identity:

1. Include detail-oriented follow-up questions
2. Pay attention to assessments
3. Check IDs during video interviews
4. Use e-signatures
5. Introduce identification scoring
6. Ask verification questions
7. Monitor your candidates
8. Take advantage of third-party resources

1. Include detail-oriented follow-up questions

One way to verify that the candidate is the same person you’ve been evaluating throughout is to include follow-up questions on earlier stages in the recruitment process.

For example, Hosea Chang, COO of clothing retailer Hayden Girls, says employers, recruiters, HR pros and hiring managers can “make sure their hires are acting in good faith by embedding small nonsensical phrases in email communication, assessments, and other correspondence and then quizzing them on it when speaking directly.”

Hosea shares an example of some of the strategies being used to verify candidate identity.

“If someone is taking an accounting exam and they come across the phrase ‘big blue elephants smoking cigars’ randomly in the text, they will probably have some sort of recollection of it when you ask them about it later.”

The point, Hosea says, “is to give little nuggets that your candidates will take note of that won’t make sense in any context until you bring it up.”

Michael Hammelburger, CEO of The Bottom Line Group, uses a similar approach.

“During the post-assessment interview, we ask them about the test and further explain their answers,” Michael says. “We try to test how well they understood the task and dig deeper into their opinions. This helps verify the credibility of their answers.”

2. Pay attention to assessments

Employers are also getting creative, and detailed, in the types of assessments they use to evaluate candidate competencies. This can also help verify candidate identity.

For instance, Davis Nguyen, founder of My Consulting Offer, share the process he used recently when hiring a remote marketing manager. Candidates were asked to do a data analysis and to record a presentation of their findings. If the presentation doesn’t look natural – or looks like the candidate is reading from a script – they’re not considered for the position.

Those that make it to this point in the recruitment process are then invited to a one-on-one interview with the hiring manager, says Davis. The hiring manager then probes into more detail about the assessment, asking questions that can reasonably be answered only by someone who did that assessment.

“For example, we would ask why they set up the pivot tables a certain way or what data they could segment further with the data they had,” Davis says. “If someone had asked or paid someone else to take the assessment, it would have been clear that they wouldn’t know the answers.”

My Consulting Offer has operated fully remotely since its inception in 2017, and Davis adds that this method of verifying candidate identity is used for all hires.

3. Check IDs during video interviews

Methods of verifying the identity of job applicants and interviews don’t necessarily have to be this complex.
There are other, simpler tactics that interviewers can do to verify candidate identity, such as asking to see a candidate’s identification on camera – such as a driver’s license or another form of ID – during a video interview, without giving them advance notice prior to the interview process.

Tech can help verify candidate identity

Follow-up questions, post-assessment meetings, and on-camera verification can be seamlessly worked into the recruitment process to ensure candidate identity.

Technology can also help you ensure that candidates are who they say they are throughout the process – and there are numerous tools out there that can help you.

4. Use e-signatures

Jessica Robinson is a senior content manager at The Speaking Polymath, a content resource center. She recommends verifying candidate identity through e-signatures.

“To ensure that the candidate who appeared in the video interview is the one whose application was received, employers and managers can [use] e-signatures,” she says.

“For example, they can let the candidates know that they have to send e-signatures with their resumes. Then, during the video interview, the interviewers can verify the e-signatures of the candidates on the spot.”

Jessica points to platforms like signNow as a means of doing this.

5. Introduce identification scoring

Identification scoring is another method of verifying identity that relies on technology. Identification scoring is a method used to detect fraud in business settings – a practice used in the mortgage industry, says Charles McMillan, founder of Stand With Main Street, a company that helps clients formally register their new businesses.

He suggests this is a method that employers might also use to verify the identity of applicants.

“An identity-score system can use the internet to check the legitimacy of someone’s public identity,” says McMillan. “Credit records, corporate and web data, personal identifiers, and other information are included in identity scores.”

6. Ask verification questions

Identity verification services like the type used in the financial services industry that ask loan applicants a series of very specific questions only they would know the answers to, are another option to confirm candidate identity. This is a suggestion from Jordan Lowry, COO of resume-writing service Resumoo.

“Utilizing a secure identity verification service offers an extra buffer of protection beyond a standard W4,” says Jordan. “Once logged in, potential employees will be asked three to five questions regarding their history in order to verify their identity.”

7. Monitor your candidates

Technology can also be an aid in monitoring candidates as they take assessments. For example, you want to ensure they aren’t looking up answers online while completing the assessment.

It’s the same type of technology that is becoming more commonly used in educational settings where schools and instructors may be concerned about remote students using external sources on exams. Software like TestGorilla has been designed specifically to address potential issues with candidates “cheating” during assessments. The software provides automatic snapshots of candidates as they’re being tested and generates alerts if candidates exit the full-screen mode which might suggest they’re on other sites.

Take care when carrying out this method of verifying candidate identity, however, as this could indicate a lack of trust on your part as a potential employer. To circumvent this, ensure that you have the right messaging in place so the candidate fully understands why you’re doing this and that it isn’t representative of how you would treat them as an employee.

8. Take advantage of third-party resources

In addition to all of these options, in some cases, employers can leave the task of verifying identity to others.

With the rise in the gig economy, many employers are opting to hire temporary, contract or freelance staff to help with specific projects. A number of online platforms have emerged as resources for those looking for a wide range of talent. Platforms like Virtual Vocations, Upwork, Skyword, Contently, and many others, offer access to candidates – and have also taken their own steps to vet candidates providing added confidence to employers.

You can also utilize third-party background check services, including Checkr.

Remote hiring, at least to some capacity, will continue to be widely used by employers even after pandemic concerns have subsided. While remote hiring offers many benefits for both employers and employees, it does come with risks.

As we’ve seen, though, employers have a wide array of options for taking steps to ensure that the candidates they interview are who they say they are, and have the skills and competencies they purport to have.

No one wants to make a bad hire – the costs of replacing an employee can be significant. Having strategies in place to verify candidate identity can be crucial in hiring the best candidates, especially in competitive sectors.

The post Verifying candidate identity: 8 real-life strategies that work appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

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.

Before we go into detail on assessment concerns, let’s take a look at the types of assessments. There are five core assessments:

1. abstract reasoning
2. numerical analysis
3. verbal communication
4. attention & focus
5. personality

Each of them have their distinct best practices for specific job roles – for instance, verbal communication skills are desired for those working in public-facing roles such as customer service or sales. Numerical analysis can be applied to those working in finance. And so on.

Now, let’s look at the concerns about these assessments.

Why you should use cognitive assessments

Let’s first look at cognitive assessment concerns, with reasons why you should include them anyway.

Concern #1: They reduce the candidate to a number

The concern: A standardized recruitment process – especially for larger organizations who have built a scalable hiring model – can make candidates feel like they’re on a conveyor belt. When you add assessments, candidates will feel like you’re just adding another statistic to them.

The reality: A standardized process is also more susceptible to bias – despite the sincere intent for the opposite. Likewise, AI screening of resumes can lead to a new problem, as seen in the example of Amazon. Even if you take AI out of the picture, humans can still be influenced by the reputation of the school the candidate went to, or their charisma in a face-to-face interview.

When you add assessments to the process, you can analyze cognitive abilities and potentials in an isolated environment without being influenced by these other factors.

Concern #2: There’s plenty to learn in other stages of the process

The concern: In between the resume, cover letter, interview, and even the reference check, you already have plenty of information to help you make a good decision on the candidate. Adding assessments just further complicates things.

The reality: Each of the stages in the evaluation are designed to understand specific parts of a candidate’s eligibility for a role. But gaps remain: for instance, it’s hard to discern how much of a candidate’s success actually comes from their own contribution or just from the environment they worked in. Plus, exaggerating one’s accomplishments in a resume isn’t entirely uncommon.

With assessments, you’re future-proofing your company against those potential bad or misleading hires by directly analyzing what they can actually bring to your company.

Concern #3: Assessments prolong an already lengthy process

The concern: Adding assessments just adds time to an already lengthy recruitment process – a common gripe among many candidates.

The reality: Yes, they’re right – if those other stages are clumsily managed with slow turnaround at the recruiter’s side due to an excess of work. But optimization tools, such as automated emailing, self-scheduling options, and one-way video interviews, can shorten those stages. This gives you the luxury to seamlessly add assessments to the mix – also in a semi-automated way – without prolonging the process. In effect, you’re getting more for less.

Now that we’ve covered three main concerns around cognitive assessments, let’s look at the more charged topic of personality assessments.

Why you should use personality assessments

While cognitive assessments are already a widely accepted element of the recruitment process, the value of personality assessments isn’t as universally acknowledged. The controversy around Myers Brigg and DiSC profile testing is widespread, and there’s little consensus on their usefulness.

Concern #1: Personality assessments promote biased hiring

The concern: Testing for personality promotes biased hiring. For instance, if you find that someone’s not a so-called “team player” or a good “cultural fit”, you may opt not to move forward with them. It also unfairly favors extroverted “go-getters” and “problem solvers” over equally qualified introverts who prefer to focus on the work at hand.

The reality: Personality assessments should not be dealmakers or dealbreakers in a hiring decision. They only help provide stronger insights into a candidate that may not be found in other stages. Perhaps a candidate seemed quiet and unmotivated during an interview – a personality assessment may find them to be introverted yet still just as qualified as a louder, friendlier candidate who made a stronger impression in the interview stage.

Concern #2: Candidates will try for the “right” answer rather than being honest

The concern: When jobseekers take a personality test, they’re going to be naturally inclined to try and give the ‘right’ answers to further their candidacy for the role. They may not be wholly honest.

The reality: It’s not a test. It’s an assessment. You’re trying to get a deeper understanding of their personality and traits. The result can help you learn how they’re likely to behave in the role, how they like to be managed, the job environment in which they most thrive, and their preferred communication style, among other things that help you understand who the candidate is and what motivates them.

Concern #3: Personalities have nothing to do with the job

The concern: Many see personality assessments as irrelevant and even as an invasion of privacy. What do they really have to do with candidacy for a role?

The reality: As stated above, having a good understanding of how a candidate might act or behave in the workplace will help you build better teams and a work environment in which they can thrive. This can create a better all-around employee experience with more engaged and productive employees.

Assess your own team first

That being said, personality assessments have their limits. To use them to their fullest benefit, have the existing employees in your company take an assessment as well.

Not only can you identify opportunities to build stronger teams, more motivational environments, and better management structures, you can also set up mentorship programs specifically tailored to specific personalities that can bring the best out of a new hire.

This means a much stronger onboarding and a shorter time to maximum productivity.

It’s not a dealmaker or dealbreaker

Boston-based management consultant Laura Crandall seconds that. Personality assessments shouldn’t be the defining factor in making a decision – nor should they even influence a decision.

Laura adds: “The name is a bit misleading, as, at their core, these tests aim to identify how personality traits, be they assertiveness, optimism, extroversion or introversion, and the like, will manifest in workplace behavior.”

And she adds succinctly: “They’re just lenses.”

In the end, while they are great tools to overcome the “one size fits all” solution, cognitive and personality assessments need to be utilized properly for them to be effective. You also want to communicate their intent and benefits to the candidate as clearly as you can to maintain that all-important candidate experience.

Think of it as adding another tool to your HR toolkit that focuses on bringing the best people to your company, and bringing the best out of them while they’re there.

The post 6 major assessment concerns and why you shouldn’t worry appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

How to scale up your hiring: 13 features for rapidly growing companies

1. Hiring Plan
2. Department Hierarchy
3. Access rights and permissions
4. Integrations
5. Compliance
6. Interview self-scheduling
7. Automated actions
8. Bulk actions
9. One-way video interviews
10. Mobile app
11. Customer support
12. AI Recruiter
13. People Search

Maintain transparency, accountability and control

When you scale up your hiring in a company that’s growing aggressively, that hiring process no longer involves just the recruiter or hiring manager. There are other stakeholders involved, including those at the executive level, department heads, finance managers, and others. Plus, the recruitment process grows in complexity as you’re no longer hiring just to fill a seat.

For that, you need to have a recruitment system that maintains transparency to all interested parties, holds them accountable to their respective roles in the hiring process, and is controllable all in one place. The following features will enable you to have such a system in place.

1. Hiring Plan

Rapid growth requires a strategic hiring plan that’s as dynamic as your company. You might be able to manage requisition approvals manually for one or two employees, but certainly not two hundred at a time. When you’re hiring at high volume, you need an organized approach so you can prioritize requisitions properly, budget them accurately and maintain visibility at all times.

With Workable’s Hiring Plan, you can track requisitions, manage approvals and review budgeting data, all in real time. Hiring managers create requisitions when they need to hire, and follow standard or custom approval workflows. As roles are opened and filled, your Hiring Performance report updates automatically, so you can track changes, make adjustments and forecast your hiring budget for the year.

2. Department Hierarchy

As your organization evolves, so does your organizational structure. As teams change and expand, you need a system that makes it easy to adapt.

Enter Department Hierarchy. This centralized department management makes it for you to manage custom departments and hierarchical structure — meaning, as your company grows your hiring structure does, too.

Filter your careers page, dashboards and reports based on the departments you’ve set up and organize key features of the hiring process by department and location. Super admins control every aspect of department management and setup, so you can maintain strict control and organization as you scale up your hiring process.

3. Access rights and permissions

When you grow from five to 500, the number of people involved in the hiring process expands exponentially. With more users and varying degrees of seniority, it becomes more difficult – and more essential – to protect sensitive data. Control who sees what, when with Workable’s roles and permissions.

User roles define which hiring tasks team members should (and can) perform, and user permissions ensure they get just the right amount of access to get the job done.

4. Integrations

Growing companies usually don’t depend on just one system to get their hiring done. From SSO to background checks to HRIS and onboarding Workable connects with the tools you rely on.

With Workable you can transfer candidate data seamlessly and safely or connect to your business intelligence suite to access robust analytics and measure custom KPIs. Need to go custom? With Workable’s open API and world-class Tech Solutions team, nothing is out of reach.

Check out Workable’s extensive list of integrations.

5. Compliance

Managing compliance can get more complicated as your business grows. As you expand across countries and continents, so does the list of regulations and laws you must comply with.

Workable helps you navigate local, national and internal regulation – no matter where you’re operating. Our suite of automated compliance features make it easy to manage and demonstrate compliance. Whether it’s GDPR, CCPA or EEO – Workable has you covered with features like automated data deletion, candidate opt-out links, and anonymized candidate surveys and reports.

Save time, automate admin and hire at scale

When you’re processing hundreds of applications for a single job opening, that’s a lot to manage. That number grows exponentially when you’re filling multiple positions at once and on a regular basis. The following features will help optimize the process in a scalable way, and avoid lengthy delays in the recruitment process.

6. Interview self-scheduling

It can take days to coordinate scheduling for just one candidate — imagine trying to do it for one hundred! At a rapidly scaling company it’s downright impossible to schedule interviews the old-fashioned way — 100% admin and 0% value added.

With Workable’s self-scheduling option, you can eliminate the back-and-forth and book timely, convenient interviews with just a few clicks. In your initial outreach template, simply include the self-schedule link. The candidate can view the available slots on your calendar and book on the spot. All you have to do is show up!

7. Automated actions

Stuck doing the same old boring hiring tasks over and over again? They’re not just tedious, they can also cost you serious time and effort when multiplied over hundreds of open positions. What seems like just two minutes can easily turn into two hours of admin work per day as candidates and open roles pile up.

With Workable’s automated actions you can increase productivity and speed up time to hire by automating repetitive tasks, emails and invites. Develop custom email templates and create automations by job, department or hiring stage.

Whether you’re sending an assessment test, self-schedule interview links or disqualification emails – Workable makes it easy to set up, cancel and edit automations.

8. Bulk actions

At a rapidly scaling company, you’re likely dealing with hundreds or thousands of candidates. Taking basic actions like sending emails or disqualifying applicants, can take ages if you’re forced to do it one-by-one.

Luckily, Workable’s bulk actions make it easy to take action with just a few simple clicks. In Workable, you can use templates with bulk emails to email sourced candidates or send mass rejection emails to disqualified applicants.

Simply open the hiring stage, select the candidates you’d like to email and click ‘send bulk emails’ from the bulk actions menu. Workable even has built-in duplicate detection to prevent candidates from receiving emails twice.

9. One-way video interviews

When you’re scaling up, you need your time-to-hire to go way down. You need tools that will help you screen at scale, and more easily identify qualified candidates. Enter, Video Interviews. Video Interviews reduce the time you need to spend communicating, scheduling and carrying out the screening process.

Workable’s one-way video interviews are built with the candidate in mind – there’s no messy tech, no downloads and no leaving the application form. It’s all built into the Workable platform, which also makes it easier for the hiring team to collaborate and compare feedback. And since hiring teams can review responses and provide feedback at any time, from any device, you’ll identify your best candidates faster, too.

Engage the entire hiring team

Hiring may be in your day job, but it’s not always in the day job of the hiring manager or executive. Nevertheless, to do your job well, you need their active participation. The following two features will help you make their part in the process easier – which in turn makes it easy to do your own job even at scale.

10. Mobile app

The hardest part of hiring at scale can be getting hiring managers on board and engaged. The mobile app makes it easy for hiring managers to stay connected, no matter where they are.

The mobile app acts as your personal assistant giving you an overview of upcoming events, overdue tasks and all the helpful context you need. You can screen, communicate, evaluate and even hire, all from your phone.

Learn how a Workable sales executive hired 20 salespeople in three months using her smartphone, despite a packed schedule.

11. Customer support

When you’re at a high growth company, you can’t get hung up on a tech question. You need real answers from real people, real fast. Workable’s global support team has you covered, no matter what timezone you’re in.

An agent is never more than a simple call, chat or email away. And, with a 95% customer satisfaction rating, you could say we specialize in solving problems.

Fill your (rapidly growing!) talent pipeline

Finally – talent shortages and niche roles often pose a challenge to recruiters who need to attract the best and brightest candidates to your company. This feature will help you.

12. AI Recruiter

When you’ve been tapped to help your company double in size by scaling up your hiring, the best place to start is with a healthy talent pipeline. But instantly filling your pipeline with a host of diverse, qualified applicants is easier said than done.

Until now. With Workable’s unique sourcing toolkit you won’t need external recruiters or additional sourcing software to get a leg up in the talent market. With AI Recruiter you can take sourcing into your own hands. Get a list of the top 50 passive candidates for every job in your account, instantly. Add them all into the sourced stage with one click.

13. People Search

Already know what skills you’re looking for? Leverage the power of the internet in an instant. Be as specific or as general as you like while running a full boolean search based on experience, keywords, location, education, etc. You’ll get matching passive candidates with their best contact info.

Learn how an insurance startup tripled their employee base in 2.5 years, hiring for difficult-to-fill niche roles using People Search.

The post How to scale up your hiring process: 13 features for rapidly growing companies appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Personality assessments, in particular, should be conducted with care. To ensure a fair and equitable analysis, follow up with a post-personality assessment interview.

The challenge here is that such an interview cannot follow the traditional structure of an interview, with a preset series of questions. Additionally, many post-personality test questions are customized based on individual test results and will differ from one candidate to the next. So, you’ll need to allow for flexibility here to gain a better understanding of the more intangible aspects of a candidate’s eligibility for a role.

With all those factors in play, here’s how you can use post-personality test questions to conduct a fair and equitable interview process.

Why should we care?

Often, interviews include questions like “What is your biggest flaw?” or “Where do you see yourself in five years?”. Research shows that questions such as these are most prone to interviewer bias.

Nevertheless, this approach may work when evaluating a handful of candidates. But when the number of candidates grows and each candidate needs to be assessed, a traditional interview with typical questions becomes more difficult when so many variables and intangibles are involved in an analysis.

This is why a structured way of conducting and recording a candidate’s post-personality assessment interview is crucial during the hiring process for a specific job. To maintain structure, follow these five steps in mind to ensure you’re set for success:

1. Prepare beforehand
2. Invite every candidate
3. Set up the interview
4. Perform the interview itself
5. Report immediately afterwards

1. Prepare beforehand

The first step is to prepare ahead of the interview. Review a map of all available personality factors and facets. Consider the relevance of each for the job, and focus on eight to 10 core facets that you want to evaluate.

If you’re unsure whether or not to include specific personality traits or characteristics in this list, consult with someone already in that function or team to get a better understanding of what traits are beneficial to the role.

Once you have the list of traits and characteristics you want to look at, it’s time to start collecting insights via the interview.

Now that you know what you are looking for, it is time to start collecting data and invite candidates to interview.

2. Invite every candidate

To ensure a fair and equitable process, make sure every candidate gets an interview. Remember, you’re looking at specific behaviors and characteristics that are better analyzed via assessments and interviews than via candidate profiles.

Another factor is that candidates’ own biases can factor into the assessment results – for instance, they may be naturally inclined to give the “right” answer to further their candidacy for a role even if there’s no actual right or wrong answer. There will also be those who don’t seem to match what you’re looking for in an ideal candidate.

A post-personality assessment interview gives you the opportunity to hear them out. You may find candidates who use uncommon tactics to turn disadvantages into advantages. Some may have different approaches to handling dissatisfied customers, for example.

3. Setting up the interview

Now it’s time to set a standard for the pre-interview period. Your goal here is to make sure each candidate feels welcome, comfortable and respected. That also means creating a comfortable environment and allowing enough time for candidates to respond in depth – and for you to really listen without distractions.

This is especially important when conducting a post-personality assessment interview because you want the candidate to feel at ease.

Meanwhile, make sure you’ve done your homework on the suggested interview questions – which are customized as well. These questions, via Workable’s personality assessment feature, can come up in cases where greater clarity is needed in specific areas.

For example, a candidate may show significant “friendly” or “distant” traits, which would trigger questions via the feature (which are, again, customized) to help understand those elements at a deeper level. These questions will be available via Workable’s personality assessment feature in cases where the candidate has scored below or above average in specific personality characteristics.

Some of these questions may not correspond to characteristics included in your list you made in Step 1. In that case, you may skip them.

4. Conducting the interview

During the interview, you should always go back to the priorities you’ve outlined in your initial preparation. Ask yourself:

• “Why is this characteristic important?”
• “How will a candidate with this characteristic perform better in this job?”

There will be a corresponding question or statement for each characteristic. Follow-up questions are available if you want to explore further. Once you’re satisfied that you’ve learned what you need to know about the candidate, move on to the next question(s).

It’s important to pay close attention to the candidate’s responses. Your goal is to understand how the candidate will perform in the job in terms of personality traits.

5. Report immediately afterwards

After the interview is over, record your assessment of the candidate’s qualities. It’s best to do this immediately after the interview, and in a standardized format that allows you to compare results with other candidates.

Post-assessment interview best practices

When interviewing, follow these best practices:

• Be actively engaged in the interview, and pay attention to the candidate’s responses. These questions are as much for your benefit as they are for the candidate’s – don’t treat this as an afterthought.
• Ensure a stress-free environment that allows the candidate to bring their best self to the interview. Even if you want to see how a candidate responds in a stressful situation, there’s a time and place for that; don’t deliberately create that atmosphere in this particular interview.
• Be intensely aware of the most important personality characteristics for the specific job position that you’re interviewing for.
• End the interview in a professional and respectful manner, and be sure to note your impressions of the candidate immediately afterwards, as to not miss any important details.

Consider a training program or consultation with fellow HR professionals to ensure an ideal outcome for yourself and other members of the hiring team.

You may also find the following tutorials and templates to be helpful in ensuring best results:

• Personality interview questions
• How to read candidate body language in an interview
• How to assess soft skills in an interview
• 12 behavioral interview questions
• Emotional intelligence (EQ) interview questions

The post How to conduct a post-personality assessment interview appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Dragging applicants over the coals

The post tells the story of one jobseeker who graduated into the workforce in 2001 into a standard recruitment process – you apply, you go through a few interviews, you talk awkwardly about salary, and then finally, you get the job offer, all within a few weeks.

But now? In that jobseeker’s own words:

“Interviews upon interviews, frivolous personality quizzes, unscheduled hour-long calls to discuss said quizzes, team/roundtable interviews with a half a dozen people grilling you and throwing you curveballs, creative submissions galore (requiring substantial unpaid work or ‘spec’ work), additional references from each company, drug tests, background checks, etc.”

While they understand that the point is to eliminate risk in taking on a new employee, they add:

“Some sort of risk is involved. You simply have to take a chance on the potential employee. You have to be able to determine if someone is a fit without building a comprehensive profile fit for the CIA.”

Plus, that burden of risk is being shifted to the candidate.

“It seems like it’s getting to the point where companies are seeking to eliminate all risk on their end while dragging applicants over the coals, subjecting them to endless hoops to be jumped through.”

In short: overanalyzing your job applicants will ultimately lead to a poorer candidate experience.

It’s not just one candidate complaint

There were more than 3,500 comments in response to this post. We’ve broken them down into five major candidate complaints, direct from the source:

1. Long game for the short job
2. Poor communications across the board
3. Duplicated efforts when applying
4. Making it unnecessarily weird
5. The job bait and switch

1. Long game for the short job

The gripe: The recruitment process takes much longer than what feels necessary. This is understandable if you’re evaluating candidates for a higher-lever position (director, VP, C-suite), but when you’re hiring for entry-level or relatively rudimentary roles, it can feel excessive, especially when there’s little payoff at the end.

Bkiersta: “My 19yo daughter had 3 interviews over several weeks to be a clerk at a local smoke shop. 3 interviews. 3 weeks to hire. For a $9.75 cashier job. It’s ridiculous!”

NimbyNuke: “I had to interview 3 times for a job [at] Subway like 6 years ago. Gave me immense pleasure to tell them on the last callback that I had already been hired somewhere else that didn’t need 3+ weeks to decide.”

MicrowaveEye: “Yes. Yes. Yes. Some of the things these employers do should be illegal. I recently had an interview process roll on for 8 weeks. They had me do countless long Zoom calls and create difficult portfolios I would normally do for big bucks. I interviewed with people that didn’t know about my job, people who were emailing the entire time I talked, and entry-level people that didn’t even understand my work. In the end, they said I was their top choice but they were going to create two new positions instead of one and wait for a few months because of covid. The nerve of these places.”

Guideinfo: “I recently spent 6. SIX. Siiiiix hours interviewing for a level entry hr position. Three separate interviews. Met the owner. Toured the grounds. Saw the cafeteria options. Was introduced to several different people and departments. I didn’t get the job.”

The lesson to be learned:

Your time to fill metric isn’t just for your own benefit. It also helps you see how much time candidates spend in your pipeline. What you don’t want is for your most prized candidates to self-select out of the process, get hired elsewhere, or complain publicly because you took too long for a decision on their status.

What you can do:

Do a deep audit of your recruitment funnel, using your applicant tracking system’s reporting tools. Look for the bottlenecks in the process where candidates spend most of their time. Identify the  causes for the delays, and correct them.

Try these solutions:

• Improve communications with hiring team members when their input or action is needed to move candidates through the funnel.
• Introduce tools to speed up the process, such as self-scheduling options and email triggers.
• Reassess whether you really need that additional interview or evaluation stage for certain roles.
• Spend more time developing your new employees and less time on hiring the “best” one. Having a great employee isn’t just about finding them; it’s also about developing them.

2. Poor communications across the board

The gripe: Candidates are often left in the dark in the process. While updating every single candidate is a lot to ask, jobseekers still need to decide whether to pursue another opportunity or just to know where they stand. Internal communications within your team are also a common candidate complaint.

ZipZopZoopittyBop: “The thing that blows my mind is that almost zero companies call you back to tell you that you didn’t get the job, even after you’ve interviewed one or multiple times. They seriously don’t give a single [expletive] about you as a person.”

ChairmanJawa: “Also add, not informing the applicant that they weren’t chosen. So you’ve just been waiting for months to hear something only to realize you’ve been ghosted.”

SeaKingDragon: “I had an interview booked for this week, it was a telephone interview but I took the day off work so I could focus on it. The designated time came and went without a word from them, I tried contacting them but have been ignored. I waited all afternoon for nothing and wasted a holiday day but get no apology or even an explanation as to why they stood me up. I’m expected to want to give my all to your company solely out of my own drive to see it succeed (because God forbid I want to work to earn money), yet they can have me chasing my tail and treat me as if my time is meaningless.”

Cjandstuff: “My now ex-wife actually got a job at Best Buy. Goes in for training. No one knew she was supposed to be there. After spending about an hour trying to find out what’s going on, she leaves. A month later the store manager calls her and asks how she likes the job.”

The lesson to be learned:

If you ‘ghost’ candidates when you’re no longer interested in them, if you don’t respond to requests for an update, or if your hiring team doesn’t seem aligned, it sends a message that you’re poorly organized and you don’t treat your people well. Candidates will call that out in their various networks – including Reddit and LinkedIn. This hurts your employer brand, and can lead to other jobseekers deciding not to apply for other roles with your organization.

What you can do:

While personal emails and phone calls for shortlisted candidates is ideal, that’s obviously not feasible for every situation. But ensure that every candidate gets notified whenever an action has been taken on their application.

Try these solutions:

• Set up an automated email system with trigger points.
• Keep your hiring team communications transparent and in a single place.

3. Duplicated efforts when applying

The gripe: Candidates spend hours crafting a solid resume and cover letter, only to have to reenter all their information again via the online application process.

Jim_from_snowy_river: “Do you also forgot the whole input your resume and cover letter and then spend the next hour answering the questions that are already answered on your resume and cover letter.”

Mycatiswatchingyou: “Don’t forget how they ask you for a resume with recommendations and a cover letter, only to have you type ALL of that information into their poorly-crafted online application. And no, don’t type ‘see resume’ because they explicitly say that typing that will get your application thrown out.”

The lesson to be learned:

One of the key aspects of entering candidate information into your ATS is so you have a standardized and scalable system making it easy to compare applications. Fair enough. But when your process requires reentering information that candidates have already shared with you, all you’re doing is handing off the hard work to them. That sets a poor candidate experience from the get-go.

What you can do:

Remember the candidate experience. Their resume has all the needed information already, and they’ve already shared that. Find a way that works for both of you.

Try these solutions:

• Invest in a “smarter” application system that allows resumes to be properly parsed with minimal additional maintenance.
• Add an “Apply with LinkedIn” button so that people can submit their LinkedIn profile as part of their application.
• Introduce a seamless application process that values the candidate’s time as well as the recruiter’s.

4. Making it unnecessarily weird

The gripe: Some parts of the hiring process are uncomfortable for some people, for example, an introvert who’s required to face three interviewers in a single setting.

BenAdaephonDelat: “As an autistic person, I hate the hiring process in IT. I hate the need to bull[expletive] about myself. I hate having to mask in an interview to seem like a ‘team player’. I hate getting asked questions that they don’t want honest answers to. … And even after all that, 9/10 you’re looking at a contract-to-hire position for a company that probably wants you to do 5 jobs for the price of 1, has no flexibility, and no respect for the fact that programmers need different office environments than most other people (especially when 90% of your employees are extroverts and you hire largely introverted developers).”

The lesson to be learned:

Not all jobs require all of the traits or skills that you’d love to see in a candidate. Some jobs, such as the above-mentioned developer roles, may have some collaborative element to them but that’s not the core criteria for success in a position. When you push a candidate through these seemingly unnecessary steps, you’re hurting the candidate experience again.

What you can do:

Go through the job opportunity with a fine-toothed comb. Look at each of the requirements and determine whether they’re really needed or just “nice to have”. And even for the “nice to haves”, think about how much you really need them for the role.

Try these solutions:

• Put your candidate at ease by telling them exactly what they can expect at each stage.
• Communicate openly about the purpose of each stage of the process as it pertains to the job itself.
• Don’t forget that you’re ultimately hiring for a job, not for a personality trait.
• Train your hiring managers on proper evaluation techniques so they’re not focused on areas not necessarily tied to job success.

5. The job bait and switch

The gripe: Candidates go through a lengthy process only to find out at the end that the job isn’t what they applied for, or it was changed at some point.

Belatorius: “It’s the same even for a technical degree. I just graduated for automation technician and I’ve had interviewers lie saying they were looking for maintenance only to turn around and state it was for a operator position. I’m still looking and the amount of experience asked for entry level is insane and often the titles are misleading. Came across several ‘automation technician’ job postings only to have the description describe it as a production gig. It’s a [expletive] storm. Companies bitch about not having enough skilled workers but they don’t want to take the time to train fresh grads for 6 months – 1 year.”

CatelynsCorpse: “My husband was laid off from his job of 14 years (20 years experience total as a graphics designer). Most of the local places that are hiring graphic designers want to pay $12/hr. AND they want you to have a bachelor’s degree. They all use the same personality tests and basic graphic design tests, and they all want you to do work for them (for free) to ‘see what you can do’. Half the time when he does get an interview, he arrives only to find out that WELL… ’I know that the job posting was for a Graphics Design job, but it’s not really a Graphics Design job, per se, it’s more of a Receptionist/Assistant/Salesperson/Assistant Manager job where you’ll have to do Graphics Design stuff from time to time.’”

Deepestbluest: “holy [expletive], I’m experiencing nearly the same thing right now. One particular position I’ve been in the interview process for (going on about a month now) has had me do multiple creative submissions to prove my ‘chops’ and now they’re asking me for something that would require a literal CREW of people and equipment I don’t have. I told them this and they’re like ‘well we’re looking for someone who can do it all’.”

And take another look at MicrowaveEye’s complaint in the first subsection above.

The lesson to be learned:

As above, your candidates are your customers. If you market a job falsely, it’ll antagonize them and hurt your employer brand. Just don’t do it.

What you can do:

Any reasonable candidate will understand that the role may not be the ideal fit for them, but will go ahead anyway because it’s mostly a good fit. They can also work with adjustments in the role based on their own qualifications. That’s fine, but stop the changes there. Also, candidates will respect you more if you set expectations from the get-go even if the job isn’t that clear.

Try these solutions:

• Meet with the hiring team and make sure you’re all aligned on the job description before posting, and stick to it.
• If something has to change, communicate that earnestly with the candidate as early as possible to respect their time and commitment.
• If you’re indeed looking to fill a utility, lower-paid position in your team because you’re a fast-evolving startup, be honest about that in the job ad and even the careers page. Candidates who opt to keep going are the ones you want.

And now, candidate attitudes are changing evolving

These candidate complaints make it clear: jobseekers are fed up. They’re deciding it’s just not worth going through a toxic evaluation process just to get a job.

For instance:

Katieleehaw: “Something has switched in my brain in the past few years, I think from a combination of the changing landscape of our world and also from, for the first time in my almost-40 years, I have been working for an employer that treats me with respect and is the opposite of a toxic environment. If I went to a job interview now, my attitude would be very different than it once was. I used to go in, like most of us, and basically try to politely beg/simper/people-please my way into the job, not because I particularly wanted it, but because I was desperate and they were the gatekeepers. Now I just don’t have time or energy for this [expletive]. I am an extremely capable person who can be a huge asset to any employer – I want to know what they can do FOR ME in exchange for that. Considering starting to interview just to practice this.”

You know what you have to do

We’ll let another Reddit commenter take it home:

WorkingContext: “It’s a good point that you bring up the risk, because it is a risk to hire someone, but if it doesn’t work out you let them go and hire someone new, if they’re worried about how hard it is to hire someone new, maybe rework your hiring process so it’s not that hard haha”.

Let’s repeat that: “Rework your hiring process so it’s not that hard.”

So, how does reworking that process look? Well, shorten that time to fill, for starters. Optimize the process. Keep communications alive and engaged. Make it an inclusive, fair experience for all applicants. And survey your candidates regularly – they are, after all, your target audience. Be sure to establish a baseline by tracking key metrics so you know where to improve.

The end result? Fewer candidate complaints. Impressed candidates who will apply again and tell their friends about it on Reddit and LinkedIn. That’s what it’s all about in the end, isn’t it?

The post 5 candidate complaints on Reddit and what to do about them appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

In this episode, we’re bringing you a very special guest, Josh Bersin. Josh is an analyst, author, educator, and thought leader focusing on the global talent market and the challenges and trends impacting business workforces around the world.

If there was one person with access to enough data to predict the future of the TA industry, it would have to be Josh. His team learned a lot over the past year as they studied the impact of the pandemic HR, Talent Acquisition and business as a whole. You might want to get your notepad ready, this is going to answer a lot of your questions on what the future holds. 

Episode transcript:

Josh Bersin:
Thank you, Carolyn. Welcome everybody. I guess, talking about the future is always interesting, but I’m going to talk about the present too. And the word that I found interesting today, I got up very early and went for a walk is effervescence. So we’re entering an effervescent time. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting there, and I’ll explain what I mean by that in a minute. And it really goes back to a little bit of history. The pandemic was not the only thing that’s been going on in the business world of HR and recruiting. It’s really been a really a 12-year cycle starting from the 2008 financial crisis, which right now it’s kind of hard to remember it, but it was pretty bad.

Josh Bersin:
And since then, there’s been a … this is almost a straight line. This is the stock market. But there’s been a pretty steady evolution of digital transformation, political change, income inequality and job change. Re-skilling up-skilling new job models, new job architectures, new organization models, a focus on the environment, the global climate issues, diversity inclusion equity, Black Lives Matter. I mean, it’s been a ton of stuff. And for those of you that are HR professionals, leaders, recruiters, you’ve been sort of swimming in this sea of change and the pandemic just came along for the ride.

Josh Bersin:
And the pandemic really just accelerated every one of those issues and added well-being and resilience and mental health to that. Now well-being was going on anyway. And if you remember right before the pandemic, the unemployment rate was around 3.8%. You were probably finding it harder and harder to hire people. And companies were trying to starting to realize they needed to hire internally because they couldn’t hire externally. And we’re going right back to that place again. In fact, an interesting piece of research I was just communicating this morning with Glint. If you look at employee happiness in December of 2020, which was just two months ago versus December of 2019, which was before the pandemic, if any of you can remember that I can vaguely remember it. It is actually gone up. Employees are happier.

Josh Bersin:
And the reason is we’ve actually made work a lot better. We’ve done a lot of things in the leadership of companies and the technology of companies and the flexibility of companies to make work easier for people to deal with the pandemic. And it was probably badly needed anyway, we just didn’t have something to kind of shoot us in the arm and force us to do it.

Josh Bersin:
And of course, the other thing that’s going on for you as recruiters is every company is changing its business. When the pandemic started, I read a sort of an interesting thought leadership piece from a guy about low touch businesses. And I thought it was kind of a silly idea, but sure enough, that’s what happened. We all learned how to sell and deliver and serve and create products and services, whether be in retail or transportation or even entertainment that are delivered in low touch ways.

Josh Bersin:
And so we’ve gone through massive amounts of business transformation over the last year, much faster than people ever thought was possible. I think the economy’s going to be coming, really going to be roaring come sort of the middle of this year until the later part of this year. And that’s because companies have adapted very, very well. Now, the people, part of it has been harder. Everything that’s happened in business to make the company more competitive has impacted the people agenda. And when I show you a little bit more about that, you’ll see what I mean by that. But that’s really the way to get a sense of what’s happening in the year ahead.

Josh Bersin:
Now, I spent a lot of time this year on Zoom, as many of you did. And we did a series of really hundreds of hours of interviews with companies. Every Friday, we have six or seven groups that meet together for an hour, and we talk about things that have been going on, and these are the things we’ve discussed. I won’t read these to you. But really a lot of focus on things that you might consider traditional HR things that have been essential to maintaining a sense of productivity and resilience and engagement with people.

Josh Bersin:
And that’s why I think employee happiness has gone up is employees are saying, “Well, look, the rest of my life is kind of crazy, but at least I’ve got my job. And I kind like the people I work with and my bosses and my managers and my leaders are being a little bit better and things are a little bit more flexible at work leading us to a really new world.” And I think 2021 and 2022 is going to be a continuation of what we’ve been doing, but with some very significant changes. Well-being, citizenship, sustainability growth, employee growth, internal mobility. These are going to stick with us. And for those of you that are in recruiting I would imagine if you worked for a reasonably good size company, you’re also looking at internal mobility as a part of recruiting.

Josh Bersin:
That is something we talked about for years, but it’s happened now. And we learned from the pandemic that we can move people around inside the company pretty quickly, and they adapt pretty fast. Human beings are very, very adaptable animals. So I think we’ve really gotten sort of a dose of really awakening that the workforce is a lot more resilient than we maybe ever thought. Now, in terms of the economy, this is just a piece of data to look at it. I noticed today that the unemployment numbers went up a little bit, but that said the number of jobs open in the United States as of January of this year, so this is about two weeks old, is 13% higher than it was a year ago.

Josh Bersin:
That’s not something you kind of read about in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but this is from Emsi. This is real data on real job openings. And you can see, there’s a lot of drivers needed. There’s nurses, supervisors, retail workers, software engineers, salespeople, customer service. I’ll show you some data on this. But we are absolutely moving into a service economy. I’ll show you the data on that, and that affects what you do as a recruiter. We’re obviously working remotely. I think most economists would agree with me that the future is not all remote it’s hybrid. Most of us will be coming to work occasionally or periodically, but not every single day. We’ll be commuting in more flexible ways.

Josh Bersin:
Companies are setting up satellite offices. There’s actually a massive movement in the public sector to build what are called 15 minutes cities. So you could have a city where every job is 15 minutes from where you live. That obviously requires companies to distribute their workers into smaller pods, but that’s all happening. So we’re actually going in a very positive direction there. We’ve obviously spent a year thinking about public health and also employee health and employee well-being. I’m going to talk to you about well-being in a minute.

Josh Bersin:
I first was introduced to well-being maybe 2015, 2016. And I thought it was a nice benefit but I didn’t think it was all that important. And I remember Google made a big splash with their mindfulness course. Maybe a decade ago, which was one of the most popular things in HR at the time to try to kind of focus on more of the internal part of work as human performance as opposed to the external part. Well, that went mainstream last year. CEO’s board rooms, CHROs have all been focused on mental, physical, financial, emotional health.

Josh Bersin:
And this is going to be part of the workforce going forward as is a different way of thinking about leadership. Leadership is probably the most red ocean competitive market in HR. There are thousands of books, hundreds of consultants, millions of models. Every consulting firm in HR has a leadership offering of some kind. And I’ve read a lot of them, not all of them. And they’ve been very respectful of all the research has been done in this area. What happened this year is we actually found that leadership is about psychology and human behavior.

Josh Bersin:
This is a list of what I call power skills that we identified right before the pandemic at a meeting, I was at a meeting of CHROs at UC Berkeley. And one of the speakers was the Head of the Greater Good Science Center, and they study happiness. So they’re psychologists. And they were going through these words, generosity, teamwork, followership, forgiveness, kindness, patience. And she was explaining to everybody why they create happiness and how they create happiness.

Josh Bersin:
And at the end of the presentation, I asked the CHROs, how many of you use these words in your leadership model, in your company mission statement, in your manifesto about performance or whatever it may be. And most of them said none. They just don’t. These are not the way we think about leadership. Well, now we do. We’ve learned now in this particular year, especially coming out of last year, that if we aren’t forgiving and kind, and flexible and empathetic, we’re not going to have a company. People aren’t going to come to work. They’re not going to be able to work. So this is a big change. And I think HR as a profession, as a function has become much, much more resilient.

Josh Bersin:
Now, when we get into the Q and A, I want to hear about your questions relative to recruiting because recruiting is a very complex area, but one of the things that’s happened in HR for the last 15 months is we’ve learned to distribute autonomy and distribute authority into the organization. We can’t sit around in headquarters and make all sorts of decisions that affect everybody perfectly. We don’t know. The virus is asymmetric and unpredictable as is everything else in business. And so we need to empower and enable HR people to operate locally, to do what they need to do.

Josh Bersin:
And relative to recruiting, that means that if you’re a recruiter and I know some of you are, you’re in a very important job. In some ways I’ve looked at all aspects of HR over the years, recruiting is the most important thing that happens in a company. If you don’t recruit the right people, forget everything else. You can’t just train people that are the wrong fit for your company, the wrong culture fit, the wrong skillset, the wrong background. So you guys in recruiting are a very, very important role and your ability to understand the organization and operate in an empowered way to find the right people is critical.

Josh Bersin:
I’ll tell you one quick story on recruiting. When I was doing some research on talent acquisition maybe six or seven years ago, I had talked to the head of recruiting at a large oil company. And I asked him just out of the blue, is there any one thing that you think is the most important characteristic of a high performer when you recruit them? Is it degree, experience, culture, age, personality, intelligence, what is it? He said, “It’s the recruiter.” I said, “Why, what are you talking about?” He said, “Great recruiters hire great people.” I thought, well, that’s actually a pretty good point.

Josh Bersin:
So you guys are really in a very important role. Now, if you want to look at the future for the year, let me give you some economic data and I think this will help you understand it. One of the most significant things that’s happened, and this is a little bit like the frog in the boiling water, where you don’t feel it, but it is happening, is we’re becoming a service economy. Now, there’s manufacturing and there’s software engineering and there’s hard skills. But really 80 to 85% of jobs are service jobs. The number of manufacturing jobs in the United States dropped 20% in the last two decades. Everything is getting automated.

Josh Bersin:
Now, even if you’re a clerk enters data, that job’s gone. The secretary jobs have gone away. I mean, there’s just lots and lots of examples of this. And what this means is that regardless of the industry or the company you are in, the human skills, the human capabilities to lead, empathize, care for people, sell are organized, inspire are basically all you have. I mean, that really is what your company is. Yes. You have intellectual property. Yes. You have software. Yes. You have a brand. Yes. You have products, all that. But those actually decay pretty quickly.

Josh Bersin:
If you’re in the software industry you got to be watching out, it’s a brutally competitive space. There’s somebody building something that competes with you all the time. So, so your human capabilities are really the core of most businesses today. By the way, if you look at the stock market, which is at an all-time high, 85 to 90% of the valuation of the United States stock market is intangible assets. It’s things you cannot find on the balance sheet. It’s not oil in the ground or cash or raw materials, its human things. It’s brand, it’s software, it’s customer relationships. And so if we take care of the people and we hire the right people, the company will perform better.

Josh Bersin:
Now, we also are in a situation where burnout is an all-time high, and this is from Glint. Their new report just came out today and it’s even higher. In the UK, 60% of workers are highly anxious, have high levels of anxiety. 40% have high levels of loneliness. So pandemic has stressed people and created a incredibly high, and it’s created a need for benefits. And interestingly enough year over year over year in the United States, I don’t know if this is true in every country, because in some countries there’s more public support of this stuff, but in the U.S. wages are going up a bit, but what’s really going a lot is benefits.

Josh Bersin:
Roughly 33% of wages in the United States are spent on vacation, health insurance, other things that have to do with making work easier for people. And that’s just a symptom of the fact that in a service economy, if the people aren’t healthy or productive, the company is not healthy or productive. Now, how do you actually sort of support that? I think there’s been many, many studies and lots and lots of academic research on this idea of employee engagement. And when I first stumbled across it we were doing some research on it and I hired somebody that had written a book on it. And she said to me, we don’t need to do research on it. I’ve already written the book on it.

Josh Bersin:
And there’s a lot of books on this and there’s a lot of models on it. And the theory behind it is that if we create a work environment that is engaging people perform at a higher rate. But I would suggest that actually we’re learning that the opposite is also true. And maybe a more important correlation is that when people can perform at a high rate, they become engaged. And that’s what this book is about. And there’s other studies that prove this, that when you ask people, “What did you like about your job today? When they come home from work?” The thing that they like the most is they got something done. They finished something. They helped somebody. They completed a project.

Josh Bersin:
And so, one of the things we’ve learned through the pandemic is that the problem is not just making people feel safe and included and friends and training and all that. It’s also making it easier for them to do their jobs. And there’s been a massive effort in HR under the guise of employee experience to make work more productive. We studied this last year and we did a study of the pandemic response and looked at the companies that were the most rapidly transforming companies during the pandemic. And found through a bunch of correlations, the 10 things that differentiate those companies, this is what they are.

Josh Bersin:
On the left, clearly health and safety, listening to the workforce, creating support for families because everybody’s family life was intertwined with their work life, reinforcing a sense of purpose. Purpose and mission really gives people inspiration and energy at work. And that’s why there’s so many companies working on their mission statement and their purpose and CEOs going online talking about why we’re here and why our company exists and the value we provide to society. Working in an agile way. Using technology in a more adaptable way. But you can look at number seven and number eight. The companies that survived the pandemic well were recruiting. And yes, there was a downturn. Yes, there was unemployment, but everybody was recruiting at the same time. They were recruiting part-time, contingent, people in new locations in call centers. And so these practices remain important even during economic downtime as the one we had.

Josh Bersin:
Now, the other thing that’s been going on in the last 12 to 18 months, and this will continue is a really new philosophy of leadership. Leadership, as I mentioned earlier, it’s a big topic and it tends to follow in fads. When I was first working in HR as an analyst and I used to go meet with companies, they would say to me, “Well, if you can just tell me how GE does this, we’d just like to copy how they do it.” And GE pioneered the idea of a corporate university, the forest ranking model. Many things about the rugged individual nature of careers in GE were copied by other companies.

Josh Bersin:
Well, I mean, Jack Welch died last year. Jeff Immelt, several books have been written about him that haven’t been super positive. GE is a fallen company. Nobody’s copying them at the moment. They’ll come back I’m sure, but there’ve been other models. And I think what happened is a few other paradigms changed. One of the big paradigms of leadership that I think is important was Google. When Google came up with the idea of 20% time, which many of you maybe don’t remember, this idea that we’re going to let employees take Fridays and do what they want to do, wild wacky idea, whoever would have thought of that? Well, look how successful that company has become.

Josh Bersin:
The idea that Starbucks would give training and healthcare to hourly workers was a radical idea. No one was doing that. If you worked in a coffee shop, you certainly didn’t get benefits and you probably would never get tuition reimbursement. Well, Starbucks did that and sure enough, they took off. So these ideas are pioneered by different people. And we’re in an era now where empathy is really the key. Empathy, growth citizenship and fairness and equity. And equity is a big deal. And also pay, fair pay. I’ve been watching the pay and the wage data and the economy for a long time. And it’s been very frustrating to me to see this divergence between the highly skilled people and the under skilled people in the United States. It’s actually a crisis if you look at the data.

Josh Bersin:
But that’s changing now. We now know from studies that I’ve done in other companies that fair pay is a high performing practice in business. Raising the wages of lower skilled workers actually pays off. There are studies that have showed that in retail where margins are very thin when you pay people more, you get more profit because they spend more time taking care of customers and taking care of the retail locations and creating service experiences that allow people to buy more things.

Josh Bersin:
So this is also part of the new world is, rethinking a lot of the core disciplines in HR around this human centered, business service oriented economy. I won’t walk you through this slide. We’re in the middle of publishing a piece on this. But one way to think about the next year or two is shifting from a business centered view of your company, where it’s all about the business strategy and the business goals and the business metrics and the business results to the human side of that. And the sort of the statement that I’ve made for many companies from my experience as a researcher is that, virtually every business problem you have is a people problem under the covers. Where our revenue is low, our profits are low, we have an error, we lost an account, we lost a client, we’re not making enough money, there’s always people problems underneath it. So this has been kind of an exciting year from that standpoint because we’ve been able to talk about the people side of business as really part of survival.

Josh Bersin:
Now, the other thing that’s part of dynamics of organizations in HR, and this affects you in recruiting a lot is the emergence of companies as a marketplace. In the traditional organization of a company, going back to the 17, 1800s actually goes back to slavery by the way. The organizations are modeled after slave plantations. I don’t want to shock you, but that’s actually where it started. The railroads, the manufacturers, they were hierarchies. There was management and there was labor. And managers told the labor what to do, and the labor did it, and then the managers manage them.

Josh Bersin:
Well, that’s just not the way companies work anymore. We’re all managing and labor at the same time. Some of us are designated managers, but we’re doing things also. And so the company needs to be more dynamic and what’s really changed is company after company, after company are simplifying their job architectures, simplifying their job descriptions and making them a little less specific so that we can accommodate the changing roles that people have. I’ll show you a chart on this in a few minutes, it kind of gets into more details.

Josh Bersin:
But when it really turns companies into is an internal talent marketplace. And in a talent marketplace, you as a recruiter are recruiting inside as well as outside. And you can do this now with software. I mean, there’s tools, talent marketplace tools. I don’t know if Workable does this. It probably does where we can be recruiting people for a whole bunch of jobs that are open and we can say, “Well, here’s a bunch of people inside the company that are potentially eligible for this. Here’s a bunch of people outside the company. Lets kind of do a combination of both. And the people inside the company if we move them, then other people have the opportunity to take their roles.” That’s really going mainstream.

Josh Bersin:
We did research on this in 2005, I think. And we found that it was very, very rare and unusual for people to do a lot of internal mobility. In fact, 65% of the companies we surveyed back in 2018 told us that it was easier to find a job outside the company than it was to find a job inside the company, which is kind of an absurd state of the world, but that’s changing. And so we’re in a world now where there’s lots of opportunities to move people inside the company. There’s lots of tools for this, and this is becoming central to the year ahead. And I think for those of you that are in recruiting or talent management, thinking about internal mobility and industrial icing it, and really embracing it is a really important discipline for the future, especially as the job market gets very, very competitive again.

Josh Bersin:
Now, the next big theme I want to talk a couple of minutes about is employee experience. Employee experience is sort of a buzz word that crawled out of HR and landed in IT, but what it’s really about is thinking through the entire experience at work. And one of the ways to make sense of it is just go back to Maslow’s hierarchy. Just as in your regular life, your job is just like this pyramid. If you don’t feel safe, you’re not going to think about anything else. And after you feel safe, then you think about belonging and esteem and then accomplishment and goals and self-actualization.

Josh Bersin:
And if you look on the right, everything we do in work is somehow mapped to this. The history of employee experience goes back to industrial engineering. In industrial engineering in the 1900s, people started to study Frederick Taylor in particular time and motion studies of employees. And we looked at physical things like how much weight they were carrying and how far apart things were in the factory and so forth, just figure out how to optimize work.

Josh Bersin:
Then, in the 1930s, actually it was Freud and Carl Young, who first looked at the psychology of work and said, “Oh, you know there’s some emotional things going on at work too. So maybe if we take care of people’s emotional state, we might improve productivity also.” And we started doing surveys and we entered a world of engagement surveys, climate surveys, annual surveys. Then of course, somewhere in the early 2000, roughly 2007, 2008, we all got mobile phones and there was Yelp and there was Glassdoor. We said, “Oh, maybe we should survey people more often. Maybe we should get some more frequent feedback from people.” And all of this explosion of interest in pulse surveys grew.

Josh Bersin:
And now in a world where basically it’s a design problem. How do we design the systems and jobs in the company so that they’re easy. And so they’re more obtainable by people. And so we in HR have been bolted up to work with IT, work with facilities, and think about not just job design, but work design. And in fact, this is one of the things we’re working on in our Academy, there’s a whole program on this. And so the problem has become a little bit more complicated. We have the issues on the left, sort of the Maslow’s hierarchy issues of, do I have the right skills? Do I get along with my team? Am I on the right? Do I have the right tools and so forth?

Josh Bersin:
And then all of the stakeholders at the bottom, and what’s really going on in EX is this is becoming a corporate issue. It’s not an HR problem anymore. And so it’s now reached really the entire range of employee experience. We’re going to be publishing a big study on this in Q2 with all sorts of case studies. It’s a really important part of HR. And I think for you in the HR function, or as a recruiter, this is a major theme in companies. And a big part of it is listening and feedback. We did a lot of surveys and studies that last year about the pandemic. We looked at DEI. We did a really interesting study on DEI called Elevating Equity. We did one on the pandemic response, did several others.

Josh Bersin:
And what came out of all of these studies, where we ask companies to tell us about all the things they’re doing in HR is the number one performance process is listening, hearing what’s on people’s minds because we don’t know what’s going on. The virus itself is unpredictable. Economic changes, social changes, regulatory changes, workforce changes, last year were very hard to predict. And so we need to listen to people and let them tell us, so open meetings, surveys, lots and lots of crowdsourcing activities. These are really part of the EX2.0

Josh Bersin:
And so the EX market has become a market of continuous listening. And in many ways you could have predicted this because this is what we do with customers. I mean, you don’t survey the customers once every 10 years. You try to serve the customers maybe every quarter, if you can, or you ask the salespeople, what are people saying about our products? Or why are they returning them? Or why are they not buying them? We need that data, and we needed an HR too.

Josh Bersin:
Now, one of the other things that’s risen to the top of the agenda this year is diversity and inclusion. Now, and I’m going to show you just a little bit of our research on this in a minute. We’ve studied this, I’ve studied this multiple times in the last decade. And one of the things we’ve found is that when you look at HR and all of the things we do from recruiting to onboarding, to pay to career, to performance management and on and on, and on the companies that are the highest performing companies, don’t just do it. They do it in an inclusive way. They have unbiased data-driven standards and practices, and they hold themselves accountable to being inclusive.

Josh Bersin:
Study after study has shown, I won’t go through the data, you can read about it on our website or through the report. That companies who are more inclusive perform higher. By the way, if you look at the engagement data from last year and this year from Glint and Qualtrics, the two biggest surveys of employee engagement, the number one driver of employee engagement is belonging. I feel that I belong at work. I feel comfortable with my team. I feel like people listen to me, that’s really about inclusion.

Josh Bersin:
And what we learned in the elevating equity research, which is available now, it’s free on our website if you just poke around, you’ll be able to download it, is that there are five things that you have to do to create an inclusive culture. You have to listen to people. You have to really strengthen HR capabilities. By the way, most HR people do not feel comfortable with diversity and inclusion practices. You need to make sure senior leadership are committed to a diverse and inclusive business, not just an HR program or a bunch of HR practices. You need to measure it and you need to hold yourself accountable.

Josh Bersin:
And I just read an article this morning, right before I got on the webinar about McDonald’s publicly not only disclosing the diversity metrics, but holding their leaders accountable for diversity with their pay. That is what it takes, because this is a business strategy, not an HR strategy. In fact, one of the ways to think about diversity and inclusion and equity for the year ahead is to look at what’s going on in the Biden administration. The Biden administration, they didn’t just create a program about equity in the United States. They basically said everything we do is about equity. How we deal the transportation infrastructure. How we deal with unemployment. How we deal with healthcare, How we do deal with the vaccines. Everything has to be done in an inclusive way. And we have to look for underrepresented or under privileged people or undereducated people in an equal way to everybody else. And that’s really what’s going on in companies. And this is going to be a massive theme continuing through the next year.

Josh Bersin:
Another part of the employee experience and engagement is psychological safety. And let me just take a minute on this. This is not a new topic. It actually comes from Amy Edmondson from Harvard. It’s a book that’s a couple of years old, but it’s very relevant right now. She’s studied healthcare providers and help healthcare teams and found that the teams that had the highest patient outcomes in her studies had the most number of problems. And what she basically found that, doesn’t make any sense. She said, “Well, why would they have more problems?” And when she got under the covers, which she realized, they didn’t have more problems, but they talked about the problems. They expose the problems. They discuss them. They had a high degree of psychological safety. Psychological safety means you can speak up and people will listen.

Josh Bersin:
And as you can see from this chart, if you kind of think about the four quadrants, companies operate in different quadrants here. We have a client who’s in the upper left quadrant where they actually do not have a psychologically safe environment. Everybody is very nice, but you’re not allowed to speak up. And they’re really trying to change that because they have to move faster and they’re evolving into the cloud and some other things. So this is part of 2021 too, is not just creating a great diversity inclusion program, but making sure that you have a culture where people can speak up and you can get the information you need to make decisions more quickly.

Josh Bersin:
As far as well-being, the really inevitable trend in well-being is away from health towards performance. There’s a lot of research on this and lots of vendors and offerings and services and various things you can buy for well-being, but the way to think about it, it’s not just lavishing people more and more benefits. I mean, everybody sort of likes that for a while and you can buy people exercise machines, and so forth. It doesn’t make as much difference as you may think. What really matters is things that help people do their jobs in a more productive ways. Because I showed you earlier. Most people, the reason they enjoy work is they enjoy the work and they enjoy the people at work. And if they can’t get their job done because they’re tired or somebody is getting up in the middle of the night sending them emails, or they don’t have the right skills, they’re not happy.

Josh Bersin:
And so the well-being agenda is moving from one of cost reduction and insurance costs, which is where it started to focus on total performance. And that’s a really positive thing to me for business. And it’s going beyond that. It’s really also reaching into the ideas of citizenship and volunteerism and taking care of society. Now, if you look at the data on people under the age of 35, most younger workers are very aware of the social issues we have. They’re very aware of the DEI and inclusion issues and citizenship and environmental and climate change issues. And they want to be a part of the solution. And so part of well-being at work is also giving people an opportunity to give back, giving people an opportunity to participate in local community events. And so there’s a sort of evolving growth of the well-being strategy and companies to cover all those topics.

Josh Bersin:
Learning continues to be massive. This is one of the biggest investment areas of HR. Every year, there’s more research on why we have to do more re-skilling up-skilling. It’s not as complicated as it sounds. I think the first point I want to make is that, the consumption of learning is high. It continues to go up. Last year, most companies told me they consumed far more learning than they ever anticipated, and people are happier and more productive and more successful when they’re learning. And the way I interpret that is human beings are learning animals. From the minute you’re born and you learn to eat and speak and walk and everything else that happens in your life, you’re learning, and that’s the way our brains are wired. And when you’re not learning, you’re unhappy.

Josh Bersin:
So think about learning as much more than a training problem. It’s really part of your entire employee experience. And the learning industry is very, very complex and messy, and it goes through phases, just like everything else. And we’re in a phase now where we’ve got learning content everywhere. We’ve got learning content on our phones and on YouTube and in our corporate systems and people are offering videos all the time. And there’s podcasts and articles and books.

Josh Bersin:
And so what we’re really trying to do in the learning industry is move learning into the flow of work. Microsoft introduced a learning app in Teams, that’s going to help with that. The learning experience platforms are all designed for this. And so, one of the strategies that you really have to think about, and this is not easy in a big company is simplifying the learning experience and using technology to make it easier to find what you need.

Josh Bersin:
And what’s going on under the covers is major, major evolution of learning technology, where a lot of the tools in the learning industry are looking at skills that a person needs or appears to have, and then recommending learning based on those skills. I won’t spend a lot of time on this chart. But what we’re really finding and doing a lot of work on this is that, you as an HR person or an HR team need to decide what the critical business capabilities are for your company, especially if you’re doing recruiting, and from them, determine what skills you want to develop or source in people.

Josh Bersin:
And you get to decide what the business capabilities are. In fact, in HR, we are introducing our capability model in HR and you can actually go through it and assess yourself against it if you join our Academy. And you’ll see that they’re actually business capabilities. And so this is a really interesting, fascinating growing area of HR and very, very important. And it isn’t just technical skills by the way. If you look at the demand for skills among CEOs, CEOs want human skills. They want power skills, they want skills and the ability to prioritize, to lead, to work in a team, to be flexible, adaptable. Learning agility is a skill, ethics, integrity. These are the things that people really want.

Josh Bersin:
And these are the skills that create growth in wages. If you look at the history of wages by different job categories, the jobs that have increased in demand and increased in wages are not engineering jobs per se. I mean, if you’re in the right engineering discipline, you’ve been doing fine. But really it’s what we call high social high math or high social low math management, leadership, project leadership, and people that can do both. People that have technical skills and good human skills.

Josh Bersin:
And it’s even more true amongst younger workers. If you look at this chart, it is a little bit confusing, but young people are on the right, older people on the left. And what it’s showing is that younger workers are even more interested in the human behavioral skills’ development at work because they learn a lot about technology and software and tools in school. So this isn’t just a problem of digital skilling. It’s really a problem of power skilling.

Josh Bersin:
Okay. HR tech is a big part of this. Let me see how we’re doing on time here. I got three more minutes and then we’ll open up to questions. The HR tech market is really hot at the moment. Companies are going public. Valuations are very high. And the reason it’s so hot is we’re really moving to a new era, an era of tech that really does a char in the flow of work. And Workable as a tool like this that makes a recruiter or a candidate or an employee or a hiring manager’s job easier.

Josh Bersin:
This has been a big change. HR technology is very complex under the covers. It takes years to build these systems and they were originally designed as forms, automation systems for HR managers to type things into. Now, they’re really look more like chatbots and mobile apps and much, much different. Companies have spent a lot of time and will continue to spend a lot of time on HR tech. And more and more of the energy in the HR tech space is going into this red area, which I call the employee experience layer, making the systems easier to use, making them more intelligent, allowing you to interact with them on a chatbot or by voice, or more recommendations from the system on what you want to do.

Josh Bersin:
Nobody has time to go poke around in Workday and find the right screen to enter your vacation. If you could just talk to the system and say, “Enter my vacation,” boom done. Let’s go back to work and finish what we were doing. So anyway, that’s what’s been going on in HR tech. Let me finish up and just talk about the HR profession in a few minutes. And then we’ll open up to questions, going to only give you guys some time.

Josh Bersin:
The final thing I want to just touch on is you and us as an HR profession. The reason I started our Academy couple of years ago is that I really believe what’s happened in HR is we’ve become a center of innovation. Everything in the area of talent and recruiting and learning and development and pay is changing. And you can’t just kind of go to a course and learn how to do it, and then do it. You need to learn the basics of it and then learn how other companies are doing it and learn about what’s unique inside your company and the culture and business strategies inside your company, and then design something.

Josh Bersin:
So a lot of what’s been going on in HR is re-skilling of us. And I think about you and us as HR people like engineers, we need to be what we call full stack professionals. We need to understand the domains of HR. We need to understand how to be good consultants. We need to understand the business and the industry and the competitive drivers in our company. We didn’t understand technology and data. And we need to understand how to be leaders, how to interact with leaders and how to develop leaders. And that’s a lot.

Josh Bersin:
And one of the things that our research found in the last two years is that the companies that invest more in HR capabilities are the higher performing companies. Because in a world where most of the jobs are service jobs and I told you the biggest criteria for great recruiting is the recruiter, not the technology per se, nothing against Workable, but you have to have a good recruiter to go with it. Those are higher performing companies. And so my sort of final recommendation is invest in yourself, take a little bit of time to make sure that you as an HR professional are keeping current on what’s going on in the economy, in your company, in the profession and the domain and the tools, and of course in society.

Josh Bersin:
And I think if there’s anything I’ve learned as an analyst over the years, you in some ways are a representation of the societal pressures on your employees for your company. That’s really what HR does. That’s why HR is such an important profession and becoming even more important in the year ahead. So anyway, that’s a little bit about what’s going on. There’s many, many things to talk about. But Carolyn, should I open it up to questions? Are you still there?

Carolyn:
Oh, here. Yeah, let’s do it. I have a unprecedented amount of questions and even more wonderful feedback on this presentation. Everybody is very thankful. And to answer the question of the hour, yes, we will share out the recording of this presentation as well as a few of our top takeaways after this webinar. So don’t worry, I know it’s a ton of information, but you’ll be able to share it with your team, look back.

Carolyn:
And before I hop into these questions, I do just want to give everybody the opportunity to let us know if you want to learn more about Workable. So I will just launch a quick poll right now. And for any of you who aren’t super familiar with Workable, we are a recruitment tool. And we’ve been spending this past year really investing in some of the most important tools to help you reach your goals and accomplish a lot of the things that Josh was talking about.

Carolyn:
So wonderful careers pages, branded careers pages, video interviews. We do have a tool where you can hire your internal talent and approach it as an internal marketplace. So yeah, just a lot of cool stuff that we’d love to show you. So feel free to answer that now. And I see we have a lot of customers who are giving us great feedback. Thank you so much. Love to see that.

Carolyn:
And while everybody is responding, I will just go ahead and start you off Josh. So like I said, we have a ton of questions. I’m sorry if we don’t get to all of you, if we don’t, we’ll do our best to answer a lot of these questions with upcoming blogs. We’ll definitely be talking about a lot of things that are in this presentation. But the first one is really interesting to me, and it’s a pretty broad question. But do you see any key differences between the UK and U.S. with respect to the future of HR and recruitment, just because we have a ton of customers in both of these areas, so?

Josh Bersin:
I don’t know that the world is that different. I think the economic climate in different cities in the UK is different than it is in different cities in the U.S. But I think the workforce dynamics are very similar and the level of technology adoption is very similar. So I’m not aware of anything huge, it’s different. I talk to a lot of companies in Europe and I think we’re all going through a lot of the same issues, so sorry, I can’t make it.

Carolyn:
We’re basically seeing the same thing over here. The biggest priorities it’s just across the board where it’s a small world. Okay. Moving on. So Lucy said she would love to hear your thoughts on AI and machine learning, moving into the recruiting space. Where is it helpful and where does it make sense to still have that human centered approach?

Josh Bersin:
Well, I mean, you guys in recruiting are just like everybody else, you’re getting augmented, you’re not getting replaced. There’s probably three huge areas. Sourcing. So most of these platforms like Workable can find candidates more quickly and better qualified candidates for on high-level issues. The second is screening, chatbots and intelligent screening tools can quickly weed out people that are just the wrong fit and they can self-select. And the third is in the area of assessment, which is massive. And there’s quite a few questions in here about, assessing skills.

Josh Bersin:
It’s kind of a black art to assess skills, Good recruiters have ways of figuring out what people are actually capable of doing through looking at their job experience and talking to references. But there’s also some pretty significant AI driven tools, including video interviews that allow you to get much more intelligence about people’s true capabilities. They’re never going to be perfect, but they’re getting smarter all the time.

Josh Bersin:
So those are the three areas that are big. And this all started with just simple word matching, does this resume match this job description? And what percentage of the words look like they’re similar, so maybe this person’s worth talking to? So it’s come a long way. And I think what it’s doing is it’s making your job as a recruiter, even more human, selling, communicating, listening, understanding, talking to people are really more of what you’re going to be spending your time on as opposed to scheduling interviews and get doing all sorts of screening questions on people that the system can do for you.

Carolyn:
Awesome. Yeah, that totally makes sense. And going into the next question. So we had a lot of chatter going on in the chat box around employee experience, and it’s just like this huge overarching subject that bleeds into DEI and wellness. So we had a few questions come in, asking who is responsible for driving employee engagement? Is it the employer, the C-suite, HR, hiring managers?

Josh Bersin:
Well, it depends on the size of the company. If you’re a big company, there’s probably a team of people working on this, including IT and HR and facilities. If you’re a small company … if you’re a medium size company, you might have somebody in charge of employee surveys and employee communications. And that person is probably sitting on a ton of data about who’s saying what about what, and probably pulling their hair out, trying to communicate that data to the people that need to have it.

Josh Bersin:
And if you’re a smaller company it’s really, the head of HR really needs to be out there talking to managers, talking to employees, looking at data and getting a sense of what are the problems we’re having. But ultimately it’s the business person’s problem, the CEO’s problem. If people feel unsafe, if the jobs are difficult, if they’re not getting enough training, if the management is not giving them enough support, HR can only do so much.

Josh Bersin:
The CEO has to care about that. And in a company where human value is one of the most important things you have. It’s also the CEO’s job. So I would encourage you as an HR person to talk to the CEO about it and make sure you guys are all on the same page as to where you want to spend money on time on it. And it isn’t just piling on more benefits and piling on more perks, that’s not really what this is about anymore.

Carolyn:
Awesome. We have a ton of more questions that are coming in. So I’m trying to sift through to make sure I answered the most commonly asked ones. But I think an interesting one is going back to internal mobility. What are some of the obstacles you usually see at these companies that aren’t really doing it right. And how can you overcome those and really make the most of your talent pool?

Josh Bersin:
The biggest obstacle to internal mobility is often management or awards. Am I going to be penalized for letting one of my employees leave my team? And is it going to make me underperform in my team? And am I going to suffer, in which case I’m going to make it hard for them to leave? Or am I rewarded for encouraging people to leave my team and work somewhere else inside the company? One of the CHROs I met with years ago used to say to me, she said, “I’d go to management development and I’d talked to leaders and I would say to them, you don’t own the people working for you. I do. You’re taking care of them so that I can move them to the next job. That’s your job, not to hoard people and create a team that’s really good and then don’t let anybody know about it because you don’t want them to steal it away.”

Josh Bersin:
There are incentives sometimes that create that kind of behavior. That’s beginning to get changed, but that’s the number one. The number two is, how do we decide who’s eligible or potentially a good candidate for an internal position. Do we have a tool for that? Do we have a process for that? Is it random? Do we have a career pathing strategy where we automatically move people from marketing to sales and back. Is it culturally unheard of for people to move from IT to another job? I mean, a lot of companies tell me, Oh, we never moved people from so-and-so to such and such. Why not? I mean, it probably would be good if you did it, into and out of HR. Is it a good thing to take a job rotation in HR?

Josh Bersin:
Some companies would think about it as the death of your career. Oh my God, I have to go work in HR. Actually, that’s not true. Everybody. I know that’s coming into HR from a business job said, “Oh my God, this is a lot more complicated than I ever realized.” And vice versa for you guys to take a job in the business. So those are the things that tend to get in the way is breaking down those barriers.

Josh Bersin:
Ultimately, though, if you look at successful careers and there’s a lot of research on this, the most successful people in business have moved around a lot. They’ve tried a lot of things. They’ve sampled different careers and roles and they’ve learned from that. And given that people live into their 80s and 90s and 100s, you’ve got time to move around in your career. You don’t have to stay in one thing the whole time. So those are some of the tips.

Carolyn:
It’s a good answer. All right. We have just a few minutes left. I’ll see if we can get one more in. Going back to benefits, you spoke about benefits being something that’s trending upwards while pay isn’t necessarily which makes sense because we’re in need of maybe new and different benefits now that we’re working differently. What are some of those benefits that seem to be working that companies are adopting that maybe we can think about to improve our employee experience?

Josh Bersin:
Flexibility is huge. Giving people time off and flexible time to work in different locations or different time zones. Relatively flexible pay policies so people can kind of dial up and dial down different benefits depending on what they need. A lot of companies have hundreds of different benefits and nobody uses them. And so if I’m not using it, how come we’re paying for it. That’s one.

Josh Bersin:
Educational benefits are huge right now. Access to online learning programs and things that you’re buying for employees, let the kids have them, let their families have them. That’s a great benefit. I think these health and exercise and fitness and well-being programs are good. I’m not sure they’re as important as people think they are, but I think they’re kind of a branding and, and recruiting tool that people like.

Josh Bersin:
But if they don’t like the job, if I get a free Peloton subscription, but I hate my job that doesn’t make my job any better. So I wouldn’t over-rotate on that. And I think just fair pay, paying people fairly and giving them a sense of belonging goes a long, long way. You don’t have to overpay people. Some companies overpay people because it’s a very competitive company and they really kind of expect very, very high performing people to come. I think if the pay is fair and the environment is meaningful and inclusive, most people are very, very happy and they don’t expect lots and lots of other benefits.

Carolyn:
Yeah, well said. Well, that brings us basically to the top of the hour. I want to thank you again so much for all of this. Like I said before, the engagement and the questions are unprecedented for us. So for all of you who asked questions and didn’t get answers, please make sure you’re subscribe to our blog, we will do our absolute best to focus in on all of this. We already have a lot of great stuff in the plans. And then of course go follow Josh, he has a ton of wonderful content out there. But thank you all so much again for engaging with us today, for showing up. Any questions you have, reach out to us and we’ll be in touch.

Josh Bersin:
Thanks everybody.

The post Podcast episode #10: Step into the future with Josh Bersin appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

In the end, though, hiring internally has significant benefits of its own. Internal candidates bring institutional knowledge to their new role, and promoting them allows them to broaden and deepen their skills. Training existing employees also makes for a stronger, more reliable resource, not to mention keeping employees engaged and invested in the success of the company at large and motivating them to work hard to earn promotion.

And don’t underestimate the value of retaining highly-skilled and valuable employees who might otherwise be tempted to accept a promotion elsewhere.

If you’re going to hire internally, you’ll need to master the delicate art of the internal interview.

10 good internal interview questions

1. What sets you apart from other applicants for this role?
2. How do you think this role will be different than your current role? How will you adapt to these differences?
3. Describe your leadership style, and give an example of a time when you displayed leadership.
4. What skills have you developed in your career over the last three years?
5. How would your mentor or supervisor describe your work?
6. How have you contributed to the success of your current team?
7. What challenges do you anticipate in this new role and how do you plan to overcome them?
8. How do you handle feedback and criticism in your current role?
9. What do you believe are the most important qualities for this new position?
10. How do you envision your growth in the company over the next few years?

Here are 10 essential interview questions and sample answers to help identify the best candidates for this role.

1. What sets you apart from other applicants for this role?

This question allows the candidate to highlight their unique strengths and experiences within the company, showcasing their value proposition for the new role.

Sample answer:

I have a deep understanding of our company’s processes and culture, having worked here for five years. My experience in both sales and marketing departments gives me a holistic view, making me uniquely positioned for this cross-functional role.

2. How do you think this role will be different than your current role? How will you adapt to these differences?

This question assesses the candidate’s understanding of the new role and their adaptability to potential changes.

Sample answer:

The new role involves more strategic planning and cross-departmental collaboration. I plan to undertake additional training and foster relationships with key stakeholders to ensure a smooth transition.

3. Describe your leadership style, and give an example of a time when you displayed leadership.

This question evaluates the candidate’s leadership qualities and their ability to reflect on their experiences.

Sample answer:

My leadership style is collaborative. I believe in empowering team members. An instance was when I led a project, and instead of dictating tasks, I involved everyone in the decision-making process, leading to a successful project completion.

4. What skills have you developed in your career over the last three years?

Understanding the candidate’s recent professional growth can provide insights into their commitment to self-improvement.

Sample answer:

Over the last three years, I’ve honed my data analytics skills, learned advanced project management techniques, and developed stronger interpersonal communication abilities.

5. How would your mentor or supervisor describe your work?

This question offers insights into the candidate’s self-awareness and their relationship with superiors.

Sample answer:

My supervisor would describe my work as thorough and detail-oriented. She often commends my ability to handle complex projects and my proactive approach to problem-solving.

6. How have you contributed to the success of your current team?

Understanding the candidate’s contributions can highlight their value and potential impact in the new role.

Sample answer:

I introduced a new project management tool that streamlined our processes, leading to a 20% increase in team efficiency. I also mentored junior team members, helping them integrate faster into the team.

7. What challenges do you anticipate in this new role and how do you plan to overcome them?

This question assesses foresight and problem-solving skills.

Sample answer:

I anticipate challenges in aligning multiple teams towards a common goal. I plan to overcome this by facilitating regular inter-departmental meetings and setting clear, measurable objectives.

8. How do you handle feedback and criticism in your current role?

Feedback is crucial for growth. This question evaluates the candidate’s receptiveness to feedback.

Sample answer:

I view feedback as an opportunity for growth. Whenever I receive criticism, I take time to reflect, understand the perspective, and work on areas of improvement.

9. What do you believe are the most important qualities for this new position?

This question assesses the candidate’s understanding of the new role’s requirements.

Sample answer:

For this position, strategic thinking, excellent communication skills, and the ability to manage and lead diverse teams are crucial.

10. How do you envision your growth in the company over the next few years?

Understanding the candidate’s long-term vision can provide insights into their commitment and aspirations.

Sample answer:

I see myself taking on larger strategic roles, contributing to the company’s growth. I also aim to mentor and develop future leaders within the organization.

What to look for during the internal interview process

Before we get to the internal interview questions themselves, you want to first outline what you’re looking for when carrying out the internal evaluation process. When you and your hiring team are aligned on this, you will be better able to identify the ideal candidate for the role.

1. Success in current position

If you’re considering giving someone more authority, you first need to look at whether they are excelling in their current role.

Speak with your candidate’s current supervisor and discuss their performance, attitude, and abilities.

Do they have a growth mindset? Are they capable of managing a team, or do they work best alone? Is the candidate confident that they can handle the extra responsibility they’re looking to take on?

2. Skills that suit the position they are applying for

This can be difficult to puzzle out, as some candidates may be a good fit for a new position because of skills they already possess, but that they are unable to use in their current role. Careful questioning and an assessment of strengths should offer a clearer picture of these skills.

Generally, if someone is looking to move up into a new role, they should display soft skills like hard work, persistence, curiosity, collaboration, and leadership. You can also assess their hard skills at a more advanced, big-picture level, especially if they’re moving into a managerial role in their team or department.

3. Motivation in applying for the new role

It can be difficult to discern someone’s motivations for interviewing for a given position. Are they applying because they feel like they ‘should’, without any real interest in the role? Is there dysfunction on their current team? Do they clash frequently with their current supervisor?

Identifying motivation is key because ideally you want to find someone who will go into a new role with a clear head and a deep understanding of what will be expected of them. If their reasoning for taking on more responsibility is muddled, they won’t have a reliable framework to fall back on when challenges arise.

4. Strengths in comparison to external candidates

In order to find the best possible candidate for a role, it’s important to be as objective as possible when evaluating internal candidates. This means looking at their technical, hard, and soft skills and evaluating whether there are external candidates who are more qualified.

5. Focus on self-improvement and growth

Having a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset is an excellent predictor of success and a person’s ability to rise to meet challenges. Humility, hard work, and a growth mindset are vital to adapting to the challenges of a new position.

These traits also generally go along with being open to thoughtful feedback, another vital characteristic for anyone looking to succeed long-term in an organization. Use questions to evaluate whether your candidate can recognize their growth potential.

6. Flexibility and adaptability

If you’re going to remove a person from their current position, you want to be confident that they possess the skills to adapt to the challenges of the new role. That means evaluating their technical abilities and how they match up with the expectations of the new position.

It also means ensuring that they are a fundamentally flexible person, able to adapt to new challenges while maintaining a high level of professionalism and decorum. Without this adaptability, even the most qualified candidate can fail to thrive in their new environment.

How to assess skills during an internal interview

1. Ask questions about specific experiences

Generally, your best chance at getting accurate information about your candidate’s skills is to be specific in your questions. Ask for concrete examples. If they describe something in vague terms, ask a follow-up question about the skills they used or the context of that experience. It’s a great way to assess the depth of their direct involvement in the examples they’re sharing.

2. Know what you’re looking for

Review the expectations with the hiring team for the position you’re assessing candidates for. You have to understand what you’re looking for yourself in order to gauge another person’s expertise and consequently make the right decisions.

3. Talk to their supervisor beforehand

Ask your candidate’s supervisor how they would assess their skills. What are their strengths and weaknesses? Do they meet the technical requirements of the new position? Hearing their supervisor’s opinion first can give valuable context for the candidate’s answers.

4. Technical assessment

When assessing hard skills rather than soft ones, there’s always the option of a technical assessment. You or another technically qualified person can ask questions about specific skills, or you can use a technical assessment tool to evaluate aptitude.

Often, an internal promotion or transfer can bring more reward than an externally sourced hire. With these internal interview questions, you’re now ready to evaluate internal candidates for that open role. Best of luck in your search!

Olivia Jones is a freelance writer and marketing consultant. She helps companies create compelling content. Learn more about what she does on her website or connect with her on LinkedIn.

The post 10 internal interview questions – and best practices for each appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Many of us in HR and Recruitment are in uncharted waters as we consider opening remote positions across borders. But some of us, like Tony Jamous, CEO at Oyster, have been hiring worldwide remote talent for years. So we’re asking him to share what he’s learned – and spoiler alert – there’s far more to a well-executed remote hiring strategy than meets the eye.

Episode transcript:

Carolyn (host):
Welcome Tony. Thank you for coming to the podcast. So to start us off, can you tell us a bit about your story, how you came to be CEO at Oyster.

Tony:
Yeah, sure. So first I start with what is Oyster? Oyster is a distributed talent enablement platform. We enable companies to tap into the global talent pool by removing the barriers to cross-border employment. And my story is very tightly linked to that. Essentially, I was born in Lebanon 40 years ago, and I had this amazing opportunity when I was 17 to leave my home country and go to France and study computer science. And that enabled me to be plugged into the Western world economy as we know it today. And I was able to grow and I started my first company 10 years ago called Nexmo. It was an API business for building communication applications. And that business grew rapidly to a hundred million of revenue in five years and is now public on the NASDAQ. But then when I left this business, I took some step back and I realized actually, what is really important for me is to reduce wealth inequalities in the world.

Tony:
And I was able to see that if you remove the barriers to cross-border employment and enable companies to really tap into the global talent pool, you can reduce brain drain, which is really one of the major impact of wealth distribution issues in the world. And to give you some background on that, so next month previous company was not fully distributed. But you employ people in 45 different countries. And we really struggled to do so, we had to set up entities, hire lawyers, accountant, benefit providers, you name it. We spent millions of dollars on building an employment infrastructure because we wanted to give people the chance to participate in success of our company. And we didn’t really succeed, we failed to provide them with great employment experience.

Tony:
So it was clear to me that if you build a software application as really pierces into the problem and make it a no brainer for companies to tap into the global talent pool, you can actually reduce brain drain and reduce wealth inequality as a result. So I wanted to do this and I started Oyster in January last year, one month before the world goes into lockdown. And yeah, what a great moment in history for enabling talent from around the world to participate in the global economy.

Carolyn (host):
Yeah. That timing is impeccable truly, it’s… There’s been a lot of bad that’s come out of the pandemic, but I think that it’s important, at least for me to focus on some of the silver linings, because there are a lot of silver linings. Before this call, you and I were chatting about the ability to leave the city and find nature, and that’s wonderful. But also just the change we’re seeing generally in remote work, I’ve seen that Workable, we’re starting to have that flexibility. And as you said, it does open opportunity to geographical areas in places that just didn’t have that opportunity before. So super excited to get into that.

Carolyn (host):
But starting off with some of the nitty gritty, back in March of last year, we hosted a webinar that we put together really quickly with TA professionals at remote companies. They were already remote and we had a ton of people attend, a ton of people asking questions and right off the bat, some of the biggest or most common questions we saw were, in the States how do we manage our nines? And be forced remote employees in States and other countries. How do we manage taxes? Local laws? Benefits? And so on. So in your position, how would you advise them?

Tony:
Yeah, my first tip here is really focus on what’s really important, which is finding the best talent no matter where they are. And worry later about these obstacles or these barriers that prevents you from hiring that talent. And that’s one of the reasons why Oyster exists by the way, is really to remove barriers so companies can really hire the best people no matter where they are. I mean, in my previous company, Nexmo, sometimes we spend six months to a year to be able to open an entity in a given country. Let’s say, take a complex country like China and what happens after six months when you’ve identified a talent and you want to hire them, they’re not going to sit and wait for you, you most probably going to lose that talent.

Tony:
So really there is, I would say a change in the talent acquisition function between in the past, it used to be focused in hiring in one country, usually around the office, the city where the company has an office. Now the new skills to acquire, is how you can hire globally and rely on maturing platforms such as Oyster to facilitate that and make sure that you remain compliant, your employee get a great experience and really focus on finding the best talent no matter where they are.

Carolyn (host):
Yeah, that’s a really good message because there are a lot of complexities surrounding just hiring outside of that zone. I mean, we’re so used to, here in Boston, we hire the Boston talent and that was the talent pool we dealt with. And it’s been a whole year of coming to terms with the fact that for many of us offices aren’t opening again, or if they do open it’s remote first. And it’s just having that space for some of the employees that were local to be here and it can really make or break a company when you start thinking about these other areas and these different talent pools. So it plays into so many different pieces. But something relatable for us here at Workable is, we’re pretty unique because we were founded in Greece and the majority of our employees are located in Greece.

Carolyn (host):
Now surrounding Athens, since people can move for a remote first company now. And there is incredible talent in Greece, and this is something I didn’t know before I started working for this company, very well-educated extremely smart people. Our product team is some of the best product engineers in the world. So it’s this untapped talent pool that has been absolutely incredible. And it’s the reason that Workable is such an amazing product to this day. We were built and founded in Greece. But what we’re seeing now is that we are the Google of Greece but now Google and Facebook, and some of these big tech platforms are starting to open their positions to talent in Greece. And from my perspective, it seems like some of these big forward thinking companies are the leaders here. So should more organizations that maybe aren’t these big conglomerates be thinking about opening in different countries? And if so, how do they go through that thought process?

Tony:
Yeah. So I think first it’s great news for Greece and the Greek people. And if you think about it, great talent is available anywhere in the world. And people go to top universities when they graduate from universities, they are full of energy, the world is their oyster, and then suddenly their first shock is when they get, especially in emerging economies, they get into the local economy and they interact with the local economy that might not be focused on their growth and development as other companies in other countries. Think about the tech industry and how much we focus on developing our people, because we believe the people are the key, the number one asset of the business.

Tony:
So if you’re married in Nigeria and you’re graduating from a top university in computer science in Nigeria, the best job you’re going to get is to work for a local bank and five years into the job, well you’re… You got plateau because there’s not enough opportunities in Nigeria and you’re a place injury of any of the 80% of the world economies. And then you have the same results. So what is important is to create… Really unlock that cycle and make sure that Mary in Nigeria can have access equally to job opportunities in Nigeria or elsewhere. And the challenge is to do so, I mean, there’s a number of challenges that companies have faced in the past [inaudible 00:17:02].

Tony:
So one of them is how do you know how big is the talent? How good is Mary in Nigeria and how can you assess her? There is a fear a of cultural differences. Maybe people in that country think differently than people in that country. There are administrative and legal and tax challenges that company have to go through to be able to employ Mary in Nigeria. So I think what’s happening now in the world is that there was a shift between being restricted to hiring in your local economy or your city to hiring globally. And there is increasingly these platforms that are overcoming that challenge so that you can provide a seamless experience to anyone anywhere in the world.

Tony:
Now if you think about it, I mean, if you were to say a startup in San Francisco or a startup in London, and you want to hire locally, what are the chances of the best talent to be in 20 miles radius from your office? It’s like 0.1%. So how can you explain statistically that this is a good strategy for talent acquisition, where over 99% of the great talent is elsewhere? So when companies… And smart companies are realizing that, every day we see new companies are adopting a global hiring. Our customer we serve, they have been very successful in growing their talent pool, leveraging that method. So essentially now smart companies are realizing that great talent can be found anywhere and they have to change and evolve the way they go about talent acquisition from being focused to one city, to being globally focused. [inaudible 00:19:02]-

Carolyn (host):
Thank you. That brings up a question that goes off of what you were just saying. How would you advise teams that maybe are in a position where they could create a business case for hiring remotely? How would you advise them to start? Are there statistics they should be thinking about? What is the big draw there?

Tony:
Yeah. So essentially it depends on what you’re looking for, right? So there are some [inaudible 00:19:35] roles that are… I would say they can be found anywhere. So think about sales, customer success, and in engineering, are talent that is readily available anywhere in the world for instance, like Oyster, our Salesforce is in 20 different countries. And there is some areas of the world that are more specialized in certain type of talents. There are certain hubs of engineering in the world, such as let’s say, Eastern Europe or Latin America that have higher degree of highly talented developers. And you can even drill down to a specific language. So for instance, you want to hire in Java and you hired in Ruby, there are certain pubs around the world that are available.

Tony:
What’s hard as well is especially if you’re a tech company let’s say, and you want to hire specific tech talent and not necessarily engineering, it’s maybe hard to find senior talent because in the last 30 years, the senior talent has been focused on the Western world. So it’s also important that you think about how you develop the younger talent that come from emerging economies and giving them the opportunity to grow with your company and with the opportunity, so we can start building the next generation of tech leaders from all over the world and not necessarily focused or centered around certain technology helps in the world, such as the Silicon Valley or London or China.

Carolyn (host):
Yeah. That’s a really good point. Do you have experience with what that looks like when it comes to developing remote talent? Because I imagine it’s a bit different, especially when, the way we think about developing talent. It’s sometimes internal, sometimes happens in the office, sometimes happens at in person events. Are there resources out there? Is there a good methodology to go through?

Tony:
So development… Yeah. I mean, definitely what I tell my customers is that you need to align your company success with your employee success. And specifically, as you think about a distributed talent force, they are not in the office. So how can you create in an environment where there’s equal opportunities regardless of where people are? And so for instance, there are certain training that you can up skill your talent force on remote work. We actually do that internally at Oyster, but we also open-source it for others in the world to benefit from. So you can teach your team how to behave, how to be productive, how to take care of themselves so that they don’t burn burnout. I mean, if you can think about it, remote work before the pandemic was a lifestyle decision for many people in the Western world, but it wasn’t really a choice for many people in emerging economies.

Tony:
Think about these contact center staff in India that used to work night shift to accommodate the US markets. I mean there’s something we don’t really talk about is really this lifestyle disparity when it comes to working from anywhere. So really as a leader of an organization, my recommendation is to create an environment and a culture that give everybody an equal opportunity, no matter where they are. And that go through the tools you use, discipline in using these tools, and go through where your leadership team is located. So if in order for you to succeed in the company, you have to be at the headquarter and you have to meet with the executive team over coffee, or what a group conversation is.

Tony:
If this is how you progressing your company, that might not be a good idea. You have to have a result driven culture first and foremost. And we’ve seen that companies that has this obsession with output rather than input, essentially we don’t care how much hours you put in to get the job done, as long as you have clear goals and you’re delivering on your goals, that goes a long way to create a culture where there’s high degree of trust in order for anybody anywhere they are to grow in and develop in your company.

Carolyn (host):
That’s a really good answer and brings us back to what you were talking about a few minutes ago with cultures across the world. And I’ve seen it at Workable. It’s been really cool just to work at a Greek company and peek into the Greek culture. And if anything, it’s been absolutely an incredible experience. But that might be, I think you mentioned that’s often a barrier in some cases for companies, when they’re thinking about hiring across the world is, what if I don’t understand that culture? What if they aren’t prepared for what my company can offer them? Is cultures clashing something that is a common issue you see? Or what does that look like?

Tony:
Well, and I’d like to… Before answering the question, maybe do you feel that Workable is a Greek culture, or is it a Workable culture?

Carolyn (host):
It is very much a Workable culture.

Tony:
Exactly. So what I always say is that company culture trumps country culture. And as we grew up, we grew up in one country and we started developing an idea of the other people in the other country that are different from us. But my experience having led two companies in the last 10, 12 years is that are people from all over the world. That company culture definitely trumps country culture. And how do you… But you have to manage it? It’s not like by default this is going to happen. So you need to really be clear about how do you create a strong company culture that actually is stronger than in local cultural specificities. And it’s hard to do, even before everybody being in a distributed environment, and specifically in a distributed environment is harder. And I’ve been thinking about that obviously, because I’m dealing company right now which has been over a year and few months in existence. And I’ve hired 95% of the people in the company I’ve never met.

Tony:
And so essentially, there’s this question of how can I create a strong culture? Is consuming me. So I had to research, what are the challenges of creating a strong culture in a distributed environment? And the first aspect of that is, leaders have to understand that the identity of people becomes the overlap between their work identity and their personal identity is stronger when they go to the office, which makes it harder for them to build that strong culture.

Tony:
And why it’s stronger when you were going through the office, because when we used to go to the office, you used to wake up in the morning, have a ritual to prepare yourself, commute, some people would commute for an hour, spend eight hours in the office and then commute back home. So our life was consumed by work. And then now, what we see, at least my experience, I’m looking to hear your experience Carolyn is, now my identity is work but it’s also family. I spend more time with my children, with my partner. It’s my community as well.

Tony:
Like the other day, I’m currently living in a small village here in France and my neighbor, Dana was on the other side of the village 200 meters away. He’s like an old dude, he can’t walk very well. And his chimney broke in the middle of the winter and he needed somebody to take him to the store, buy something to come and fix the chimney. So he called me at 2:00 PM in the afternoon, and I had 45 minutes gap in my schedule. So I was able to go and bring him to the store and build it. And I felt more connected to him. And so if I was in the office, I would have missed that opportunity to help him out. And so I feel much more connected to my local community. So that’s a good news for the world. And that’s a good news for people. Now it’s a creative challenge for leaders to create strong culture. So yeah. I mean, how has your experience now working from home? How have you… Do you feel a change in your identity?

Carolyn :
Totally, yeah. I love that you say that. I actually I’ve said before that I feel like I’ve had to mourn a piece of myself because there was a work identity that was part of who I was. And I had to let that go because she doesn’t exist anymore. There was work Carolyn and there was home Carolyn , and now there’s this interesting blend of figuring out who I am when I’m working behind a screen and building relationships with my remote co-workers, but also taking my dog for a walk in the middle of the day. And living in the suburbs and I have a lot of cranberry bogs and connecting a bit more with nature than I was when I was in the city. So there are these huge changes that we’re all going through.

Carolyn (host):
And I think when we talk about a remote culture, we think about like team-building games and communication and all hands meetings and how we’d stay connected. But there is a big piece of, what actually is culture when you’re at a remote company? Is it the ability to have your senior leaders tell you to take a walk with your dog in the afternoon and to find flexibility throughout your day, and to feel like you’re trusted and can work autonomously. There’s so, so much there. And I’m glad you brought that up because it’s such a huge part of this conversation and what a company decides to be remote.

Tony:
Yeah, I was in London the other day and I saw this event of a coffee machine provider for businesses and on their van, they say that the slogan was, we make business culture. And I had this question, what does they mean by that? What is culture? And for me, culture is this set of shared norms and habits that an organization have, that removes uncertainty around how the work gets done. And how do we… What is the relationship on the job and how do we treat each other as team members? And what is a strong culture? A strong culture is these norms and habits are not only shared, but they are reinforced. And that’s what’s a great culture for me, and there’s definitely a way to do it.

Tony:
And first is really about building trust among the team. And this is really, you have to up the game on that in a virtual environment because trust in a physical environment is much easier to build because you have this emotional messaging, signaling such as body language that you have, that you can really screed the person better. And then that removes the distance between you and the other person. So how do you recreate that in a virtual environment is something that we focus on, how do you create opportunities to connect with people in a way that creates safety, that creates closeness and intimacy with the other person is something that can be engineered. But that’s not enough, that’s like hygiene factor that you have to really work on and in a virtual environment to deliberately create opportunities that build trust, like for instance in my team, I cannot engineer opportunities to work with them on a personal basis. Let’s say I have a roadmap discussion with my head of product.

Tony:
So I spend a few hours or long one month period working synchronicity with her, brainstorming, building on each other ideas. I want her to have an insight about how I think, and I want to have an insight about how she thinks. And I do it with other… I can have, create these opportunities deliberately because that can we understand each other and create language-shared meaning about the work. And that’s one piece of the equation. The other piece of the equation that is also a hygiene factor for building strong culture in a virtual environment is around the discipline of how the work gets done. We call them at Oyster, tools and the rules. And that’s again, that’s if you’re in an office environment and you’re not very clear or prescriptive about how to get the job done, then you can get away with it.

Tony:
So in a virtual environment, it’s not going to work if people are on different time zones, people are coming from different culture, different backgrounds. So you have to be very prescriptive of how you work together, what tools do you use? When do you use them? What different meetings you have? I mean, obviously embrace this as synchronous communication and collaboration and then reinforce it. And then thirdly is it cannot be a top down effort, has to be co-created among the team, and you as a team manager, you have to be the best remote worker in your team to show the example for your team that this is something that everybody needs to buy into, and it gets reinforced.

Tony:
And I think these are the foundation of creating a strong culture in a virtual environment. And actually when you think about it, there’s a way to outperform in office cultures. So for instance, a virtual environment requires you to share leadership more, so essentially because everybody is in different location and the leader cannot do everything like they used to do in the office, then suddenly you have an opportunity for other leaders to come in and fill that gap. So it becomes a great place to grow leader fasters in the business. And you’ve seen how Oyster in very excited about the opportunity.

Tony:
Another superpower from distributed teams is, the best ideas win. I don’t know if you remember when you used to work in an office and you go to a meeting room and usually the loudest person in the room monopolize the discussion, but you have maybe this extroverted, brilliant person on the side that they’re not sharing their ideas. So when you adopt these as synchronous way of collaborating, the work happens before, we share a new doc, everybody comes in, everybody collaborates on it and then you go and have a conversation. Maybe one last one is really dealing with conflict is also, there’s a super power there because again, when you’re doing in-person, face-to-face, trying to solve conflicts, there’s a lot of emotional baggage that come into the conversation.

Tony:
So if you solve that in a synchronous way, people are not reactive in solving this problem, are more active, which mean that they don’t feel that they have to speak at that time. They have make sure that they have their pressure to say something. So essentially, if you shift some of the problem solving or conflict management into a synchronous, then you can also gain a superpower. And then the role of the leader is really to be aware of these superpowers and create an environment that actually facilitates and foster these benefits.

Carolyn (host):
Wow, thank you. All of that really resonates, especially being at a remote company. We’ve been remote for about a year now, and it wasn’t up until maybe six months or so ago that we realized we weren’t going back to an office, but I’ve seen a lot of these things happen naturally at Workable. And I don’t even know if, until now I really realized that those things were happening and that’s really good news. But it also makes me think of just the fact that a lot of these companies, like members of our audience were thinking about hiring remotely and taking that leap and opening positions in different companies do have to look inward at how they’re managing their remote workforce, because you really do have to have all of that place. And that’s really great advice for companies who are thinking about moving in that direction, and be able to have like a strong well-oiled workforce.

Tony:
Yeah. I mean, do they even think about it? The war on talent is going distributed. So essentially it’s not… To the companies that have thought about how to enable a strong culture, how to enable a distributed workforce to grow and develop, they are the ones that are going to attract the best and the brightest talents in the world. And there’s no going back on this. I mean, that lasted us to a year, we’ve seen that many companies think about Spotify. Spotify is saying, guys I think about competition policy. They want to pay anybody the same San Francisco and New York salary, regardless of where they are. And I try to compete with Spotify on hiring the best talent. So from an employee branding standpoint, you have to start incorporating some of these softer approach around how you work together. And you want to explain to candidates, why are they going to be successful in your company working remotely. And it’s not nice to have anymore.

Carolyn (host):
No, it’s an absolute necessity. So going off of employer brand, when we’re hiring in certain locations, how do you position yourself as a strong, competitive local employer brand.

Tony:
Yeah, so let’s take the example of, let’s say Mary in Nigeria. Okay, so she has the option of being hired with a great local bank that can give her a local employment contract, the best local benefits. And you want to be able to match that, you want to be able to understand what good looks like in country X, and then extend a generous offer to that employee. And that goes to, first hiring them as a full-time employee rather than a contractor, so that you can reduce their anxiety and provide them with the ability of having a stable job and a stable income. And then supplement that with whatever local benefits Mary expects to see from a top employer in that country.

Tony:
And some countries are more heavy on benefits, especially the US. It’s must have to have a health insurance in the US, otherwise it’s very problematic. Other countries, like in France, they expect to have restaurant vouchers. I mean, assuming the world is going to reopen and restaurants going to reopen, I mean pre-pandemic, the restaurant option was an important thing to have in France and some sort of complimentary health insurance. And there are some countries where you don’t have to have any health insurance because the local national health system is what is expected. So every country is different and you have to navigate that. And this is something that also we help our customer to do is, is not only to be able to extend a full-time employment role job to marry in wherever she is, but also to make this employer become an attractive employer for an evermore distributed workforce.

Carolyn (host):
Yeah, that’s great. And another interesting question that came up, going off of competing with local employers that maybe have an office. So how long do you think it will take looking at the future for companies to understand that remote first by region and area and people working remotely there versus opening up, like we work in these small office locations throughout there, it’s two different paths. And it sounds like a lot of companies haven’t been able to break away from the idea that you need some sort of office location. Is that something you’re seeing? When do you think that will break off? Is it just both will exist?

Tony:
Yeah. I mean, clearly the world is shifting from an office only culture to a hybrid culture where you have both the co-existence of both an office and a distributed workforce at the same time. And there are certain tasks and certain to work experiences that require us to have face-to-face. So I don’t think that a hundred percent distributed virtual can work or functions and for our companies. I think that there are going to be always a… It depends is the question, depends on what does the company do? If you’re… Or what is the role of the person? So for instance, maybe software engineering is been around for, it’s been distributed for virtual for a very long time. And maybe other roles are less prone to that. And also it depends on the task well solve, highly complex cross-functional creative tasks might require people to be together and solve problems in the same place. But it’s not necessary, I think that really where I see the world going, is that it’s become optional. It’s not necessarily a must have in order to get stuff done and to create a great culture.

Tony:
And employees are asking for an extra degree of freedom, which is location. We want to be able to leave wherever they want to leave. Now that they know that they can be productive no matter where they are, and actually that’s going to be… That’s hard for companies to manage, if they want to go back to an office only culture, because talent will go to wherever they have more freedom and that’s assuming equal pay and equal benefits.

Carolyn (host):
Yeah, it’s a good answer. It is going to be a bit different for everybody, but I guess, last question going off of that could be, as you look forward, and being CEO at Oyster, you have an interesting position of seeing companies firsthand that are adopting this approach and are using your platform to handle the legal, the tax, the compliance, the benefits. Do you see that there is a big spike here? Do you think that the future is going remote? Do you think it’s going to be mixed? When do you think this is going to be happening? What is your outlook for the future?

Tony:
Yeah, I think we know that my outlook for the future is that we want to have a future where people have a choice in where they want to live. And they don’t have to necessarily live in the city, becomes a choice if they decide to want to live in a city, but if they don’t, if they decide not to they shouldn’t be forced to be living in a crowded space. And that’s the world that we want to portray. That’s a vision we want to portray for the world that Oyster… Because we’re a mission-driven company and not only we want to bring the great job opportunities to anywhere in the world, but there’s also environmental impact that attached to this. I mean, think about it, there are every year, we’re pourning the equivalent of four New York cities in terms of concrete on planet earth. And in many cities, it’s not any more livable condition.

Tony:
I mean, if you’re currently living in Delhi, working in Delhi, you’re going to lose seven years of your life expecting because of air pollution. So I think the pandemic enabled us to realize that actually we are past that tipping point of sustainability of cities. And I hope that the world will reverse that trend now that actually it’s not a necessity to be in the office to get the job done, at least for knowledge workers. And to give you some statistics, there are 1.5 billion knowledge workers coming into the workforce in the next 10 years. That is the biggest labor democratic shifts since the industrial revolution. So we have that opportunity now as a world to rethink what work is and make it more sustainable and more focused on bringing that opportunity to people no matter where they are.

Carolyn (host):
Awesome. It’s an exciting time and Oyster and your whole team is in a really exciting position to be enabling these companies to make these moves because truly it’s incredible. Last January started up Oyster, and there’s a huge need for figuring out all of these admin focus things so that we can start making a difference in our organizations and our workforce. And it does make a difference in the world, so really cool stuff. But that pretty much brings us almost a time at 45 minutes. So I’m going to go ahead and thank everybody who joined us live. I will drop a link to Oyster site for everybody to check out if you are looking for a solution to help you with all of that to hire remotely. And I’ll also add it to the podcast description. We’re going to be live on our podcasts that are hiring. So go check that out on iTunes. But yeah, thanks everybody for joining. Thank you so much Tony for your time. Anybody who’s interested, head over to Oyster and yeah.

Tony:
Thank you Carolyn for having me here and for giving me a voice on this podcast. Bye.

The post Podcast episode #9: The new land of opportunity is anywhere appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

So, why learn how to use video in hiring? As Elena Valentine of Skillscout.com says in a conversation with Workable at LinkedIn Live, “It’s how we learn. We are visual learners, and that’s from a biological standpoint. There really is an art and science to why video works. We retain 65% of what we see and hear versus what we read. 80% of our brains are dedicated to processing visuals.”

Not only are we visual animals – we also live in a world where video is king.

“This is a YouTube generation. And if you think that we’re going to YouTube to learn how to braid our hair and get tours of the White House and everything else, we are absolutely going to YouTube [to learn] about jobs, plain and simple.”

Elena points to the pandemic as forcing us “to start to think differently about how we’re showcasing jobs, people, environments. [We’ve] really had to flip it into high gear when it comes to the value of video.”

You can ‘see’ employee testimonial videos

Using video in your hiring process also helps candidates visualize the day-to-day of a job more than a job description ever could.

That’s especially the case with specific roles, Elena says. She recounts SAC Wireless, a client who wanted to show the day-to-day work of their cellphone tower workers – who often operate hundreds of feet up in the air. They were struggling with employees leaving soon after starting.

“[New employees] go up for the first time, realize just how frighteningly scared they were of heights and then quit,“ Elena says, adding that this would happen even after recruiters were clear about that part of the work in interviews.

This meant producing a video depicting exactly what the work would entail, involving the POV of workers from the top of towers in a series of employee testimonial videos.

“This is going to be your world,” Elena says in describing the intended message in the video. “Rest assured we keep it safe. We have a culture of safety and a team that really supports you, but this is the work.”

The result?

“They significantly reduced their turnover because of an entire brand campaign and their video went viral.”

The connectivity of video

While video can’t ever replace the full hiring process, says Elena, it can help enrich the applicant pool you have for a job opening. You’ll have a more invested group of candidates who are actively interested in the specific position and not just slinging resumes at every job opportunity.

This can lessen the time and work involved in sifting through the applications you get for a role, Elena adds.

“Rather than the 500 candidates that you got, a lot of them who may not be a good fit or on the cusp, you’re getting candidates who are saying, ‘I’ve watched this video, I see the challenge, and I’m still willing to apply.’”

How to use video in the hiring process

Great, you’re on board. You’re ready to get crackin’. But making employer branding videos can get complex at times.

So we picked up some lessons from Elena, who’s been doing this for a long time as the CEO of Skillscout. Here are six best practices on how to use video in the hiring process, from her LinkedIn Live session with Workable.

1. Don’t overthink it

First, don’t overthink it. “There’s no wrong or immediate right way to do video. … That’s the thing that people have to get over,” Elena says, quipping about the unrealistic expectations that a recruiter or hiring manager must have a Hollywood-sized budget or possess filmmaking skills to rival Martin Scorsese.

On the contrary, it’s more about finding that important balance between authenticity and brand, Elena says.

“You can actually do this in a way that still is quality, still as authentic, but also reaches a level of consistency that marketing and others would be okay with sharing publicly.”

2. Think about quality over quantity

Although it’s nice to have numerous candidates applying for a job so you have the luxury to choose, that’s the wrong approach, suggests Elena.

“The question should be, ‘Are we getting the right eyeballs on these videos?’” she says. “It has less to do with the metrics of; ‘We’ve had 50,000 people [see this video].’”

Instead, ask yourself: “Did the right 10 people in our application process who are kick-ass engineers see this video? And did they understand exactly what we could offer them?” Elena suggests. That’s where the key differentiator is.

3. Think about the ‘recruitment funnel’

A core tenet of sales and marketing strategy is the “funnel” It’s described in so many different ways. Ultimately, you can think about it in three stages. First is“top of funnel”, the moment where your audience becomes aware of you. Further down is “middle of funnel”; where your audience now knows you and wants to get a little deeper into the specifics. Finally, there’s “bottom of funnel”; in other words, the stage where your audience makes a decision based on what they’ve learned.

Workable’s EMEA VP Rob Long describes it as a “pragmatic recruitment framework”, in which he takes a page from the pragmatic marketing framework.

Elena speaks a lot about that in understanding how to use video in the hiring process. “You can build a series of videos to engage the varying levels of interests that a candidate has in the role or in your company. At the very top of the funnel is that introductory video.”

She explains: “We are just here to create a level of brand awareness and interest. Maybe this is a company that does really great stuff, but no one’s ever heard of them before.”

Once the candidate is interested, you can get right into the details of the job itself.

“When we’re on the job post, which is, ‘All right, I’m a shoe designer, and at this point I’m looking to understand, do I want to be a shoe designer at Nike or do I want to be a shoe designer at Adidas?’”

That’s where employee testimonial videos can come in incredibly useful, she adds.

“There’s some pretty specific stories of, ‘All right, now that I’m getting an understanding of the culture, what is it really like to work in these specific roles at these specific companies?’”

4. Be specific – and keep it short

No one likes a long, rambling video that doesn’t properly inform the candidate on what they want or need to know. This especially holds true when you’re looking to engage busy candidates applying for several jobs in a single day.

That’s why, when understanding how to use video in the hiring process, you must keep your videos concrete and tight.

“[You] want to think about the role itself,” says Elena. “Who are the folks that they might be working with or that department? The second is going to be show, not tell, which clearly the medium of video allows us to do that.”

Elena reminds us that it’s important to keep it contained.

“About 90 seconds is typically the sweet spot, especially given social media and the ways people are able to peruse.”

5. Be honest – warts and all

There’s a reality about work that can’t be ignored – sometimes, it does suck.

“We cannot put lipstick on a pig,” says Elena. “This has to be a balance both of what the opportunity is and also what the challenges are going to be, because candidates are going to smell a stock video, a stock photo, a stock feeling and emotion from a mile away.”

It’s tempting to gloss over the negatives, but candidates will appreciate honesty.

“They recognize that our jobs aren’t perfect, and if you could be the first one to tell that to them and they don’t have to find that out on the first day of the job or the first 90 days on the job, even better. They will respect you more for it.”

Elena explains that this is top of mind for her and Skillscout, especially when it comes to younger candidates.

“This isn’t just about showing the sunshines and rainbows of a role. We all know that there are sucky parts of all jobs and we need to be about as upfront about that as possible when it comes to this.”

There’s a practical aspect to it too – enriching the talent pool with candidates who really do want the role.

“We want to give candidates an opportunity to self-screen in or self-screen out. And it’s perfectly okay if a candidate is going to self screen out as result of this, because we’re not here to waste their time. We’re also not here to waste ours.”

Workable’s CEO Nikos Moraitakis himself follows this code on describing life at Workable: “It involves doing a lot of things that you would rather not be doing, but down the line, there may be something in it that may improve the way a lot of people work.”

Read more about why it pays to be authentic in your recruitment marketing strategy.

6. Good questions mean great answers

Your videos will ultimately feature your current employees, and you want them to share some of the more interesting aspects of their work. That means you’re interviewing them – and when you do that, don’t just ask them to describe their day at work. Throw some interesting questions at your employees that they will be excited to answer.

For instance, ask them to describe the surprises they had when they first started at the job, says Elena.

Elena suggests a few other questions you can ask:

• “What is it about your work that you’re most proud of?”
• “What is it about your work that people would be surprised to know about?”
• “What makes you stay? What makes you come back every day?”

And her personal favorite: “What makes your heart sing?”

“It really gets fascinating from a layperson’s point of view to say, ‘Wow, I didn’t realize that this much effort, et cetera, goes into creating this one piece of cereal,’” says Elena.

Video attracts the real-life stars

Video really is another tool in your recruitment marketing playbook. Learning how to use video in the hiring process – including in the careers page, the video interview, and even outright employer brand promotion – can really show off the job and the work environment in action in ways that static words on a screen or paper can never do.

And it’s about keeping up with the times, adds Elena.

“In today’s day and age, the way that we communicate our culture, our brand, the way that we get people interested in our role and the right people interested in our company is through video.”

The post How to use video in the hiring process: 6 tips from an expert appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Topgrading interviewing allows you a lot more insight into a candidate, and (importantly) it will enable the candidate better insight into the company.

Here’s what you need to know.

• What is topgrading interviewing?
• Why your company should utilize topgrading
• Example topgrading interview questions
• Incorporating topgrading into your interview process

What is topgrading interviewing?

The term topgrading comes from a 1997 article by Bradford D. Smart and his son, Geoffrey, called Topgrading the organization. Their definition is:

“Topgrading simply means proactively seeking out and employing the most talented people available, while redeploying (internally or externally) those of lesser ability or performance. More specifically, we view topgrading as employing only A players.”

But, it’s more than just seeking A players; it’s about structuring interviews and making sure the process is rigorously targeting the right people. The Smarts talk a lot about talent rather than skill or experience, theorizing that the most talented people will bring the most value to your organization.

And to do that, it’s not just about the interview questions; it requires a well-written job description that reflects the company culture and goals and the individual job responsibilities. Without this critical information, you can’t attract the right people for the job.

Typically, when you use topgrading, the candidates face multiple interviewers to find the best people who fill these critical core competencies: Intelligence, vision, leadership, drive, resourcefulness, customer focus, hiring, team-building, track record/experience, integrity, and communication.

This all comes together as part of a 12-step process in hiring.

These twelve steps are:

1. Measure and improve the current hiring process: You need to look at your current methods before making changes. What works and what does not?
2. Create a job scorecard: This is a rigorous process to determine what you need for the position. You do this before you begin recruiting, so the scorecard reflects the company’s needs rather than allowing candidates to sway hiring managers with charm.
3. Recruit candidates: Make sure you have a detailed job description.
4. Screen candidates with work history forms: These forms include detailed questions for all candidates that include compensation history (illegal now in some states and jurisdictions), “boss ratings, reasons for leaving jobs, likes and dislikes in job, self-appraisal, and more.”
5. Conduct telephone or video interviews: This should be an in-depth screening that lasts about 45 minutes. This narrows down your field.
6. Do competency interviews: These focus on proficiency and behavior.
7. Conduct a topgrading interview: Topgrading interviewing is intense and focuses on the candidate’s entire career history, with questions about every position.
8. Provide feedback and coaching to interviewers: This helps you improve your process by giving each other feedback.
9. Write a summary: Each interviewer writes up a summary of each candidate, used for comparing.
10. Have the candidate arrange reference calls: Topgrading theorizes that good performers have good relationships with former bosses and will enjoy this process. You then conduct the calls and categories the candidates according to their perceived potential.
11. Coach the new hire: The process doesn’t end on the candidate’s first day. You have to make sure to make this a good environment and an excellent place to grow.
12. Measure hiring success annually: When you establish a baseline and regular tracking of recruitment metrics, you can identify opportunities to finetune and improve your hiring process.

Why your company should utilize topgrading

Topgrading interviewing isn’t the best idea for every company and every position. It’s an intense process that doesn’t make sense for call center employees but makes sense for CEOs and senior vice presidents.

When you hire someone into a leadership position, you need to be absolutely sure of their skills and abilities. After all, you are entrusting your business to their decision-making skills. This can help weed through multiple candidates to find the best of the best.

However, there is a caution: you will find great candidates who aren’t willing to jump through your hoops. This is a risk you have to take when you dedicate your process to topgrading.

Example topgrading interview questions

Topgrading interviews are broken into four parts: Early influences, work history, plans and goals, and self-evaluation.

For example:

• Early influences: “Tell me about the high school teacher who influenced you the most? How did that impact your future?”
• Work history: “What is a problem you had to overcome in [specific position]? How did you solve it?”
• Plans and goals: “What are your career aspirations? What do you hope to achieve in this role?”
• Self-evaluation: “What are the things you struggle with? What are your strongest talents and skills?”

Candidates can answer none of these questions with a quick yes or no. They involve thought and require the interviewer to listen carefully.

Incorporating topgrading into your interview process

You don’t have to switch to a complete topgrading process to use some of its best aspects. Using job scorecards for all positions can help ensure that your interview process is fair and as unbiased as possible. Having multiple interviewers meet with each candidate also gives the possibility to tease out different skill sets. If the job has technical aspects, but the hiring manager isn’t a technical person, you want someone who understands those aspects to be part of the team. Otherwise, you may not get accurate answers.

As noted above, some aspects, like a compensation history, are illegal in some states and jurisdictions and should be avoided altogether, as it helps promulgate earlier discrimination problems. Look instead for growth in positions, regardless of salary.

Having candidates reach out to former bosses can make reference checks much easier, but keep in mind, just as there are bad employees, there are bad bosses. If someone has a bad relationship with a former boss, it doesn’t always mean that the candidate was the problem.

The best aspects of topgrading are careful, detailed planning, and consistent candidate evaluation. It really can help you get the people you need into the position.

The post What is topgrading interviewing? Our favorite tips appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Let’s go back to the beginning:

Video interviews are booming

Video interviews – even pre-recorded video interviews – are now a standard element in the overall recruitment process, and will continue to be so post-pandemic. According to Workable’s New World of Work study, 56.5% of businesses plan to make remote permanent for at least some of their workforce going forward. Only 6.2% of businesses plan to do nothing in general.

This means even more digitization of the recruitment process, and one aspect of that is video interview technology.

Even before COVID-19 introduced itself to our world, video interviews were used by 70% of the employers in the list of Talent Board’s Candidate Experience award winners. Time to hire is now shorter as a result of pre-recorded video interviews, and it’s cheaper too in terms of travel and time commitments both for the candidate and the recruiter.

The benefits of pre-recorded video interviews

The benefits of pre-recorded video interviews for employers and candidates are multifold. It’s a fantastic tool for evaluating candidates at a deeper level, especially for remote jobs in roles that directly engage with customers and prospects.

Recruiters can now enjoy the following benefits of video interviews:

1. Gain better insight into soft skills and “personality” of the candidate
2. Assess ability to work remotely – as video is a core component of remote work
3. Save time by not having to coordinate interviews or screening calls – especially across different time zones
4. Establish a more uniform process – making for a more equitable experience
5. Share pre-recorded interviews with your team –  in a traditional interview, only those physically present would be able to provide feedback

There are benefits for the candidate experience as well:

1. Candidates have the opportunity to present themselves more naturally than in a stressful 30-minute live interview – depending on the role, of course
2. Candidates can prepare for and complete video interviews at their convenience
3. Candidates are no longer expected to travel or commute for that first interaction with the company
4. Candidates can pause their interviews and pick up where they left off

To convince the budget holders in your team of the value of pre-recorded video interview tech, there are significant benefits to the bottom line as well:

1. Shorten your time to hire by eliminating a step in the selection process and combining the screening and interview stages. When 66% of candidates move on after two weeks of not hearing from an employer, shortening the time to hire becomes crucial in reducing the risk of losing top candidates – especially in high-volume hiring periods.
2. Reduce the hours invested in the hiring process. The number of work hours invested in communicating, scheduling, and carrying out the screening process can be costly, so reducing that means you can do more recruiting with less resource commitment. And with self-scheduling options, you’re eliminating time-consuming back-and-forth communication to find a time that’s right for both of you.
3. Lower your cost per hire by improving the quality of your hires, saving your money in the future through lower employee turnover and higher engagement. Also, with fewer work hours invested by the hiring team, the recruitment process becomes more optimized and you’re doing more with less.

Budget holders aren’t as interested in the day-to-day process – they’re more impressed with risk reduction and lower costs. So emphasize the above when presenting your case to those stakeholders.

There’s another impact, a negative one if you don’t implement it properly: your employer brand. Candidates have often griped that pre-recorded video interviews are just further automation of the recruitment process and can hurt the candidate experience. It sends a signal to candidates that they’re no longer humans – they’re just nuts and bolts in a larger machine. Not a good look for you or your brand.

However, it doesn’t need to be this way. Here are four tried-and-true ways that you can use pre-recorded video interviews to their greatest benefit and make a strong, positive impression on candidates.

Pre-recorded video interview best practices

Simply plugging video interviews into your current workflow won’t be enough. If you do, that’s where your employer brand will take a hit, because you are automating the process in the wrong way. To get around that, you want to personalize it as much as you can while at the same time utilizing video interviews to their fullest benefit as outlined above.

Here are four ways in which you can utilize video interviews to really boost your cred as an awesome employer:

1. Add an introductory video

Include a recording of yourself at the very beginning to help the candidate understand and appreciate the context in which you’re conducting video interviews. In this recording, you can:

• Introduce yourself as the recruiter or hiring manager
• Talk about the role a little bit – and what you’re looking for
• Explain why you’re doing video interviews instead of a live phone screening
• Talk about how a candidate can best prepare for this step
• Thank the candidate for taking part in this very important part of the process
• Set expectations – for example, turnaround time, next steps, etc.
• Use a friendly tone to put the candidate at ease

2. Tutor the candidate

Some candidates will not be 100% well-versed on pre-recorded video interviews. For some, it may be their very first time doing so. You can share a tutorial – such as this one – to help candidates prepare. You can share these tips as well:

• Equipment that they’ll need, and supported browsers
• A demonstration or practice question if available
• Find a quiet place free from distractions with a professional background

3. Include video questions

Instead of simply adding boilerplate questions to the video interview in writing and sending those on to the candidate, have the hiring manager record themselves asking the questions one by one.

This more personalized approach reassures candidates when they can see who they’re responding to, and helps them prepare a solid, thoughtful answer. All the better for you to gain more insight into candidates.

4. Incorporate other elements via links

Pre-recorded video interviews do not necessarily have to be in a basic Q&A format. You can liven things up by adding elements in different formats, customizing fonts and styles, etc. Examples also include:

• Embedding a YouTube video and asking the candidate to record their honest reaction to it
• Including a PDF (i.e. a sales sheet, a product page, a piece of marketing collateral) and asking the candidate what they would do to improve on it

It’s not about what you use – it’s how you present it

When you think about Nike, it’s not about the shoes. It’s about Michael Jordan, “Just Do It”, and other powerful messaging and positioning. Red Bull’s similar – they’re not just an energy drink company. They’re about extreme sports and healthy, fun living.

If Nike just said, “Here’s a pair of shoes”, and if Red Bull said, “Folks, here’s an energy drink”, would you be so interested? Probably not.

Think about it in the same way when adding pre-recorded video interviews to your recruitment workflow. Candidates won’t respond well if you just said, “Here’s a video interview, get ‘er done and get back to me!” But they’ll respond if you add the extra stuff.

Personalize the video interview experience with introductory videos and pre-recorded questions, include tutorials to help the candidate present their best selves, and make it an all-around interesting and immersive experience for the candidate.

That’s a part of recruitment marketing, and the resulting positive candidate experience can be great for your employer brand – and help you hire the very best talent for your team.

Want to learn more? Check out our other content on video interviews:

• The video interview: top tips for employers
• Zinger Property enhances their inclusive hiring process with Workable Video Interviews
• Video Interviews: Designing for and with end users in mind

The post Pre-recorded video interviews: 4 best practices for success appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

So can you break through the screen and bring your company’s story to life? Find out in our chat with Elena Valentine, CEO & Co-Founder of Skillscout. She’ll guide us through steps you can take to level-up your employer brand strategy with video.

Subscribe to the podcast for more ways to move your hiring forward.

The post Podcast episode #8: How to attract, engage, and retain talent with video appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

You’re also surfing online, consuming interesting stuff, and at one point, you’re looking at a company’s website and thinking, “These folks look pretty cool. I like what they’re doing. I wonder if they’re in the market for someone like me.”

So that’s when you gravitate to their careers page. It’s one thing to want to work at a company because you like their product or service, or they specialize in your area of expertise, but it’s another thing to want to work at a company because they seem like an amazing place to work and they feel like an amazing fit for you.

Careers page best practices for your employer brand

As an HR professional and employer, that’s why you need to double down on your careers page best practices. Here are seven core elements you need to think about when building a careers page that will attract the attention of even the most seasoned (and jaded) jobseekers:

1. Add employee testimonials

When you shop online, do you look at the reviews before making a purchasing decision? Have you ever bought something or watched a movie/TV show because a friend or family recommended it? The answer to both is likely “yes”.

The same thinking applies for your careers page. Candidates often read up on company reviews on Glassdoor or Indeed when thinking about applying for a job. If you include a few friendly employee testimonials in your careers page, it’ll make an impact on their impression of you.

Workable’s own careers page has several high-quality testimonials from employees who have worked at Workable for years. They’re outlined nicely in our first example of careers page best practices.

Screenshot: https://apply.workable.com/careers/

2. Put your “About Us” at the very top

You want candidates who want to work for you. One way of motivating them is telling them up front who you are and what you’re all about. An aspiring programmer looking to play a role in disrupting the existing framework of their industry won’t necessarily apply for a developer job at a traditional financial institution, but will jump through hoops for an opportunity in a cool fintech startup.

Likewise, a seasoned programmer looking for more stability and predictability in their working environment will be more interested in a role at a legacy organization with tried-and-true workflow systems.

Don’t make your candidates look for that information. Put it right in front of them, right on the page itself, and right at the very top.

GetResponse does exactly this, with two short, punchy paragraphs above the fold detailing who they are and what they do, in just 65 words. Sixty-five words! That gives the candidate all they need to know to make a quick decision on whether to apply for a role with this marketing SaaS company.

Screenshot: https://apply.workable.com/getresponse/

3. Add your company’s mission, vision and values

A widely-publicized Glassdoor survey in 2019 found that a company’s mission and culture are valued more than compensation for many candidates. Plus, the vast majority of jobseekers take mission and culture into account when applying for a job.

As the lines between work and home continue to blur after the paradigm-shifting events of 2020, it’s become more important than ever for candidates that their prospective employer’s vision and values align with their own. So, including your company’s mission, vision and values in your careers page will not only help candidates decide if you’re the right fit for them, but also attract candidates who are personally motivated to play an active role in your overall mission.

That can be a powerful differentiator beyond the elements of candidate attraction such as salary, benefits, work flexibility, and other standard perks.

Soho House & Co.’s careers page includes their mission and values with special emphasis on what they describe as the “guiding principles” that drive them. By listing five simple, yet powerful, values – curiosity, inclusivity, connection, passion, respect – they make it clear who they are, the kind of team that they are, and what they’re committed to as an organization.

Screenshot: https://careers.sohohouse.com/

4. Include details about benefits and perks

Yes, benefits and perks are powerful attractors for candidates when applying for a job. Candidates want to know what they’re getting out of the job on top of the standard salary. There are numerous kinds of benefits, including insurance, paid time off, work flexibility and location, bonuses and awards, training programs, and even company getaways and free lunches.

Be sure to include a breakdown of the important benefits and perks your company offers that set you apart from the next employer. Again, Workable does this in its own careers page.

Screenshot: http://careers.workable.com

5. Add photo and video elements

Candidates can be skeptical about what you’re telling them – and they have every right to be. You’re marketing to them, after all. To get around that initial skepticism, add a touch of authenticity with photos and videos in your page.

These can be straight-up employee testimonials, a statement from the CEO, a day in the life of one team in your company, or a demonstration of your product or service in action. Anything that can give the candidate a visual dive into what it would be like to work for you.

Every company is comprised of individuals working together – photos, videos and any other visual element can be powerful tools to convey that personality to your candidates.

TrueLayer does this masterfully. The fintech organization balances out the very professional photos with organic images. Scrolling down, you run across themes important to candidates – in this case, how the company operates in this COVID-19 environment, and images of teams not only working, but interacting socially.

They’ve also supplemented that with links to design and engineering principles as written by their own employees – offering added insight into what kind of people work there and how they approach the work. Check out the fifth of our seven careers page best practices in action:

Screenshot: https://apply.workable.com/truelayer/

Meanwhile, investment software startup Stockbit embeds this video on their careers page near the bottom, which makes for a more immersive experience.

6. Keep a consistent brand and message

You’ve heard of marketing. How about recruitment marketing? A core element of that is maintaining a consistent brand and message anywhere your audience interacts with your company – in this case, your candidates. That includes your application setup, your interview and scheduling processes, and of course, your careers page.

In fact, your careers page is a core element of candidate attraction. It’s one of the first things a candidate looks at when they come to your site. If your careers page is clunky, has conflicting messages or is inconsistent overall, you need to fix that.

Your brand and message is not just in the language. It’s also in the visual elements – are you using brand colors in your careers page? Is your logo prominently featured? Are the headlines short and snappy and, again, in your company’s official font and colors? Is the text itself tight and concise and informative?

All of those are important. You are marketing yourself as an employer to candidates.

Again, Soho House & Co. presents a great example of a careers page that’s consistent in brand and tone throughout.

7. Ensure a high-quality, eye-catching design

Take two companies’ careers pages, both with all of the above information neatly laid out in front of you. Both companies are also exactly the same in every other way – in their product and service, their location, their benefits and perks, and so on.

The only difference? One company has listed all their information in dry sans-serif font, heavy on the text which makes candidates’ eyes dry out as they read. The other company has eye-catching design that will make an impression even on tired jobseekers, and is designed to guide attention to the important parts in a way that feels natural to the candidate.

Stockbit’s careers page is eye-catching and very scrollable. They’ve taken all of the above careers page best practices and assembled it all into an appealing layout that’s easy on the eye and gives the candidate a quick overview of the company they’re about to apply to.

Careers page best practices for the win

Having an advanced careers page with thoughtful design, digestible information, visual elements, employee testimonials and mission, vision & values is a core element of your overall recruitment marketing strategy. It’s not just about putting your best brand forward – you’re also doing your candidates a favor by making it easier for them to learn about who you are. That level of candidate attraction speaks volumes for your employer brand.

Want to see more great examples? Check out these 10 great careers page examples, and why we love them.

The post 7 careers page best practices to boost your employer brand appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Why you should ask candidates unique interview questions
• Examples of unique interview questions
• How to incorporate unique questions during your interview

Why you should ask candidates unique interview questions

Usually, by the time people get to the interview stage, you know that –at least on paper – they meet the qualifications for the job. But, resumes and cover letters can be deceiving. When someone writes “developed new system for X,” the truth might be; “I was in the same room as the people who developed the new system for X.” That’s the type of stuff you want to tease out. That’s what you can do in the face-to-face interview.

If you simply keep to the same template for all positions, you won’t find the answers you need. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t ask similar questions to candidates for the same position – you should, in fact, to ensure a standardized process – but questions need to be uniquely tailored to the individual candidate.

This requires a bit more work from the hiring manager – you have to pay closer attention to the resume and cover letter – but it can pay off handsomely when you now know the candidate you’re hiring is the perfect fit for the job. Increased engagement, lower turnover, better productivity – there are numerous payoffs in a higher-quality hire.

Examples of unique interview questions

1. Tell me about the moment you came up with the idea for X.

When someone lists their accomplishments on their resumes, asking this question helps tease out if they really did what they said they did. Were they the ‘idea’ person or simply someone who implemented someone else’s idea? (It’s not bad to be an implementation person! It’s just a different skill set.)

Someone who developed the idea will almost always have a moment they can describe. “I was in my car on the way home, listening to a podcast, when the person said, ‘plastics.’ I was like, ‘Woah, plastics. That’s what I need to do.’”

When you ask a candidate about an accomplishment on their resume, you find out their level of involvement with the achievement, and you find out how their mind works. It’s a great question for anyone in a leadership or creative role.

2. Tell me about some of the most difficult problems you worked on and how you solved them.

This question is stolen from Elon Musk, so you may argue that it’s not unique. What makes this a unique interview question is that you get to find out strengths and weaknesses that directly pertain to the job.

If you ask, “What is your biggest weakness?” you’ll get some drivel that won’t help you find the right candidate. If you ask this, the candidate can give you a tailored answer.

3. What made you go into this field of work?

This unique interview question helps you ascertain a cultural fit. You need to know what you are looking for in the answer to this. Is the candidate excited about their field of work? It gets you the background information you want and (often) insight into where they want to go in the future? Is this a stepping stone? A stop-gap measure? Or a job the person really wants?

“Where do you see yourself in five years?” is one of the more popular questions to get that information, but it’s reviled in these times of uncertainty and shorter tenures. The above question will give you better insight into the candidate’s longer-term objectives.

4. Here’s a description of a problem we’re working on. Can you give me a five-minute idea of where and how you’d begin solving this?

This puts your candidate uniquely into the job and not on general principles around the role. Note: this isn’t an assignment to create a three-hour presentation, and it’s not an attempt to get free consulting out of a candidate. It’s a five-minute look at where they would start.

From this, you learn their background, problem-solving approach, and ability to comprehend the situations they will face in the job.

How to incorporate unique questions during your interview

The point of these unique interview questions is to target them specifically to the job and the company. By the time you conduct an interview, all the candidates have already been determined that they can likely do the job. Through these questions, you get to learn a lot more about the individual and how they would fit into your department and team.

So many canned interview questions have the candidate thinking, “What does the hiring manager want to hear?” rather than “Here is what I have to offer.” These questions directly engage the candidate’s unique experiences and the unique struggles of the business. You’ll have a better understanding of the candidate with this type of questioning.

Use these questions as part of your general process. Depending on the role, you may want technical questions, hypothetical situations, and questions about their career progression. But, with everyone, you want to know how well they’d do in the job. These questions help.

The post 4 unique interview questions to help you find the best employees appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

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Table of Contents

1. Candidate experience

• On sidestepping “Where do you see yourself in X years?”
• On recruiting passive candidates

2. Lean recruiting

• On start-up recruiting without benefits and perks
• On sourcing diverse talent on a tight budget

3. DEI in the recruitment process

• On supporting DEI in hiring
• On the efficacy of Workable’s anonymized screening tool
• On hiring diverse candidates for a school district

4. Competing for talent

• On compensation in different markets
• On finding top talent when you’re not the ideal

5. And one more for the road… on hiring after COVID

Following are some exchanges from that Q&A session (with names of guests removed to preserve privacy):

1. Candidate experience

On sidestepping “Where do you see yourself in X years?”

Guest:
What is the best question to ask potential employees about retention in the office?

Melissa:
Hi, thank you for your question! To clarify, are you asking how to respond about retention at your company if the answer is not positive?

Guest:
Yes, we have a lot of longevity in our office. I have worked there for over 20 years. It takes about a year just to learn the job. I wanted to think beyond the “where do you see yourself in 5 years”. I know there are some gray areas to avoid, but any advice would be great!

Melissa: 
Assessing staying power can be hard to navigate, I would focus on sharing your company’s lengthy ramp time and the need for time commitment that employees need to invest in order to make an impact. For the right candidates, this transparency and approach will resonate.

However, we also have to recognize that workforce behaviors have evolved when it comes to tenure and the average time in a role is around 4.5 years and those aged between 24-34, it’s around 3 years, so employers have to adjust in order to maximize the impact employees can make in that timeframe.

Guest:
Great advice!! thank you so much!!!!

Melissa:
My pleasure!

On recruiting passive candidates

Guest:
Could you provide advice on best practices when it comes to sourcing passive candidates?

Melissa:
Hi again, of course! RESILIENCE. Candidates are cautious to leave jobs right now so don’t get offended if you don’t get responses to your reach out.

Personalization is key, show that you have a good understanding of their background and why you think making a move into your organization would be worthwhile. Projecting warmth and enthusiasm goes a long way and sharing as much about your company and why it’s a stellar place to work.

It’s difficult but you also have to do this as succinctly as possible. And don’t be afraid to use multiple methods of reaching out, direct email, LinkedIn or even a call.

Keith:
Think of it in terms of recruitment marketing. You are marketing yourself as an employer. You want to show your value as an employer to the candidate. Usually, it’s the other way around, in that candidates are trying to market themselves to you.

Show your value as an employer, in terms of what that candidate can gain from making such a move. As Melissa says, passive candidates aren’t just going to jump ship. You’re asking them to take a risk. You want to show them that you’re worth that risk.

Guest:
Thank you so much you two! I really appreciate it! I often do get discouraged when I don’t get a reply back. I will consider trying different approaches and watching which one works and have really been looking into recruitment marketing.

2. Lean recruiting

On start-up recruiting without benefits and perks

Guest:
What is the best way to recruit people into a start up that currently has no formal benefits and very few perks. It’s hard in the world of free lunch and a games room!

Keith:
Oh yeah, that is always tough. You’re in a very competitive space already. Workable CEO Nikos Moraitakis offered some great insights around that theme in an interview a few years ago:

To your point about free lunches and games rooms, he offered this: “No one ever came to work because of the ping pong tables. Even less so, stayed for them.”

He does have a point. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about benefits and perks – you can communicate the value of the work itself, which can be unique and interesting in so many ways compared with other startups.

You may also find this to be a good resource.

Melissa:
Hi! You have to capitalize on the things a startup does offer – a chance to be part of building and shaping structure, tech tools, teams and culture! Post your jobs in places that might draw in candidates that are inspired by that type of opportunity – AngelList, VentureFizz and Built In to name a few. At this stage of your growth, count on referrals too, they’ll have a better sense of what they’re walking into.

On sourcing diverse talent on a tight budget

Guest:
What are some strategies for sourcing diverse candidates when the organization doesn’t have the budget to invest in diverse platforms?

Melissa:
Hi … thanks for your question! To me, it’s about posting in multiple places to source from as many diverse job boards/candidate pools as possible. There are organizations who also focus and partner with companies to support diverse hiring. Also, using technology like anonymized screening will help.

Training hiring managers to identify biases is a crucial starting point when interviewing in order to to avoid unintentionally disqualifying candidates. Getting commitment from the hiring team will sometimes take longer than you wish, so patience is required.

Just so I can try to help further, what are the diverse platforms you’re referring to?

If you’d like to do some reading on the topic, here’s a great resource for you (and definitely, watch the video!).

Guest:
Melissa, thank you for the advice. This is very helpful. Currently we have looked in areas like Dice or POCIT. And I have been told we do not have a budget to post on paid platforms at the moment. Current postings are those provided via our current ATS. Thank you again for sharing this resource.

3. DEI in the recruitment process

On supporting DEI in hiring

Guest:
There are some new recruitment products, touting support of DE&I with this process, that is championing for even more increased “blind” selection criteria to go beyond hiding names, home addresses, school names, etc. which have been known to elicit hidden biases to not utilizing Zoom or video interviews to further cut down on unconscious biases from creeping into this process – ie. voice, dialect, dress, hairstyle, etc.

So these products are focused on the employer asking work-based questions for the candidate to submit in writing. Would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this new burgeoning recruitment strategy to further support DE&I efforts?

Melissa:
Hi … thank you for your question! This is a tough one, but definitely a good one. While there is research available that shows the positive impact of anonymized screening, it needs to be part of a wider DEI initiative to have an impact.

For example: According to a study completed by Harvard Business Review, “Before any anonymization, men outperformed women by about 5%. After just the removal of the names, that number dropped to less than 3%. When the applications were fully anonymized, women outperformed men by 1%.”

However, even if this method does improve your diverse hiring metrics, it does not guarantee the organization’s culture is inclusive. Anonymized screening is one piece of the puzzle – it’s a tool companies can utilize to meet their goals – but so much more needs to happen as well.

On the efficacy of Workable’s anonymized screening tool

Guest:
I also noted that you have anonymized the Workable ATS, could you please let me know to what extent this has reduced unconscious bias and how, in cases where the content of the CV or application either countries where one has worked, college or university can give an indication of nationality

Melissa:
Hi, great question! This article has a few screenshots that can help you visualize what our Anonymized Screening tool does. As you can see, college & country are considered identifying information, so these would be blocked out.

According to a study completed by Harvard Business Review, “Before any anonymization, men outperformed women by about 5%. After just the removal of the names, that number dropped to less than 3%. When the applications were fully anonymized, women outperformed men by 1%.”

Guest:
Great feedback, that’s good analytics. I noted that some panel members try as much as possible to have women in the shortlist and sometimes this can be at the expense of men.

This happened last time, I pointed this out to the team and they thought, it’s good to have an all-women shortlist. The results were anything but; we did go back to the longlist and selected the next group which was a mix and the second round was much better and men did better compared to the first group.

On hiring diverse candidates for a school district

Guest:
Hi! As a recruiter for a school district, my biggest challenge is to recruit diverse candidates for all positions. What suggestions or ideas do you have on how to do this?

Keith:
Hi – great question. We talk a lot about this in Workable’s own content. First things first, you want to diversify that initial candidate pool. In that, you’ll need to think about where you’re actually posting your job ads and where you’re announcing opportunities at your school district. The more diverse your outreach, the wider range of candidates you’ll attract, so to speak.

Another thing to think about is the overall messaging of your school district. An overt statement that shows you value diversity, equity and inclusion can do a lot in terms of candidate attraction.

If you’d like to do some reading on the topic, here’s a great resource for you.

If the challenge is about making a case for it with stakeholders, then this may be helpful.

Melissa:
Hi, thanks for your question!

I agree with Keith, you want to increase posting in multiple places to source from as many diverse job boards/candidate pools as possible. There are also many organizations focusing and partnering with companies in support of diverse hiring. Also, you’ll find using technology like anonymized screening will be helpful.

On the hiring manager side, training them to identify biases when interviewing to avoid unintentionally disqualifying candidates will get the ball rolling. When it comes to commitment from the hiring team, it will sometimes take longer than you wish, so patience is required.

4. Competing for talent

On compensation in different markets

Guest:
I recently joined a fully distributed company with employees all over the country. When it comes to hiring cross-country and compensation, what philosophy do you think makes the most sense? Different compensation for different markets? Same compensation regardless of market, which can mean you’re priced out of the most expensive markets?

What’s your advice when coming up with compensation recommendations knowing how much markets can vary?

Keith:
Hi! This is obviously a tough one, because there’s no “right” answer. It’s been debated widely, especially as more companies move to remote-first operations during the pandemic. There’s a great discussion from Forbes on it – highlighting Reddit and Zillow as companies that opted to pay the same regardless of location, and Facebook at the other end, preferring to pay based on location.

And if you wanted to go down the rabbit hole on the topic of distributed teams, we do have some great reading for you. First, an interview with SmartBug CEO Ryan Malone, whose company was fully remote way back before it was cool.

And another, on the topic of hiring in different countries.

Melissa:
Hi, thanks for your question. Definitely a hot topic right now. But really, it comes down to your company’s compensation philosophy. Do you want to lead the pack on comp or stay conservative or middle of the road?

It’s unrealistic to expect a company of a certain size and revenue located in one geography to compete with the likes of large enterprises in NY and San Fran.

So the best advice I can give is, make a fair and realistic budget for roles based on comparative comp data, budget approval and cast your net far and wide in your candidate search. You’ll soon get a pretty good picture from candidate feedback if any comp adjustments need to be reconsidered from there.

And sometimes, you have to accept, this is how much a role is going to cost to fill, and you gotta pay if that’s the position your company needs.

Guest:
Yeah, it’s interesting. We’re a small 30-person series A company so our resources are very different than many of the companies frequently mentioned in regards to this topic. I think the biggest challenge has been helping my hiring managers realize that our budget for a role is X.

We might find someone great in an expensive market, but there’s only so much flexibility we have in regards to compensation.

I think they are struggling to understand that there’s always going to be great talent out there that we simply can’t afford–and I know that’s not unique to just my company.

Melissa:
The way I look at it is, if budget is non-negotiable, then time and patience is required to advertise and source for this needle in a haystack. The other, less ideal option, a re-assessment of the job might be required and understand that you might have to get someone who checks 70% of the boxes or a more junior profile.

As much as we’d like to move mountains for our hiring teams, we’re also not miracle workers.

On finding top talent when you’re not the ideal

Guest:
Melissa, thank you for your time and expertise. I am at a small, regional, rural public university in the PNW and we are challenged finding qualified IT faculty to hire. Suggestions?

Our comp structure is “average”, benefits are very good, and livability is superb (if you don’t need a city to live in). Thanks again.

Melissa:
Hi, thanks for your question! Happy to help as best I can. IT / tech talent can notoriously be difficult to find. Do you find you’re not getting enough quality candidates to fill the pipeline? Or, are you getting candidates, but they fall off during the hiring process?

Guest:
Unfortunately – both. Lean applicant pool and quick bailouts when offers to our best candidates come in ahead of us. We cannot sponsor H1B visas and that portion of the labor market appears to be the applicants most available.

Melissa:
This is a tough one. Advertising and promoting those stellar benefits is key and the livability, it will help make your position stand out. Thank you for clarifying, if it’s a lack of qualified candidates, focusing your sourcing efforts on passive candidates at other educational institutions would be where I’d start first.

Keith:
Hi! Seconding Melissa’s comment that IT/tech talent is tough to find. We have written a lot about that in our website. You’ll probably find these articles particularly helpful, especially if you’re finding that talent attraction is a challenge:

• Office in an ‘unsexy’ area? Use these 5 talent attraction strategies
• Hiring tech workers when you’re not on their A-list

Guest:
Super! Thanks for the tips and online resources. We will move ahead optimistically!

Keith:
De nada! If you search “tech talent” in our site, you’ll find plenty of other helpful stuff as well.

Guest:
Thank you again. Your online availability is just great…

Melissa:
Our pleasure!

5. And one more for the road…

On hiring after COVID

Guest:
Any recruiting recommendations for hiring pre & post COVID?

Melissa:
Hi, thanks for your question!

In the past year, we opened our scope to other states offering greater flexibility on location, resulting in a larger pool of candidates. We’ve also focused on a higher utilization of video interviews. As we’re working remotely and will likely continue for the foreseeable future, that comfort with technology and video communication is key.

We’ve also been looking at our scorecards and how we assess candidates to evaluate autonomy and greater emphasis on communication skills. We’ve found by doing these activities, we’ve had greater success in securing hires that do well under our new ways of working.

Keith:
Melissa basically answered it… but thought you’d be interested to know that we surveyed our employees on the kinds of skills that are needed in a remote work world, with some great results.

We also sat down with a CEO of a company that has been fully remote for nearly a decade. He had some great tips on how to identify ideal candidates for that kind of environment.

Have more questions for us?

We are always here to support recruiters and HR professionals in doing what they do best. If you have any more questions that you wish you had the answer to, don’t hesitate to email us at content@workable.com with “Recruiting Q&A” in the subject headline. We’ll assemble your questions and have Melissa answer them for you in a future article!

The post Recruiting Q&As from Bamboo HR’s Employee Experience Week appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Described as a digital challenger bank in the United Kingdom, Starling Bank operates out of four locations in the UK and Ireland with headquarters in London. They take a more customer-centric approach to banking, and continue to grow rapidly as a disrupter in the financial industry. They have amassed £363M in total funding and more than two million customers to date, plus they have been voted as Best British Bank for three consecutive years from 2018 to 2020.

Starling Bank’s incredible growth requires a highly efficient recruitment solution that can handle the volume of candidates and hiring managers while maintaining seamless, easy to use functionality. Workable’s ATS gives Starling Bank what it needs to confidently maintain its recruitment process. 

Says Marc Douch, Talent Acquisition Manager at Starling Bank:

“It’s a simple platform to use from a recruiter and a hiring manager point of view… Training new hiring managers is almost non-existent because I just set them up with an account. It’s fairly self-explanatory.”

To meet the skyrocketing demand of its services in the market, Starling Bank has consistently hired at a high volume in two major areas: engineering and customer support.

“We hired just under 600 people last year and, I think so far [as of November 2020], we’ve hired about 450,” says Marc. “So, it’s been a bit of a busy past couple of years from a hiring perspective, that’s for sure.”

The Video Interviews feature, which eliminates resource-heavy communications between the recruiter and job applicant to set up screening calls, has been particularly helpful, says Marc. 

Marc adds that recruiting continued at its torrid pace even as Starling Bank shifted to a remote working environment, making Video Interviews an even more useful tool in the company’s recruiting toolbox. In fact, he says business has moved even more smoothly than it did when everyone was in the same working space.

“We’ve gone from a company that was five days a week in the office to no one’s in the office five days a week,” Marc says. “We’ve ended up doing some stuff in quicker time than we probably would have done in the office.”

Marc also highlights Workable’s award-winning customer support team as a huge bonus to using the recruitment solution – when operating in such a busy recruiting environment, recruiters like Marc rely on solving problems as quickly as they arise. 

“The support that you get is more responsive, more thoughtful, more on the ball than any other ATS I’ve ever worked with,” says Marc.

Starling Bank’s choice to use Workable’s recruitment solution enabled it to continue to grow its workforce rapidly to meet booming business demands. Moreover, it ensured a seamless shift to a fully online recruitment process throughout the COVID-19 pandemic – making possible a highly efficient operating system beyond the crisis as the business continues to scale rapidly in future.

The post Starling Bank scales from 50 to 1,100 employees in five years, staying efficient with Workable 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.

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.

If you aren’t collecting that information regularly, it’s time to reconsider that choice – you cannot see the bigger picture without your candidates’ point of view. They experience your hiring process first-hand and can readily share your strategy’s pros and cons. Plus, candidates will often share their experiences via public forums such as Glassdoor and Indeed, as well as throughout their professional networks. That’s why it’s critical to take their feedback into serious consideration, before your reputation as an employer is harmed via a poor candidate experience.

Candidate surveys: what can you track – and how?

In this section, you’ll find some key hiring areas you can monitor and improve using candidate surveys. You can tailor these aspects and survey questions according to your business goals and needs. Keep those surveys anonymous, so that job applicants feel more secure and willing to share their honest opinions with you.

1. Candidate experience

We’re starting with the broader category which includes the majority of the aforementioned: Candidate experience. With candidate experience surveys, you can retrieve information regarding each recruiting phase, such as the application process, interviews, and assessment stage. You can combine close-ended with open-ended questions, or ask candidates to evaluate procedures using a Likert scale.

Here’s a small sample of questions you can include:

• What would you recommend to make our hiring process better in the future?
• On a scale from 1 to 5, how hard was the assessment you completed?
• How clear were the job responsibilities to you before and after the interview?

It’s critical to have a standardized hiring process with clear goals and guidelines for both interviewers and hiring managers. The results will enable you to spot the flaws and adjust them accordingly. For example, if the majority of candidates for a specific role reported that the required assessment was hard and time-consuming, consider replacing it with another tool that takes less time to complete and measures skills more accurately.

2. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Companies are increasingly understanding the significance of diverse hiring and inclusivity in the workplace. According to a recent Workable survey on DEI at work, 56.1% of respondents said that they actively aim to improve diverse recruiting in the future, compared to 20% who said they don’t.

In the same survey, 64.8% of the recipients reported they want to achieve diversity throughout the entire company. To succeed in this, understanding the demographics of your candidates is a crucial factor. Here are some data you could collect from your applicants, suggested by Multiverse’s Inclusion and Diversity Lead, Siobhan Randell:

• Gender
• Ethnicity
• Neurodiversity
• Disability
• Education
• Socio-economic background
• Dependents and caring responsibilities

If you find out that you attract applicants from similar backgrounds and with identical traits based on those data, try to figure out why this happens. Maybe you need to tweak the messages – e.g. your vision and mission statements – you share with potential candidates, or post your ads on more diverse job boards.

3. Employer brand

Candidates inform themselves about a company’s culture through numerous channels. They can reach out to your current employees, scroll through Glassdoor or Indeed, search your social media, or talk to others in their professional network. How can you ensure that the perception candidates form about your business is accurate and valid – and remains positive?

Again, candidate surveys can help you know your brand positioning in the competitive market. You can analyze what applicants and candidates think about your company culture and brand and examine how you could boost positive awareness in the future. Here are some questions you could ask:

• Did you know about our company before you applied?
• Was our company culture clear to you during the hiring process?
• Name any benefits/perks that are missing from our scheme that you find valuable.

Overall, this information will enable you to revisit your employer brand and clarify the grey-zone areas that can confuse candidates. For example, let’s imagine that you’ve recently been through a company culture shift. Even though you’ve introduced remote work in your benefit plan, you may learn that candidates were not informed properly about this change.

So, how can you act upon it, with the minimum possible cost? You can consider adding this detail in the job description or your careers page. This way, you’ll attract more suitable candidates next time.

Prevention is better than cure

Overall, collecting feedback from candidates can be game-changing. You’ll be able to spot the flaws in your hiring process before word-of-mouth affects you in a negative way. When candidates understand that their experience and feedback matters to you as an employer and that you want to keep growing in this area, they think better of you.

Finally, avoid using these data just to resolve short-term crises as they occur – instead, utilize them to actively reform your long-term recruitment strategy. For instance, if you see negative comments about your interviewing process online, on Twitter or Glassdoor, responding with an empathetic manner to people who’ve complained is one short-term solution to regain trust. However, if you neglect revisiting the interviewing process, then you’re neglecting the long-term benefits of a fully standardized – and fully tracked – recruitment process.

The post How to level up your hiring strategy through anonymous candidate surveys appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

• Children’s moment of glory
• Other unexpected visitors
• Workable’s takeaways for virtual backgrounds
• Yhprum’s law

Children’s moment of glory

Parenting and working at the same time is a fairly new and stressful challenge for many employees. It might become even more stressful when children interrupt an important video call such as a live video interview with a candidate; but it doesn’t have to be that way.

First of all you need to accept and embrace the fact that since you work from home, you’re constantly caught in the middle ground between professional and personal life. If you’re already there, you can use this fact as an icebreaker during the first minutes of your conversation with the candidate.

For instance, share a story about when your children videobombed another business call. By doing this, you leave room for the candidates to share a similar work from home bloopers and at the same time you make them feel more at ease and therefore improve candidate experience. This practice also prepares the candidate for a potential invasion and helps you communicate an inclusive culture where having children and working is OK.

Now, in case your children do walk in, invite them to say a brief “Hello”. However, if the situation isn’t that easy to resolve, it’s better to reschedule the interview and ask for the candidate’s understanding. Make sure to prioritize the interview and send an email in which you highlight that you value their time and you want them to have your full attention.

Keep in mind that the same might happen to the candidate as well, and your response will be crucial. Before starting the interviews, prepare a case scenario and give some thought to your response. Remember to show your wholehearted understanding and offer the option to reschedule the interview. Unexpected things do happen, but the way we handle them matters the most.

Other unexpected visitors

The golden rule to avoid other unexpected visitors is to think and act proactively. You can communicate with others in the home that you don’t want to be disturbed during certain periods of the day. Try to note down your busy hours each day and help them keep track of your schedule and your needs. This way, you’ll more likely avoid unwanted disruptions such as the following:

However, with Murphy’s law in mind, sometimes things don’t go as planned, even though you’ve done your best to avoid any situation. Open communication with the candidate and a sense of humor on the spot are the most important ingredients to handle the situation successfully. For example, if your doorbell rings and that long-awaited package you’ve been expecting is finally here, it can be OK to pause the interview to pick it up, but make sure that you make up for the time lost.

And what about pets?

Most of my colleagues have already met my cat Fluffy — or at least seen his tail waving around the webcam at some point. You can ask your vet or find some practices online to help your paw-worker stay calm, especially during a busy day. Pets reduce stress and increase levels of oxytocin, also known as the love hormone. So, next time your pet walks through an interview take some time to introduce them to the candidate as it is likely that both of you will feel more comfortable and relaxed.

Workable’s takeaways for virtual backgrounds

It all started on Dec. 9, 2020, when Spyros Magiatis, Workable’s CTO, announced in the company’s Slack channel “wfh-watercooler” the first day’s prompt of a “12 Days of Holiday Spirit” series; a holiday photo from when we were kids. Many of us shared our moment of glory either along with Santa Claus, during a Christmas play.

The next day, Melissa Escobar-Franco, our Head of Talent, asked for our favorite holiday ornaments or decorations. The first one to answer — and claim our giggles — was Rob Long, our VP of Sales (EMEA). Behold:

Over the following days, we shared lots of present ideas, crafts, pictures of our pets, our favorite holiday movies – and even created a holiday adventure about a little troll who loved to bake cookies. And then, Panos Korros, our SVP of Engineering, asked us to change our meeting background to a special holiday scene. Guess what background Spyros chose? Yes, it was a hilarious reference to Rob Long’s toilet decoration.

The days passed and as we approached New Year’s Eve. Fewer Slack notifications came in, as people enjoyed their time off. And Spyros did the same. But one day, as he opened his computer and joined the video conference to interview a candidate, he realized that something didn’t feel right with the candidate as he was utterly surprised.

Here’s what the candidate saw:

Spyros, of course, laughed it off and this made for a more memorable video interview experience for the candidate. If something like this happens to you, take a note from Spyros’ book: don’t be afraid to laugh. Sharing personal moments makes you more human and brings you closer to the candidate and at the end of the day, connects you to another human being.

Yhprum’s law

Yhprum’s law — which is Murphy spelled backwards — says that “Anything that can go right, will go right”. And it will. Everything’s a matter of perspective and handling. If you panic and start blaming you or others while you experience work from home bloopers or any other difficult situation, you’ll only see Murphy’s law; but take a deep breath and handle those situations in a humorous way, and always try to find the best in it. You’ll see that not only your professional, but also your personal life will be vastly improved for the better.

The post How to handle work from home bloopers during an interview appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Zinger Property is a property management group that owns 16 buildings across the US Midwest with 4,000 apartment units. Based in Chicago, their mission is to blend technology and the traditional human touch in property management. With Workable, they’ve found a recruitment technology partner that aligns with their mission to ensure a personalized touch in the hiring process. Alongside their main Zinger brand, they also hire for their subsidiary company, RuMe. Their multi-tenancy account with Workable allows them to hire in one place, keeping senior leadership aligned on their robust hiring plan.

Says Kate Blake, Assistant Director of Operations at Zinger: “Workable has completely streamlined our entire recruiting process. Furthermore, our staff working in the field is able to utilize the mobile app, which has been a game-changer.”

Prior to COVID, Zinger had been vetting video interview solutions to reduce the administrative time required to screen candidates. When Workable offered their new solution, they went with it because it was a fully native platform keeping all the elements of candidate evaluation in one place.

Says Kate: “Every member of our hiring team reviews the video interviews. Early in the process, our direct hiring manager will review. As candidates progress, our corporate staff utilize video interviews prior to approval.”

Inclusivity increased with the introduction of video interviews as senior leaders who approve hires were able to gain a better overall impression of candidates. The enhanced inclusivity of the video interview feature aligned naturally with Zinger’s vision of a fully inclusive company culture. This was an added benefit to the original value proposition of Workable Video Interviews, which was to eliminate the time-consuming nature of phone screens in the hiring process.

Says Kate: “I would say that video interviews have cut our recruiting time practically in half.”

Video interviews are sometimes stigmatized among candidates as being impersonal. Zinger combatted that by keeping branded video interviews and ensuring increased flexibility for the candidate – so much that a newly hired employee spoke out about their positive experience.

Says Jim Oates, Associate Analyst at RuMe: “It was definitely easier to schedule than a phone screen because you can do it on your own time. I found this online interview to be a great process that was very time-flexible and very much in favor of the applicant.”

Zinger Property Group’s choice to use both Workable’s ATS and Video Interview products enhanced inclusivity, decreased admin screening time and solidified a branded, personalized candidate experience.

The post Zinger Property enhances their inclusive hiring process with Workable Video Interviews 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.

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.

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 post The talent market is changing – and recruiters need to evolve with it 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.

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.

The hardest thing you’ve not been told

The Series A crunch may be tough but the talent crunch is brutal. We talk to high-growth startups every day and we keep hearing versions of “compared to recruiting, fundraising was easy”. Just like fundraising, it’s very competitive. It takes time, preparation and selling, and getting it wrong can slow down or kill your startup. It’s the hardest thing to get right. It doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

You need to be a hiring obsessive

Whether it’s two founders talking to an angel investor, a team of 10 making something from nothing, or a high-growth company with 50 staff, team quality is the single best predictor of success. If you can get great people then everything else becomes so much easier.

Growth hacks versus talent hacks

Silicon Valley has figured out how to build great products and turn them into successful business models. Methodologies have emerged like Lean Startup, agile product development and growth hacking. They function as roadmaps for the non-experts and inspire conversation and innovation in those fields. In comparison hiring practices have remained in the dark ages.

Getting from 5 to 50 and beyond

Your first five hires pretty much picked themselves but in getting from 5 to 50 you will need the best tools and analytics, and you will need to be systematic. It’s about more than ping pong tables and bicycle racks. We’ve spent the time to curate the best thinking on everything from employer branding and headhunting to every step in the interview process, whether you’re building a distributed team or you’ve got an office. We’ve thrown in ideas, tricks, talent hacks and real life examples from great companies. The result is this startup hiring guide that offers some structure when hiring for rapid growth from 5 to 50. It’s a starting point. And my aim is to get all of us to talk about hiring.

1. Building an attractive company: Employer branding
2. Always be hiring: developing a hiring process
3. How to write job descriptions
4. What to look for: Hiring for a startup
5. Sourcing 101: Passive candidates
6. Creating an interview process
7. Workplace benefits and compensation
8. Recruiting software and tools
9. Where to post your jobs

1. Building an attractive company: employer branding

Smart companies typically operate in competitive talent markets. This means that the people you’re looking for are likely to be juggling several job offers. Competing for outstanding candidates with the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter might seem like a losing proposition but it’s not.

It can be done but, first, you have to realize that hiring is marketing. We live in what’s called the “age of transparency”. It has never been easier for employees to be able to tell who you are or what working with you would be like. Digital platforms mean that even the youngest companies can affordably showcase why they’re an exciting place to work. There’s more to social media hiring than just tweeting your jobs. Everything you do or say on social media is building your brand.

PRO TIP: Intercom’s blog is a great example of doing marketing and employer branding at the same time.

You’re speaking to two audiences: Customers & talent

In the early days, the way you market your product and the way you think about the problems you’re solving, says a lot about the kind of company that you’re about to build. If you become known for doing interesting things for your customers, you will attract talented and ambitious people. Smart people want to solve interesting problems. They’re not looking for a job, they’re looking for a mission. Smart people want to work with smart people.

Your presence in communities, your reputation, your contribution and ideas represent you. Use blogging, social media and public conversations to keep speaking to your ideal future hires. Signpost your involvement in events and your own content to make it easy for people to find out what you stand for and why you matter.

PRO TIP: Buffer’s focus on transparency led to their Open Salaries initiative which has created huge buzz and awareness of them.

Who the hell are you?

In the beginning were the founders. The early hires in startups don’t have a company reputation to buy into, so usually they’re taking a gamble on joining the founders in their big initiative. When you’re in the early phase, it’s the personal brand of the founders that’s going to be the strongest component. Simple steps like having an engaging personal blog can project why you’re worth working for and what you’re trying to do. Let prospective candidates get to know you.

Even in the early days of a company your employees become your brand and signal what kind of people work there. Chances are you’ve hired people who reflect your company’s brand and values well. Showcase your employees on your website and empower them to talk confidently about your business. Employees attending meetups and events, sharing a video of their home working environment, or just speaking with genuine passion about their jobs are a powerful marketing tool.

Hire people who can build teams

Good people know good people. Hire people who are already networked and know much of the talent you’ll be needing. When you can, go for people with a personal brand. This is also a signal to future hires. Remember, some of your best people will be high-potential junior hires who will grow with the startup. So, always look for those who can nurture and grow your young talent.

PRO TIP: FullContact’s paid-paid vacation initiative offers holiday bonuses to staff who go completely off the grid. Everyone needs to from time to time.

Live in the real world

Don’t just be digital. You’re going to be employing people after all and they congregate at events and around offline communities too. Be an active participant in these ecosystems. An event sponsorship or even a few beers can go a long way. Even as remote work becomes more of a standard in 2020 and beyond, human interaction is highly valued and appreciated.

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2. Always be hiring: developing a hiring process

Networks are king

Ask any startup where most of their hires came from or ask bigger companies where their best people came from and the answer is usually the same: friends, friends of friends or ex-colleagues. It’s all about networks for one simple reason: good people know good people. Part of being a good CEO is building a great network with quality and reach. There are no shortcuts here, it’s real work. The better your network is, the easier your next hire is going to be.

If you don’t know the right person you will at least know someone who does. Remember quality as well as quantity. It’s not just about having thousands of LinkedIn connections (although it can’t hurt). Are you working hard enough to be an authentic member of the community where your talent pool is? If your tech is built with Ruby are you taking part in the relevant meetups and hackathons? Are your developers known for their thought leadership and contribution in your sphere?

Hiring is everyone’s job, especially sourcing

Just as you look for candidates through networks, the best candidates are looking for their next job in the same way. Word of mouth matters. The best recommendation you’re going to get will be when someone you’d like to hire is told by a friend of theirs who is already on your team that your startup is great place to work. If your team is proud of where they work they’ll tell their friends.

What happens when your own network runs out? Keep trying. There will always be someone you haven’t told that you’re hiring. You can go further, take the time to sit with your employees one by one and go through their online networks (LinkedIn is a good example). You’ll find good people and you can get your colleagues to message them then and there. This is a time-consuming process but worth it.

There’s tremendous value in referred employees in the form of greater job satisfaction, higher retention rates, quicker applicant-to-hire conversion – all metrics that ultimately reduce the cost of recruitment, especially when hiring for rapid growth.

PRO TIP: Set up a formal employee referral program in your company, with incentives for your current colleagues. You can even gamify the process to further motivate employees to refer people in their networks.

Get out of your bubble

Your own network can only extend so far and the chances are your colleagues’ networks have a lot of overlap with yours. Plus, there’s the potential for bias – as the old saying goes, birds of a feather flock together. If you’re hiring friends of friends or former colleagues of existing employees, that’s a potential trap in homogenizing your workforce. Get out of that bubble and speak to new people, ask for introductions from your own network so you can start tapping into adjacent ones.

Learn how a tech sales VP established gender balance in her team in a male-dominated field, by looking outside of the usual candidate resources.

PRO TIP: Sending your developers to the best conferences is a sure fire way to grow your network, as well as encouraging them to spread the word through their online networks where they live and play.

How to do social the right way

If you’ve done most things right so far you’ll start with an audience. This means you have something to bootstrap your social media recruiting effort to. Using social for hiring isn’t just about tweeting jobs and getting your colleagues to retweet. The companies who are most successful at social hiring have built up a relevant audience and target their tweets to influential people in their community. Not all retweets were born equal — you want to be talked about in context. You want influential people in your field talking you up as an authority.

PRO TIP: Netflix put their culture presentation online:

[slideshare id=36216034&doc=netflixorganizationalculture-131001173045-phpapp02-140623172442-phpapp01]

That open presentation promoting Netflix’s Culture of Excellence went viral – clearly boosting their employer brand and reputation.

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3. How to write job descriptions

Don’t go with the flow

Job descriptions could and should sweep candidates off their feet. But all too often, we’re content to lean on the old-fashioned and generic with the result that most job ads are mediocre. We’re guessing you don’t want to be average. You’re not one of those guys looking for superheroes who is too lazy to craft a job description that might actually attract them.

PRO TIP: The first time we came across Medium’s careers page was in Lou Hoffman’s article: The best job descriptions on the planet. Enough said.

Love at first sight

We all know that applicants like to scan. They want to look at an opening and be able to recognize in the blink of an eye if it’s their dream job. Like all busy people they have a thousand things competing for their attention; especially the passive candidates for whom you’re trawling. Make every job description seductive. Start with the job title, keeping in mind that most job boards work like search engines, therefore candidates use keywords to search for jobs.

The about-the-company part

This is your chance to make a good first impression, so start thinking about the distinctive characteristics that make your company special. The type of job description you publish is closely related to who you are as an employer. Give them a glimpse of your company that will charm them into coming to working for you.

PRO TIP: Check out some of our favorite job ads from the Workable job board – each of which can fit different needs in your business.

Candidates need to be able to relate to job descriptions on a personal level. Tell them a story about your company that will make them sit back and picture themselves working with you. Start with an educated guess, with something simple, ask for feedback and then optimize. Ask employees why they enjoy working for your startup. If you have a marketing department lean on them for some content marketing advice. Hiring for rapid growth should not to be done in isolation – it’s a team effort. You’ll need to put in some extra effort but it will pay off.

The about-the-job part

You know that if you go with the flow then your job descriptions will be deathly dull but you’re tempted to do so anyway. Because that’s the way everybody is doing it. But it won’t help your company stand out, it will just add to the mountain of identical job descriptions that grows larger every day.

How are job seekers (let alone the precious, passive ones) supposed to spot that you’re offering a dream gig when it looks like a machine wrote your job description? It’s not necessarily because they’re not well-written, it’s because they’re presented as if they were not written by or for a human being. Do everyone a favor and stick to the important stuff. There are tons of job descriptions out there listing every tiny little task a future employee might perform. That’s not the point.

It’s all about clarity

Start writing job descriptions that build businesses. They will attract the best talent and convert prospects into candidates. How?

• Sell your company and their future in it in an engaging fashion
• Get rid of the boring corporate tone
• Keep it chatty and friendly
• Use words that evoke feelings
• Make them aspire and then act on that desire
• Use “you” or “we’; drop the passive voice

To up the ante you can also add a list of people the future hire will get to work with on a regular basis.

The about-the-requirements part

We’ve covered the basics in our “There’s a difference between what you want and what you need” blog post. If you’ve used Workable, you may have noticed the must-haves and nice-to-haves requirements. Why did we add this feature? To make sure that candidates won’t get excluded from the hiring process just because they clicked “NO” on a secondary skill that is unlikely to be pivotal. Think about what skills would make sense, adding to the equation the fact that they are individuals and not miracle workers. Must-have requirements are the bare minimum: the can’t-live-without list. Nice-to-have requirements are the extras: they belong on the we-can-live-without list.

Jobseekers also have a hierarchy of needs that you need to keep in mind as you craft the perfect job ad. In fact, if Maslow were alive today, here’s what he might think about your job ads.

PRO TIP: Worth looking at KinHR. They might not have a careers page at the moment but this sales job description rocks.

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4. What to look for: Hiring for rapid-growth startups

Punch above your weight

A startup literally is its team in the beginning. These are the people who will signal your ambition and set your limits. So, go for the people you think you can’t get. You’ll be surprised and once you’ve got the first few heroes it will become a lot easier to attract more of them. This is not a luxury. It seems obvious to punch above your weight but a successful startup will continually shift up the weight categories. If you don’t get these people you’ll get stuck.

Hire deliberately

You’re not hiring to fill a job, you’re building a company. Make the first 20 hires deliberately with the future in mind. Don’t hire people just because they’re good in general and available. These kinds of opportunistic or bad hires early on in a startup’s life can sink you. The cost of a pointless hire can be astronomical. That’s money that most startups cannot afford to waste. Beyond the cost of getting it wrong, your first few hires will set the tone for the future. Getting it right will make something that’s intrinsically hard a lot easier.

PRO TIP: Avoid hiring a candidate who badmouths their previous employers and coworkers.

Hire for potential

A successful startup will quickly outgrow everyone’s current skills and roles. If things work out as intended it’s going to grow and morph unpredictably. So will the demands on your employees. One of the most exhausting aspects of startups is this constant evolution, or as some founders call it “keeping up with their own company”. While it can be fairly simple to assess a candidate’s current skills rating their potential is less so.

Look for people coming into their professional prime. The past is a good guide, so take into account lifetime achievements whether they’re jobs, schools or hobbies. With few exceptions, smart, decisive and hard working people usually manage to go to a great school and do well in exams they care about. Look for high achievers.

PRO TIP: Include pre-interview assignments in the hiring process. Those who bother to go the extra mile will prevail.

The culture fit

This can be hard to pin down but it’s almost always important. It has its roots in the unfashionable word “congruence” — the fit between personality and organization. It means that you need to assess people on their behavior, mentality and match to the values of your organization.

PRO TIP: Valve’s Employee Handbook (the production quality, akin to what you would expect from their best marketing material) tells you a lot about who they are and how important this is for them.

But there’s one simple rule: never hire people with a bad attitude. It only takes one to poison an otherwise stellar team. That little problem you noticed in an interview will be magnified one-hundred fold by six months of hard work in a small team. Don’t overlook it. Go for people with an opinion, people who can honestly explain what they like and dislike. The kind of people who believe in missions, values and visions. They care. Those are the people who will be telling the truth when they assure you that they believe in your startup’s vision.

Hire for attitude, train for skills

You have to like a candidate before you hire them. This sounds highly subjective and unfair to them, especially when the context is strictly professional. However, someone’s ability to blend into your team, get along with you on a daily basis and build up some emotional reserves for tough times will ultimately determine their performance.

Malcolm Gladwell and Tim Ferriss can argue all they want about what and how fast a human being can learn but the truth is that certain human traits can’t be acquired beyond a certain stage in life. Focus on the fundamentals: intelligence, personality, diligence. Instead of testing for specific knowledge, check how a prospect reacts when you ask them to do something they haven’t worked on before.

PRO TIP: Carry out behavioral interviews, in addition to the standard ones. Always have a good store of questions.

Look for things you can’t train

You can teach financial management or how to interpret Google Analytics reports, but it’s probably too late to instil manners, ethics or numeracy. Skills and experience are worthless when not put to use. Knowledge is useless when not shared with others. The smaller your business, the more likely you are to be an expert in your field, so transferring those skills to new employees is relatively easy. But you can’t train enthusiasm or a solid work ethic.

According to a LeadershipIQ study, only 11% of the new hires that failed in the first 18 months did so because of deficiencies in technical skills. The majority failed due to lack of motivation, an unwillingness to be coached, or problems with temperament and emotional intelligence.

PRO TIP: Always ask for references. Poor players struggle to provide solid and believable references.

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5. Sourcing 101: Passive candidates

Build a profile

Most people don’t know how to fish for talent that’s not looking for a hook. These elusive prospects are known as passive candidates. Sourcing is the process of finding people who are not overtly looking for a job. Your starting point is to know what you’re pursuing and as much as possible about where you’re likely to find it. Think about what the ideal person looks like. What experience do they need to have? What kind of job are they doing now? Which companies must have good people doing this job? Start building a profile. The key to sourcing is figuring out what you’re pursuing and where it lives.

What is sourcing?

Mature companies: You’re looking for established companies doing a great job at what you’re looking for (eg. selling to SMEs, content marketing). You’re looking for people trained by the best, whose options have vested, who are ready to move on to a new exciting gig.

Vulnerable companies: Startups are volatile. When a company experiences a shakeup, there’s a window of opportunity. Signs to look for include the departure of a leadership figure; ventures which have gone 18 months with no follow-up funding or rumors of layoffs. You’re looking for drift and discontent where the talent works so mine the industry reports (Crunchbase, Mattermark, CBInsights, Owler) and listen to the gossip.

Events: Where do the best people on your shortlist hang out? Think about what kind of events they attend and make sure you’re there – be they virtual gatherings or in person. These settings give you the chance to meet people who you may want to approach in the future. When the time comes you will have less cold calling to do.

Universities: The very best talent are only truly unemployed once in their life: right out of college. Universities have structures that help you identify this top echelon. They’re at careers fairs, on internship programmes, or even doing work experience that contributes course credits.

PRO TIP: Look for companies 6-12 months after a seed funding without followup.

Make a shortlist and lean in

Now that we know what to search for, all these sourcing tools (LinkedIn, TalentBin, GitHub, Sourcing.io, and of course, Workable) actually become useful. Start browsing profiles and make a long-list of prospects. Prioritize people who you can reach out to through your extended network. If you can’t get an intro, then see if you can engage them on social media (Twitter) or engineer a chance meeting.

PRO TIP: Attend startup community meetups, design conventions or hackathons.

A courtship doesn’t begin with leaning in, it starts with people getting to know each other. If you do this well the prospect will have already gotten to know you before the conversation turns to a job offer. These are people you may not hire today, or even one year from now. They may also be the key to introducing you to your best hires in the future.

External recruiters

This is where you turn when you’re short on time or confidence to follow the steps above. They can be a fantastic shortcut. It might look simple but there are a couple of things to bear in mind. Look out for recruiters who have hired for small companies before and have a track record of placement in the role you’re looking for. Most startups use contingent recruiters whom you pay only when they deliver someone you hire (typically one-third of the hire’s annual salary).

The upside is that you only pay for what you get. The downside is that your aim and the recruiter’s aim are not the same. You want to hire great people. They want you to hire someone. This subtle difference can lose you time dealing with uninspiring candidates.

PRO TIP: Pay your recruiter more than they ask for. They’ll think twice before referring the next high-quality candidate to another competitor or well-funded company.

A nod to ethics

You need to be competitive but you also live in a community. Employee poaching can backfire on you, especially when you’re just starting out. Getting the balance right can be as simple as being mindful of basic good manners.

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6. Creating an interview process

One of the biggest mistakes made when hiring for rapid growth in a startup is to think that just because you’re small you don’t need a process. If you think “process” means doing things slowly, think again. Get the right tools, remember to hire as a team and you will stay on track. The selection process is a funnel – you get a lot of applicants, you speak with some of them, you meet a few of them, you hire the one you like best. An efficient filtering process will save you and your candidates time.

Pre-interview questions

This all starts with the pre-interview questions, the questions you ask a candidate when they apply that will help you decide whether to progress with an applicant. Make sure candidates can sensibly weigh themselves against the requirements. Do you know anyone who will say “no” to the requirement “must be hard working”? Neither do we.

PRO TIP: Get candidates to do an assignment or task related to the job as part of the pre-interview.

Pre-interview questions can only get you so far. They weed out the most inappropriate candidates and give you an insight beyond a basic resume. However, a major factor in your hiring decision will be how well a candidate will fit in with your business. It’s personal and you need to get to know the candidates.

Screening assignments / testing

Ever walked in to an interview and known within 30 seconds that the candidate you’re meeting is never going to work out? Sure, most people have been there. The worst thing is that it wastes your time. You can’t just stop the interview after half a minute so you go through the routine and waste an hour of your time. It doesn’t have to be that way. An initial phone call, Skype screening conversation, or asynchronous video interviews will prevent that scenario nine times out of 10. Resumes, pre-screening questions, screens, interviews – we use these techniques to use past performance as an indicator of future success.

But what if you want to better understand how candidates will actually perform in the job you’re hiring them for? One way of finding out is to get candidates to do an assignment or task related to the job – in other words, a skills assessment. Hiring for a customer support associate? Test candidates by getting them to answer some hypothetical customer queries. If you are hiring developers, there are online tools like Codility which can put developers through their paces so you can see exactly how they code.

Interviews

Have a plan. Don’t just ask the same questions over and over. Take the time to know who you are meeting before you walk in. Not just their name and not just the job title of the role they’re interviewing for. Get to know them a little, check their resume and note some questions in advance.

Interviews shouldn’t slavishly follow a script. There are probably some standard questions you want to ask all candidates, such as whether they’re eligible to work in your territory. But these are just hygiene questions – you have to go further. Ask open questions that encourage a discussion, engage with the candidates’ responses and consider follow up questions you want to ask. If it’s boring, it’s not working. There’s nothing worse than the candidate feeling like the interviewer hasn’t read their resume and is just going through the motions: “Tell me about this job, now this job, and now this job…” No one gets much out of this kind of interview.

Interviews work both ways

When you leave an interview you should have a much better understanding of the candidate’s credentials and suitability. Equally, they should leave knowing a lot more about the role and the company. If you’ve screened your shortlist properly then everyone you interview should be a real contender – which means it’s worth selling to candidates in interviews. Chances are you’re going to offer them below market rate if you’re an early stage startup. Generally people don’t like getting paid less so you’d better give them a good reason to be excited.

PRO TIP: Note down personalized questions for candidates before the interview but don’t stick slavishly to the script.

Take a deep breath

If you have a nagging feeling that something isn’t right when you’re making an offer, don’t rush. Take your time to identify where that uneasiness comes from. Talk it through with a colleague. Don’t be afraid to ask a candidate to come for another meeting. Chances are if you have a concern, the candidate will be feeling the same and a quick conversation will iron out any problems. In the long term a bit of caution will pay off.

When you’re hiring for a function where you have little or no personal experience, it can be very hard to assess resumes or know what to ask during interviews. You might want to consider bringing in some outside help. This doesn’t need to be paid help, it could just be a friend or ex-colleague who can help you out with the skills-based aspects of the hiring process.

Keep it challenging

This is where you set the bar and show your rigour and ambition. A challenging interview process is a signal to candidates that your company doesn’t do average. This doesn’t have to mean a drawn-out 15-phase interview – even Google is moving away from the huge number of interviews they put candidates through – but you absolutely should establish a thoughtful pipeline that gives the candidate an opportunity to prove their mettle.

PRO TIP: Level the playing field by posing customer support queries for a tool most people are familiar with or can access easily e.g. Facebook.

Taking references

Not everyone believes references from previous employers are useful way in determining future performance. Candidates are unlikely to provide a reference whom they expect to say negative things about them. And many people don’t want to talk badly about someone so even if your candidate was terrible in a past job their reference won’t tell you.

This is not a reason to ignore references. It’s a reason to work harder at getting them right. Get more references. Successful entrepreneur-turned-VC Mark Suster recommends getting at least five, including people the candidate didn’t propose. If we assume people are smart enough to gather good references, ask yourself: “Are they glowing?” If not, why not? Ask candidates why they chose the referees they did.

PRO TIP: Get at least 5 references and make sure some of them come from people the candidate hasn’t put forward. Read this.

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7. Workplace benefits and compensation

You can’t pay for groceries with equity

You’re not going to compete on salary with Google and Facebook but you need to get survival out of mind. Even your earliest hires ‐ and that includes you, the founder ‐ will need to pay bills. Some startups go to extremes, trying to make their runway last longer. Don’t build your runway on the backs of an exhausted and underpaid team. You objective is not to delay the next round but to get to it in the best possible shape. Here’s a few things you can do to achieve the right balance.

The power of perks

You’re not going to have the swankiest offices but you can make them reflect why people came to work for you. You don’t need a big budget to create a friendly, informal and energetic work space. Our environment helps to shape our mindset and reminds us who we are. Spend the time to make it attractive to your team, even if you can’t initially spend much money. There are many ways to make your company an attractive place to work – even if you’re in an “unsexy” location.

PRO TIP: Buffer’s emphasis on transparency led to their Open Salaries initiative, which has created huge buzz and awareness of them.

Perks are powerful and cost effective. When you take into account tax and deductions a $10 lunch is worth more to your employee than $10 on their salary. But it’s about more than a free lunch. Taking care of peoples’ needs makes them feel taken care of. This pays off handsomely in productivity and morale.

That shouldn’t mean that you neglect traditional benefits. Before you start on the ping pong tables and games consoles make sure everyone has access to health insurance. When people know the basics like health are covered they’re more prepared to live leaner when it comes to salaries.

Compensating risk

Equity compensates risk. It is a form of deferred reward. When deciding whether to join your startup a prospect is looking at what they could earn at market rates for their skills over the same time period and balancing it against a potential future return that should be several multiples of the income they lost out on. It’s mathematics.

All early employees should have a significant amount of equity. This ensures their sense of ownership and mission. A properly structured stock option is also a commitment on the part of the employee. Equity grants usually vest over a period of three to four years and there’s a “cliff period” (typically one year) before a new employee earns their first tranche of shares.

This way, you’re not giving your company away. Instead, you’re binding the core team to your mission for long enough to make meaningful progress. With that in mind, don’t wait till the best people are restless. The best companies also give retention equity packages to fully vested employees. You need to think about this, before your star performers do.

How to research market rates, equity standards

Knowing the going rate for salaries and equity is notoriously difficult. A good place to get a benchmark is AngelList (for startup equity and salaries) or Glassdoor (for market rates). Make sure to compare yourself to similar companies. For each hire, check what’s on offer for jobs they could take so you know what their other options look like.

Especially when it comes to equity, it’s always better to err on the generous side. Rather than being hung up over a 0.1% more or less, think about whether this employee will improve your chance of success by that amount. A good hire will make it worth your while.

PRO TIP: Wealthfront’s Startup Compensation Tool is one of many benchmarks you can use.

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8. Recruiting software and tools

You need tools

We consider an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to be the centerpiece of any effective toolkit – especially when hiring for rapid growth. This is why we built one from scratch and obviously consider it to be the best of its kind. When choosing an ATS, ask yourself how well it integrates with other tools that you’ll need. A good one will integrate or at least play nicely with most of the software we recommend below.

Even then, it helps to know which ones are tops in the market. We’ve compiled for you the 12 best applicant tracking systems to help inform your decision on purchasing an ATS.

Sourcing and referral platforms

TalentBin, Sourcing.io, 3Sourcing and Gild are people aggregators with searchable, often pre-evaluated or classified profiles of people. Professional networks or communities like LinkedIn, GitHub, Dribble, AngelList are good places to do manual sourcing. Zao is one of the best referral platforms we came across. It’s made based on best practices, optimizes matches across all companies’ open jobs, has a gamification layer making it fun to participate and allows extended referrals. Another one to consider is RolePoint.

Online interview systems

Interviewing has gone video and this lets you record video questions, invite candidates to submit their responses so you can review them. Set time limits for responses, pause to take notes, tick the ones that are a perfect match, share if you’re not sure to take a second opinion. Workable’s Video Interviews can set you up for success here – particularly if you’re hiring for rapid growth in a short period of time and need to establish a standardized screening process with minimal breakdown.

Assessment tools

Codility is a niche, engineers-only, database. These guys are loaded with millions of engineers — active and passive. Considering the gap between demand and supply then this app is a treasure trove of prospects and a pretty straightforward tool to use if tech job boards aren’t cutting it. You can browse and filter data, collaborate with your team and do social recruiting too.

Smarterer have revolutionized skills assessment. Just give them 10 questions, 2 minutes and voila! you get a quantified skill. It’s basically a skills testing app but different. All of its test content is crowdsourced from the individuals who take the tests.

SHL has ability and personality tests if you need to test for critical qualities. They only offer science-based assessments and benchmark data.

Weirdly has your cultural fit riddle all figured out. It’s a four-step culture assessing recruitment tool. Define your desired cultural profile, publish the vacancy, watch candidates complete the quiz and select the right kind of weird.

Onboarding & talent management

KinHR is probably the best when it comes to onboarding new hires in a comprehensive and thoughtful way. The new employee signs in and reads about the company and the team they’re going to work with and what tasks they should start working on.

Zenefits is good for payroll and benefits management.

The shift to remote work also means onboarding remotely – such that you’re bringing people on board without them having met anyone on the team in person. Learn some tips and tricks of successful remote onboarding for you and your company.

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9. Where to post your jobs

You know exactly what you’re looking for so what’s your next step? Plaster your ad over every job board out there, right? Wrong. It pays off in time and money to do a little homework. Consider these questions:

• Where does the rest of your industry (in your city or country) post jobs?
• Did you get enough qualified candidates the last time you hit publish on XYZ job board? Did you get any candidates at all?
• Did you get too many candidates, maybe?
• Ask people who already have this type of job, where they first saw it?
• Visit alexa.com to see how popular the job board you are considering is.
• Find out where the audience you want to reach hangs out online
• Study the other job postings on that XYZ job board where you’re thinking of publishing your opening

The job board forest

To facilitate the job board selection process, we brought together a handy list of the top ones (below).

Horizontal

LinkedIn is the leader due to its three-way nature; professional social network/headhunting tool/job board – the biggest of its kind with 760 million members. It enables you to search profiles, pay to post jobs and more besides. With LinkedIn InMail, you can even contact candidates directly.

Indeed is the premier job site globally with 250 million regular visitors. You can post all types of jobs, sponsor the ones from your careers page, pay per click and search resumes.

Craigslist is the site for classifieds. Doesn’t match the traditional job board criteria, is famous for its no-frills user interface but beats everyone for inbound traffic.

Monster is one of the oldest job boards that keeps expanding worldwide. It’s a bit expensive in some countries (unless you post through Workable), has a lot of traffic and loads of resumes and free content.

Careerbuilder operates in the US, Europe, Canada and Asia. CareerBuilder is used by 80 million job applicants and has three million job postings per month.

Stepstone is one of the most successful job boards in Europe.

Beyond automatically distributes postings to niche sites and talent communities based on specific criteria. What’s in it for you? Targeted exposure and more relevant applications.

Tech

StackOverflowCareers is the careers platform of StackOverflow. It’s used by more than 100 million developers and technologists and is the trusted first destination of tech recruiters. If you’re looking for developers, it’s the place to go.

Dice is also a leader in the tech job boards industry. It has a cross-posting network and minimizes unqualified clutter due to its niche nature, with a database of more than nine million members.

Github Jobs taps into developers and engineers by being the place they hang out. Good place to trawl for passive candidates – especially with 50 million developers checking in regularly.

Creative

Behance is where some of the top brands post their creative jobs. It’s also the place where professionals showcase their work enabling you to take a sneak peek before you decide.

Dribbble gives you access to designers’ portfolios and profiles. Workable’s designers are really fond of it. Plus you can post your jobs and connect with top talent.

Authentic Jobs introduces recruiters to creative professionals. Simple and efficient.

Remote & flexible jobs

We Work Remotely is the job board without borders allowing you to narrow down talent without it having to be in the same location as you.

Upwork is free and for freelancers only. If you’re looking for one, check out their well-rounded freelancers’ database.

Flexjobs is free and effective when it comes to flexible jobs job posting. Only applies if you’re in search of part-time, telecommute or freelance employees.

Startups

AngelList ‐ you probably already know it if you’re a startup. Candidates get to apply privately and see salary and equity up front and startups get to access a huge list of developers and designers actively looking for a job. On top of that, it’s free!

Startuply is a free job listing site aimed mainly at small startups, which find it rather difficult to attract engineering talent. Startups can create a detailed company profile to give prospect candidates a sense of what it’d be like working for them. You should definitely give it a shot.

StartUpHire lists hundreds of jobs, but only for venture capital backed companies. It also comes at zero cost and has a widget that enables you to automatically add your open positions to your website

The Muse lets job seekers look behind the curtains of great companies. You can “showcase the heart and soul of your company” in 500 words, videos and photos and then display your job openings.

The post The Startup Hiring Guide: Hiring for rapid growth from 5 to 50 appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The modern jobseeker could be spending up to 15 hours a week looking and is just as likely to be using their smartphone as their laptop while doing so. More than half the traffic on Glassdoor, one of the world’s most popular job boards, comes from mobile with the group of 35-44 leading the way. And this is why employers who accept mobile applications are twice as likely to get high quality candidates as those that don’t.

This guide was created so as to give you a quick overview of job posting and help you bring those talented jobseekers to your doorstep. If you know the basics, you can navigate and jump into the topics you want:

1. Choosing the right job title for your open role
2. How to write a job description
3. How to post a job listing
4. Where to post a job for free
5. The best places to post jobs free and paid
6. Specialist job boards
7. How to post to multiple job boards for maximum impact
8. Tips for successful job candidate management

What are the different ways to attract candidates?

There is no magic bullet in recruiting. Instead there’s an exciting variety of channels and the challenge is to get the mix right. The starting point should be a great careers page that showcases what’s good about your company and the roles you’re hiring for. The next step is to take advantage of social media to spread the word that you’re hiring. Get everyone you work with involved with the help of a referral program. Then turn to job boards where there are a host of free options for job posting, as well as premium job boards, which if used right, are worth the money.

How do people collect and review applicants?

Even now some of the smartest companies are still hobbling their recruiting effort by using accounting tools to get it done. Spreadsheets are great for a lot of things. They suck as a hiring tool. Likewise email – which you can’t work without – becomes overwhelming when you’re hiring. The answer can be found in some of the great hiring software solutions that an increasing number of employers are turning to. Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), like Workable, are bringing the advantages larger organisations have long enjoyed when hiring and delivering them to smart companies of all sizes.

Do I need to hire a recruiter?

Hiring a recruiter isn’t always necessary but it can be a great shortcut. Here are some important points to bear in mind:

• Look for recruiters who have hired for businesses like your own.
• Look for recruiters who have hired for roles like the one you’re hiring for.

Contingent recruiters, who get paid when they deliver results, have become increasingly popular. The upside is that you only pay for what you get (typically one third of the hire’s annual salary). The downside is the cost and a possible conflict of interest. You want to hire great people. The recruiter gets paid when you hire someone. Bear this in mind.

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1. Choosing the right job title for your open role

Whichever job title you choose for your job advertisement, remember that it will be displayed in job listings, on your own website and in search results. While you might think of a job title one way, your candidates could be busy searching for something else. The answer is to do some research to make sure your title is something a jobseeker would look for on Google or Bing. While a designer might reasonably expect to search using the term “designer”, this won’t help them to find your posting if you’ve used the job title, “graphical ninja”. Clarity of writing comes from clarity of thought.

Tech tricks to inform your choice:

• Go to the job board Indeed to check out the most searched job trends.
• Use the Google Keyword Planner, or if you don’t have an Adwords account one of these free keyword tools.

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2. How to write a job description

First impressions count. For many jobseekers, the job description is where the relationship between employee and employer begins. Should this step turn into a stumble it’s all over very quickly. Job descriptions can alienate, demoralize and intimidate. They can also engage, motivate and inspire. To achieve the latter we need to revolutionize the way we think about this relationship.

We’re starting with a list of tips and tricks on how to write a job description, then we’ll break it down to provide specific guidelines for your company profile, requirements and benefits.

How to write a job description in 10 steps

1. Discuss the role with someone who already does this job, or its nearest equivalent within your organization, and get them to describe their average day.
2. Describe the role using words that feel inviting and evoke an emotional response. Resist the temptation to use jargon, buzzwords or a flat corporate tone.
3. Keep it short (but not too short) or it can become confusing. As a general rule, don’t use more than a half-dozen bullet points and don’t exceed 700 words.
4. Be specific. Vague meaningless prose won’t cut it here. Know your industry and where your company stands. Make sure you’re familiar with the role and what it consists of and spell it out. Add a start date to create a sense of urgency.
5. Think like an applicant. What would make you apply for the job? Is it just perks and benefits or the chance to work with a smart group of people? Perhaps it’s the clear career path, the opportunities to learn and add to your skills, the company’s vision or the way you do things.
6. Help applicants to picture themselves in the role. Share details of the team they could be working with on a regular basis; include quotes or links to social media accounts.
7. Leave out trivial tasks or minor details. It’s all about what’s important in the role.
8. Offer value. It’s not all about how great your company and the job you’re offering is. This is about the potential candidates. Share content that interests and attracts them, talk about knowledge, ideas, and working methods.
9. Don’t write job descriptions in isolation. Talk to other departments to gain their expertise, content writers for wordsmithing, marketing for promotional ideas, designers for smart-looking visuals.
10. Spell-check and proofread. And once you’re done, do it again.

Looking for more? Check out our ultimate and most updated list of how to write a good job description.

Your company versus all the companies out there

To stand out in a crowded market you need to show some personality in your company profile. Your company is a unique combination of people, culture and knowledge, and your target is to attract candidates who share your approach and values. Make a pitch. Tell them the story of where you are, how you got there and where you’re going. Invite your candidates to join you in getting there.

Make it visual; an image of your workplace, a video or a quote from one of your employees offers an inside look at your company. Two-thirds of jobseekers admit to being influenced by the presentation of a job ad. Make yours memorable.

But don’t be self-absorbed. Many ads brag about how special their company is, how they only employ the best. This can come across as boastful, which is a turnoff for some candidates and will make others suspicious or fearful of applying. Brevity is your friend, keep this part to no more than 200 words and focus on your candidate; what’s likely to capture their attention.

This job versus every other job out there

The two most common approaches when writing a job description are to present a detailed list of daily tasks or a vague run-through of responsibilities. Neither will make the role compelling. Focus instead on deliverables and explain how these will contribute to the success of the business.

Here you can use bullet points (not a laundry list) that describe the nature of the work and how the role functions within the broader team. Rather than describing tasks, focus on the type of decisions they’ll be making, who they will be working with and reporting to.

The requirements list

You get what you ask for, so it’s tempting to go all out with a wish list. What you actually need is someone who can do the job and has the potential to grow. Candidates aren’t sitting on a shelf waiting to be picked. Distinguish between what you “want” and what you “need”. Come up with a list of 15 requirements. Read, rethink and cut the list in half.

A good approach is to rank skills by importance and frequency and be clear about it. Treating all skills as equal will demoralize jobseekers. The wrong emphasis could cost you good candidates who are concerned that they lack some skills which could really be picked up with a few hours basic training. Likewise don’t dwell too much on experience. Keep in mind that skills can be learned, people can be trained.

Benefits & perks

Here you can knock yourself out with as many bullet points as your actual benefits deserve. Still, you would be wise to focus on what’s special about your company. Keep in mind that attracting people through perks isn’t the best recruiting strategy. You’re looking for someone to meet the challenge and buy into the company as a whole, not a benefits shopper.

Make it easy to apply

We’ve all come across job ads that require a lot of patience to apply. Sending resumes to email addresses, filling out a bunch of fields with basic personal details or even worse rewriting your entire resume in individual form fields. Don’t be that guy. The candidates’ application experience is important.

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that automatically fills in required fields and offers a simple resume upload is all you need. Screening questions are useful and can weed out poor candidates to save you valuable time. A simple question like “What attracted you to this job?” can say volumes about the candidate. But go easy on open-ended questions that require candidates to write an essay. Multiple choice questions to check on skills and knowledge should be the default.

Worried about starting with a blank page? Try our job description templates, or jump right in and post your job to the best job boards today.

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3. How to post a job listing

You need to create some buzz around the job you’ve just published on your careers page. To do this you want to get your listing noticed by the communities where the passive candidates hang out. Linkedin has scores of groups you can join, mention jobs in or initiate general discussions around the role, your company or the industry.

First things first. Does everyone on staff know you have just listed a new job? Share it across your company. If you don’t have a referral system in place we’d strongly advise you to set one up. Include a social sharing feature and give incentives to your staff to start sharing from their own social accounts.

An alternative is to create your own communities. Smart companies make sure they have created Facebook groups or a Facebook Jobs tab, or even run a Facebook ad campaign, with the sole purpose of attracting potential candidates. Promote your employer brand through these pages and when you post a job you’ll have a talent pool of existing fans. Add as many touch points as possible between you and prospective candidates.

The top job boards

Posting your job on your careers page and social media is not enough. You need job boards. The leading premium job boards in terms of ROI (return on investment) are LinkedIn, Craigslist, Indeed and Monster.

Some job boards, like Indeed, also offer a free option as well as a paid. SimplyHired and Glassdoor offer free postings when you access them through an ATS like Workable. For the most effective places to post your jobs, check out our job board directory, which enables you to choose job boards based on industry, location, and cost (paid versus unpaid).

The best day to post a job

Don’t post your jobs on Friday evening, by Monday they’ll be last week’s news! Instead, wait until Sunday evening or Monday morning and advertise your roles when the candidates are most active.

Most job sites use freshness as a factor in ranking job search results. Plus, the new jobs of the day usually land in email updates and job board front pages, so getting there when the action is happening can get you up to double the candidates you’d receive on a slow day.

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4. Where to post a job for free

To keep costs low, share your job on social media – with a well-thought-out strategy – and harness the power of your best brand advocates: your employees. Wondering where to post jobs for free? Get word-of-mouth referrals for free by having your team share your job descriptions far and wide on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

• Twitter
  Twitter is the most open and transparent of these three social networks. In other words, you don’t have to be a Twitter user to read tweets. Putting your job listing on Twitter is a great way to connect with audiences you don’t already know. Help jobseekers find your listing by using relevant hashtags, such as #jobopening or #joblisting. You can even use industry-specific hashtags, such as #greenjobs, or location-specific hashtags, such as #bostonjobs. This list of hashtags is written for jobseekers but equally useful for recruiters
• Facebook
  Facebook has more users than LinkedIn and Twitter and is by far the most popular social network. It’s designed for personal sharing and the best channel for employer branding. To get the most traction from Facebook, intersperse job listings with photos and videos that feature your corporate culture. If you’re planning to do a lot of recruiting on Facebook, try adding a Jobs Tab to your page. This is a free, effective way to enable your audience to browse all your open jobs on Facebook.
• LinkedIn
  LinkedIn is purely a professional network and a natural fit for recruiters. LinkedIn profiles are formatted much like a resume, with most of the same candidate data—education, work history, technical skills, and some extras, like recommendations and endorsements. This is what makes LinkedIn so effective for sourcing highly specific types of candidates. Although LinkedIn has paid job listings, you can also post an open job as a status update on your company page for free.

Talent pools and the power of referrals

IMPORTANT NOTE: Choose your social media channel based on where your target talent pool is likely to be. Communications professionals in fields like advertising, marketing, and PR, are likely to be active on Twitter. If you’re hiring for construction jobs, Twitter won’t be an effective recruiting channel for you. You’re not limited to these social networks either. For example, if you’re a lifestyle or fashion brand and primarily communicate with your audience through images, Instagram may be your best bet.

Try pairing social media with an employee referral program. This is a warm, efficient way to reach your colleagues’ trusted contacts and make higher quality hires. Referrals are the number one source for hires, and social media provides employees with an easier, more personal way to share open jobs. Increase participation in the referral program with incentives. Gift cards, gadgets, and bonuses are popular, but feel free to get creative.

For example, APAC Customer Services had offered concert tickets as a reward for referrals. It was fun, but also smart, with the concert date functioning as a kind of countdown. When creating a referral program, think about the way your colleagues like to communicate, such as Slack.

Where to collect your candidates

One efficient way to post to job boards is through an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). In addition to posting to multiple job boards and social networks with one submission, any applicants from those job boards will automatically be imported into your ATS. Hiring teams can work smarter, not harder, by cutting email and spreadsheets out of the process and storing all their candidate profiles and resumes in a searchable database.

The best ATS options, including Workable, offer you a simple hiring pipeline that makes sense of your recruiting tasks.

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5. The best places to post jobs free and paid

Get more eyes on your job listing today. With one click, post your listing to free job boards like Indeed, SimplyHired and Glassdoor. Workable integrates with numerous top job boards around the world. All you need to do is select the ones you want and we’ll do the rest.

Premium Job Boards

• Indeed
  Indeed is a leader among job boards and is visited by nearly three-quarters of all jobseekers. The site also boasts substantial reach with over 4 million jobs posted directly to Indeed.com. Indeed is also a job search engine that anyone can use for free. It takes jobseekers’ input, such as skills and location and then aggregates all matching jobs from thousands of other websites.
• LinkedIn
  LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional social network, a powerful sourcing tool and a job board. LinkedIn enables recruiters to create narrow searches for candidates by parameters such as location, job title, industry and more. With more than 722 million users in total, LinkedIn has the largest user base. And they’re growing fast with 172,800 added per day. The site is also visited by a whopping 310m active users a month.
• CareerBuilder
  CareerBuilder is both a job board and a destination for career advice. It operates in the United States, Europe, Canada and Asia and is visited by more than 24 million unique visitors a month. It has 3,200 partner sites in 60 countries. CareerBuilder is used by 80 million job applicants and each month it has 3 million job postings.
• SimplyHired
  SimplyHired, like Indeed, is a job search engine at its core. It is a highly-targeted pay per click job board that gets around 30 million unique visitors per month. SimplyHired is used by 3 million employers. When jobseekers search on SimplyHired, they’re able to discover jobs on the SimplyHired site, mobile app and numerous partner sites.
• ZipRecruiter
  ZipRecruiter is used by over 1 million employers and 7 million active job seekers each month. They offer a speedy way to get candidates by enabling recruiters to post to more than 100 job boards with one click, in addition to having a job board of their own.
• Monster
  Monster enables recruiters to target jobseekers in other countries, as well as through niche sites like Military.com, thousands of newspaper sites and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. It’s a recognized name in job boards, having been around for 25 years. Monster also gets a ton of traffic with more than 926 million monthly unique visitors.
• Portfolium
  Portfolium is a job board and a portfolio site that enables approximately five million students and recent graduates to get their work samples, video clips and skills in front of employers. Hiring college talent is not easy for recruiters but it is especially challenging for small businesses. Portfolium enables any company to look beyond resume keywords and effectively reach and hire college talent with verified skills.
• StackOverflowCareers
  StackOverflowCareers is the careers platform of StackOverflow. It’s used by more than 100 million developers and technologists and is the trusted first destination of tech recruiters. Both employer profiles and developer profiles on this network are designed with the interests of developers in mind. In addition, there’s more for employers and recruiters to look at besides resumes. Recruiters look at code samples and interaction with other users to build a high quality pipeline of talent.

Free Job Boards

• Glassdoor
  Glassdoor offers jobseekers free access to more than 70 million company reviews, interview questions, salary reports and more, all posted anonymously by employees. It allows hiring managers to post jobs free, and is quickly rising in popularity as a job board and recruiting site. Glassdoor enables employers to update their company info, see who is viewing their company profile and respond to reviews. Glassdoor gets 50 million visits monthly
• Trovit
  Trovit is the leading classifieds search engine in Europe and Latin America. They have a presence in 57 countries and are available in more than a dozen languages. Jobs are one of their five major verticals and they partner with thousands of job boards and newspapers to help jobseekers be more efficient in their search. Trovit listings are highly visible as they are visited by 11 million unique users a month.
• JobRapido
  JobRapido is a global job search engine similar to SimplyHired and Indeed. They conduct business in 58 countries with more than a thousand companies, have 85 million registered users and are visited by 35 million monthly users. They’re a frontrunner as far as job aggregators go and continue to expand in Europe and the rest of the world.
• JobInventory
  JobInventory is a job search engine that eschews pay-per-click campaigns for a contributor program. This means that the search results provided to jobseekers are 100% organic. They offer a wide selection as they post jobs from all sources: employers, job boards and classified sites.
• CareerJet
  CareerJet is a job search engine with a worldwide presence. They’re available in 28 languages and source job ads from nearly 60,000 websites around the world. They own and operate two other brands, Opcionempleo for Spanish language markets and Optioncarriere for French language markets.
• Recruit.net
  Recruit.net is the leading search engine for jobs in the Asia Pacific region. Their search technology pulls jobs from corporate web sites, job boards, recruitment agencies, classifieds and more enabling jobseekers to quickly find millions of jobs. They also offer pay-per-click advertising, detailed analytics, and tracking for employers and recruiters. Recruit.net operates 18 localized websites in 6 major languages.

Looking for more? Check out our ultimate and most updated list with the best job boards.

Why you would pay for a job board versus free job boards?

Which job board is right for you and whether you should spend the extra on a paid job boards depends on a few factors:

1. The urgency of the hire – if you need to hire quickly you’re likely to find them faster by putting some money behind a paid or sponsored ad.
2. The type of role – some roles are simply harder to find candidates for. Take for example technology roles and often more senior hires. For this type of role you’ll often need to use a specialist/niche paid job board. The cost of the board will be justified by the quality of candidate it can attract.
3. Your location – if you are based in an area where there is high competition for candidates, a paid job ad can help you stand out from the crowd and make sure you’re speaking to the best people.
4. Ongoing hiring – as free job ads get old they fall down the rankings on job boards as newer jobs take the top spots. Simply reposting the same job on the same job board won’t get it listed back at the top. So if you’re hiring for a particular type of role over a long period of time you’ll keep your job ad fresh and the candidates flowing by paying for a job ad to keep it high on job board search results.
5. Cost control – how much you pay for job ads is completely customizable, especially with pay-per-click (PPC) options. Many job boards have PPC campaigns that you can use to target a highly specific audience. This means that you only pay when interested and suitable candidates view your job listing.

Never forget that a badly written job ad will never attract the best candidates whether you pay for an ad or not. So be sure that your job ad is up to scratch before you start.

So a paid ad is always better?

Not necessarily. There are many jobs where the free job boards can perform very well. Indeed for example is the biggest job board in the world, its free version has a huge amount of candidate traffic and can provide great candidates.

You’ll need to decide which job boards are best for you on a role by role basis and whether paying for a job ad will work out better in the long run.

Try Workable free for 15 days, and see which job boards work for you. Post your job to multiple free job posting sites with one submission, and get discounts on premium listings.

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6. Specialist job boards

Specialist Job Boards, also referred to as niche job boards, trade on quality of candidates over quantity. Many have grown out of successful community sites or evolved into community hubs as well as listings sites. This is an introduction to some of the top job boards in their respective fields — or head straight to our job board directory for the full breakdown.

Industry-specific job boards

TECH AND PROGRAMMING

• StackOverflowCareers
  StackOverflowCareers is the place to go if you’re looking for developers. Some 100 million devs and technologists use it every month.
• Dice
  Dice the other tech job board giant with a database of more than 9 million tech resumes in the US. Has a cross-posting network and minimizes unqualified clutter due to its niche nature.
• Github
  GitHub is a community of 50 million developers but it also has its own small job board. More often used to trawl for passive candidates.

DESIGN

• Dribbble
  Dribbble is a community that gives you access to designers’ portfolios and profiles. Plus you can post your jobs and connect with top talent.
• Behance
  Behance is where some of the top brands post their creative jobs. It’s also the place where 10 million professionals showcase their works enabling you to take a peek before you decide.

HEALTHCARE

• Doximity
  Doximity has attracted almost 75% of US doctors. It’s a professional network and a job board. You could call it a niche version of Linkedin.
• HealthECareers
  HealthEcareers with 6,500 employers and more than 11,000 medical & healthcare jobs posted, this job board is guaranteed to provide you with qualified applicants.

SALES

• Rainmakers
  Rainmakers attracts top performing salespeople, making it a leading sales career site and sales talent community.

RETAIL

• AllRetailJobs
  AllRetailJobs board adds 4,000 resumes per month on their database and has more than 19,000 employers and recruiters using the platform.

HOSPITALITY

• HCareers
  HCareers is the premier job board that covers all hospitality jobs (hotels, restaurants, travel etc).

MEDIA

• Mashable
  Mashable has emerged as a global media company with 45 million monthly visitors and its job board is a go-to for digital talent.

FINANCE & BANKING

• eFinancialCareers
  eFinancial Careers includes jobs in finance, accounting, banking and insurance and has an audience of more than 1m finance professionals.

Job boards for different types of work

FREELANCE/FLEX

• UpWork
  UpWork (previously oDesk) is free and is for freelancers only. If you’re looking for one, check out their well-rounded database of 18 million freelancers.
• FlexJobs
  FlexJobs is free and effective when it comes to flexible jobs. But only if you’re in search of part-time, telecommute or freelance employees.
• WeWorkRemotely
  WeWorkRemotely is the job board without borders allowing you to narrow down talent that doesn’t have to be in the same location as you.

SEASONAL

• Snagajob
  Snagajob is the largest resource for hourly employees. Has 100 million registered job seekers and 700,000 employer locations in the US and Canada.

INTERNSHIP/RECENT GRADS

• Internships.com
  Internships.com is used by more than 80,000 employers that can post and manage their internship jobs for free.
• Looksharp
  Looksharp is made for entry-level jobs and internships.

STARTUPS

• AngelList
  AngelList will be familiar to most startups. More than 100,000 of them use it. Candidates get to apply privately and see salary and equity up front and startups get to access a huge list of developers and designers actively looking for a job. All for free!

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7. How to post to multiple job boards for maximum impact

Recruiting software (like an Applicant Tracking System, or ATS) takes the hassle out of hiring by automating repetitive tasks and enabling you to keep everything you need to do your hiring in one place. Posting your job to multiple job boards and social media sites used to take hours. Now, it can be done in a click. Your recruiting software may even offer discounted or free job listings with specific partner sites.

Get candidates in one place

As candidates apply through job boards, their application data flows directly back into your recruiting software, or Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Your ATS will organize each applicant’s resume and application materials, track how many candidates are applying to each listing and enable you to see how many candidates you’re moving forward in the hiring process. You’ll also be able to discuss candidates with colleagues and keep all their communication on the candidate’s timeline.

How to post jobs that will be seen everywhere

Maximize your reach by using the job board integrations offered by your ATS. Posting to several job boards at once is a great way to get more exposure, and more exposure means more applicants. Automating this task with an ATS saves time but also increases productivity. With an ATS, your hiring team can save hundreds of work hours you’d otherwise lose to filtering a large pool of applicants. This helps you identify top talent faster and focus on the more important work of choosing the best candidate for your job.

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8. Tips for successful job candidate management

You’ve posted your job and applications are rolling in. Now, it’s time to start building a shortlist. Hiring processes vary from company to company, but generally your next steps for job candidates are one-way video interviews, phone screening, assessments, in-person interviews and at the very end, offer and onboarding, or rejection letters.

In the United States the average cost per hire (including direct and indirect costs) is $4,129. (Source: SHRM)

How to collaborate with your hiring team

Close collaboration with your hiring team will result in more efficient processes for candidate management and a hire who fits better. Whether you are an in-house or agency recruiter, it’s a good idea to send regular updates to your clients or hiring team. Using recruiting software means you don’t have to stitch together spreadsheets, email and elaborate filing systems. Some tools provide seamless and customizable collaboration features so that you’re always in the loop.

Methods used to score candidates

Time to rank your candidates. There are different approaches that can be taken here. One way is to simply rank candidates between 1-5 stars based on a few key elements. Some useful things to look for are:

1. Initiative and drive
2. Trend of performance over time
3. Past accomplishments
4. Comparable experience and education
5. Problem-solving and analytical skills

How to move candidates through the process

It can be hard to pick up where you left off while managing multiple hiring pipelines. Use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to easily identify next steps and efficiently move candidates through the different stages of hiring.

The typical stages of the hiring process include “sourced”, “applied”, “phone/video screen” and “in-person/live interview”. The right system will enable you to disqualify candidates from the process or even move a candidate from one hiring pipeline to another for a different job.

Chances are you know this scenario:

You write a job ad then post it to every job board one at a time. Your inbox gets jammed with randomly formatted resumes. You forward the ones you’ve had time to read to colleagues. It gets messy so you try to track it on a spreadsheet. We like spreadsheets, they’re great for all sorts of things like metrics and accounting but they’re useless for hiring.

That’s why we made Workable. A simple and powerful tool designed to help you hire better. Workable helps thousands of SMBs and Enterprises hire better candidates faster. Post to all the best free job boards with one click, share your jobs on social media and get discounts on premium listings. When the applications roll in, Workable keeps them all in one place, where you can browse and decide painlessly. Hiring made simple.

The post The ultimate guide to job posting appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The post Know your unknowns: Check your unconscious bias when screening candidates appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

In this webinar, we’re sitting down with Lissa Khan, Recruitment Manager at Weetabix. She’ll break down how to use your careers page to attract talent and put your brand into the spotlight. You’ll also get an early sneak peek into Workable’s new Advanced Careers Pages.

In just 45-minutes, you’ll learn:
– The most important elements of a careers page
– Creative ways to engage and attract talent on your site
– Top features in Workable’s Advanced Careers Pages

The post Advanced Careers Pages: Talent Attraction Made Easy appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Workable’s own data finds that in 2020 to date, there was an average of 94 total candidates for every single job – with 26 of those being moved to the “promising” stage. That’s 26 candidates who need to be screened – 26 for each job opportunity that opens at your organization, which can become a lot of work, especially if you’re scaling rapidly with multiple hires as a result of a new funding round or a new market penetration.

Great for your organization, but for you and the hiring team, that is a lot of work. You’re spending many hours communicating with each and every candidate, lining them up against your ever-busy calendar for screening calls, dealing with delayed responses, back-and-forth communication, and ultimately the actual call with them.

This whole process is clunky and expensive in terms of hours taken from other duties. So how do you try and solve that? Technology and automation, of course. And there’s one piece of technology out there that’s growing in popularity: the asynchronous video interview – or AVI for short. You prepare the questions beforehand, send them out en masse to candidates, and within days, your inbox is filled with a clean set of responses that you and your hiring team can review on your own time. It’s a match made in heaven, right?

The upside of asynchronous video interviews

First, let’s look at the upside of AVIs. There are clear benefits, according to HR consultant Laura Handrick in New York City – they make it easier to identify the soft skills that can’t otherwise be discovered via a standard screening process in a large candidate pool.

“For popular jobs, like COVID Compliance Officer in TV/Film, the number of applicants who believed they were qualified was overwhelming,” says Laura, who currently works with Choosing Therapy, an online mental health therapy resource website. “To pare down the group of qualified applicants, it was important to discern their professionalism, demeanor and experience working with celebrities in a way that gave each candidate a fair shot at selling themselves for the job.”

Jennifer Roquemore, co-founder of Resume Writing Services, was also looking for a solution to the cumbersome screening process.

“As a growing resume service, we are constantly trying to hire new resume writers to join our team,” says Jennifer. “One of the main challenges we faced was finding a quick and efficient way of adequately screening all the applications we were getting from the various online job sites we were posting our openings on. In particular, we felt like we were doing a poor job at screening candidates because we were unable to evaluate their speaking ability and interview skills, which are quintessential assets to have as a resume writer.”

She found that asynchronous video interviews helped hugely.

“To resolve this issue, we turned to one-way video interviewing which allowed us to see first hand the communication skills and general soft skills of the applicants who were applying to us. Using this method, we were able to make a far more informed decision as to whether the applicant was up to par with our standards and expectations, which made the hiring process a whole lot easier.”

Ed Spicer, the CEO of Pest Strategies, a resource website for information and services on pest control, found AVI tech to be immensely useful as well, even from the candidate’s perspective.

“While one-way video interviews aren’t every applicant’s cup of tea, people who are currently working at another job or have a busy schedule tend to love the freedom of being able to record at any time. […] If an applicant prefers to wait for a one-on-one phone or live video interview instead, we’re happy to schedule for the next available time. This way, we can accommodate everyone.”

Ed also finds more benefits down the road.

“Once the one-way video applicants get squared away, it becomes easier to schedule the reduced slate of remaining applicants who want a live interview. It’s an efficient system and works well for us.”

And now… the downside

What makes your work easier isn’t necessarily easier for the candidate. Put yourself in the candidate’s shoes for a moment: After many months of bleak job hunting during the economic downturn in the midst of a stay-at-home order by your local authorities, you get an email in your inbox! The people at XYZ company would like to learn more about you.

Excited, you click the link in the email, expecting to set up a call with a recruiter or hiring manager. Instead, the link takes you to a webpage asking you to record yourself responding to various questions.

That can be a tad discouraging. Check out these choice comments from a comment thread on Indeed:

“If you ever encounter the digital interview, you are going to laugh. Someone on the other end has a remote in hand and can ‘interview surf’ much like you channel surf the TV stations at home. Hope you are devilishly good looking and have an engaging personality or click … on to the next one. LOL!”

“I just want them to scan our foreheads now and get this over with. It reminds me of the old sci fi movie Gattaca where 100 years in the future, your station in life will be determined by a drop of blood.”

Leading HR guru Liz Ryan offered her own perspective in a scathing tweet:

Q. I was scheduled for a video interview. I expected a Skype interview but no – it was a one-way video interview. I signed off. I don’t want the job. What new insult is this?

A. Companies that use one-way video interviews don’t deserve your talents. That’s an easy goodbye!

— Liz Ryan (@humanworkplace) January 7, 2019

You may even lose out on top candidates in the process, as one person wrote to Liz:

“I declined to take the interview. I don’t want to work for a company that would stick me in front of a piece of software and ask me to talk into my microphone. If they don’t have time to talk with me live, they can hire somebody else.”

In short, you’re losing out on the best candidates in the market if you take what’s sometimes viewed as an assembly-line approach to recruitment.

Daniel Carter has taken on AVIs to optimize the recruitment process for Zippy Electric, an all-in-one resource for electric riders. He, however, empathizes with candidates in the process.

“With the new VI technology, although it is much faster, there is also the problem of it being rather impersonal and rushed,” Daniel says. “I guess I’m siding with the candidates here. The unwanted feeling of corporate slavery feels more prominent than ever especially when you take away the human aspect of things, especially from something as preliminary as a job interview.”

The human disconnect

A study from the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University in Ontario found a significant disconnect in video interviews that wasn’t there in face-to-face interviews. Study author Willi Wiesner puts it aptly:

“Video conferencing places technological barriers between applicants and interviewers. Employers and applicants should work to reduce the barriers that arise through video conferencing and improve the interpersonal aspects of the interview process.”

But if the big kids on the block (i.e. Google, Twitter, Apple, CVS, etc.) are using it, it may well be something you need to incorporate into your hiring process, and somehow overcome the challenges inherent.

5 tips to overcome the AVI stigma

So we picked up five valuable tips that can help you ensure a top-notch candidate experience – and preserve your employer brand and reputation in the process.

1. Show them you’re on their side

First of all, your candidates are human. Simply throwing a video interview invitation into their inbox won’t reassure them. You need to maintain a two-way communication stream in other ways, and explain how AVIs can benefit the candidate as much as it does you.

In Smooth Waters CEO and Founder Jacob Pinkham, whose company focuses on water sports and safety, thinks video technology in recruitment gives candidates a huge opportunity to present their best selves – and it never hurts to tell them that.

“A resume is often boring and personalities are difficult to shine through. Now, it is very easy for someone to record a short video to showcase not only their experience and skills, but their personality.”

Daniel at Zippy Electrics takes the time to help candidates warm up with a few friendly set-up questions.

“What I’ve been doing is I’ve been trying to ask candidates casual and mundane questions before beginning the interview,” Daniel says. “Usually, it’s something about a specific show I’m watching or something about current events. Anything to let them know that I’m there with them.”

It helps to include pre-recorded questions of your own in the interview, especially as the person who ultimately makes the hiring decision, says Jonathan Frey, the CMO of Cincinnati-headquartered Urban Bikes Direct, an online retailer for electric bikes, scooters and skateboards.

“To make the process as respectful and inviting as possible, I record my own video to introduce myself and ask my questions.”

You can also share a quick tutorial for candidates on how they can excel in this part of the process.

This will show the candidate that you value them as people, and will go a long way in establishing your reputation as an employer.

2. Clarify the process

One of the big pushbacks against AVIs is that candidates feel they’re just being thrown onto the assembly line without any insight into why this is happening or where they stand in the process. Help them feel more comfortable by walking them through this part of the evaluation – including details on what candidates can expect before, during, and after.

Jacob likes to explain to the candidate why he’s turning to asynchronous video interviews in the hiring process in the first place.

*In the application process, I clearly define how the video is only to understand the candidate better, to give them the opportunity to truly represent themselves,” says Jacob. “It doesn’t end either with the video. I only request videos of those who I am planning to interview. In fact, it enables the interview to run smoother because I, in the interview, am able to adapt the flow of conversation to suit the candidate.”

Laura at Choosing Therapy highlights the importance of clarifying the process as part of establishing a diverse, equitable and inclusive experience for the candidate:

“To give everyone a fair shot, it’s crucial to provide instructions that are crystal-clear and leave no room for interpretation. That means we provide the job description. We provide the timeframe and expectations and we explain the criteria required to move to the next phase in the interview process. We try to prevent any confusion as we hope to recruit as diverse a work-team as possible and don’t want to make our recruiting process a barrier to an otherwise top-notch candidate.”

Candidates will be more motivated to participate in asynchronous video interviews when they know how it fits within the bigger picture.

3. Put your own work in

Sometimes asynchronous video interviews can be a boon in that they eliminate those irrelevant nuances that fuel hiring biases – for example, hitting it off because you like the same restaurants – and establish a more uniform screening process with a preset series of questions.

However, it can be a double-edged sword in that you can’t clarify an answer or question with a follow-up comment. That means you have to put thought into creating a series of questions that will help the candidate feel motivated to share a thoughtful and inspiring answer.

Jennifer at Resume Writing Services learned this the hard way:

“One of the reasons we were initially getting awkward responses was because we were asking poorly worded questions. Once we were fully onboard with one-way video interviewing, we came up with more appropriate questions and laid out an interview process that was more accommodating and natural for the interviewer.”

Think of it this way; the time you save in the screening process using one-way video interview technology can be invested in creating a stronger set of questions.

4. Make it a two-way street

As above, a common gripe about asynchronous video interviews is that it is a one-way experience. Candidates don’t get to ask questions of the interviewer and they don’t get an opportunity to inject some extracurricular aspects of themselves into it.

Jerry Han, the Chief Marketing Executive of PrizeRebel has a solution for that, suggesting that the interview can close out with an open-ended section to benefit the candidate:

“Add an optional section where candidates can express themselves and ask questions freely. In this set-up, one-way interviews become a two-way form of communication,” says Jerry.

“Candidates can say things that are not limited to the given questions. Candidates can choose to add vital details they didn’t get to answer because of the question selection. Consequently, they can also ask recruiters questions that show their keen interest in getting hired.”

5. Customize the experience

While a standardized process is crucial to identifying top candidates for a position, that doesn’t mean you can’t customize the experience based on a set of criteria.

In fact, personalizing the experience goes a long way in making a more positive candidate experience, says Jonathan at Urban Bikes Direct. He likes to individually tailor his asynchronous video interviews based on a pre-interview.

“Whenever possible, I record multiple video introductions for different kinds of applicants. Then I ask applicants to take a fun, Buzzfeed-style quiz – something like ‘Which Golden Girl Are You?’ That way, I can serve up a custom one-way video interview designed just for the Betty Whites or Bea Arthurs out there, as the case may be.”

Jonathan, who manages a fully distributed team out of his NYC office, also likes to have a little fun with the technology to help loosen up the candidate and get better responses:

“I recommend injecting the applicant’s name into the video interview in an unexpected way. A tongue-in-cheek approach often gets a good response. For example, you can poke fun at the very nature of one-way video interviewing by leaving silent spots in your pre-recorded video where the applicant’s name can be dubbed in by a robotic voice.”

You’re all in this together

One-way video interviews really aren’t to blame for a candidate’s negative perspective or experience. The responsibility falls on you, the recruiter and the hiring manager, in establishing a smooth, thoughtful process that shows value, empathy and appreciation for a candidate’s own position in the world of job hunting. Put in the good work, and the good workers will follow.

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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.

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.

The answer: it’s because your candidate’s experience in the recruitment process is important. Candidate experience is one of the most important factors that not only determine each candidate’s final decision, but also reflect your company culture. It’s important to always remember that, as a recruiter or hiring manager, you are the conveyer of that culture and you want to reflect it the best way possible.

To help you deliver your mission, we gathered weird interview questions that make your ideal candidates feel uncomfortable and – thankfully for you – some alternatives so as not to scare away those candidates – unless you actually want to trick or treat instead of filling that much-needed job position.

Weird interview questions list:

1. Why should I hire you?
2. Why should I not hire you?
3. You have 10 minutes to impress me.
4. Prove to me that you’re smart.
5. What was your relationship like with your previous employer?

1. Why should I hire you?

Apart from being a very stressful question by itself, it also signals a mentality of dominance of the interviewer over the candidate. Even though recruiters and hiring managers have the skills and knowledge to identify skills, there is something that’s sometimes missing:

Candidates are potential colleagues willing to offer their services over compensation and therefore should be treated as equals, not as convicts being forced to testify for their skills.

Alternative: If you are determined to ask this question, consider rephrasing it as: “What could you offer to our company?”. This way, you’re giving the interviewee the opportunity to elaborate on their skills and ideas, and give them the chance to showcase their value to your company.

2. Why should I not hire you?

At first glance, the intent of this question is actually brilliant. Understandably, candidates want to present themselves as flawless and perfect, but the reality is that nobody’s perfect and that’s OK. However, you should carefully consider the words you choose when looking to identify those imperfections. At the end of the day, you want the candidate to feel comfortable. Right?

Alternative: Think about it for a second. Imagine yourself in the shoes of the candidate, waiting anxiously for the next question which ultimately is about calling attention to your flaws. Would you rather get a blunt question like the above, or something more like this: ‘What is something about you that you’d like to change/improve and how would you do that?”

Bet you prefer the second phrasing. But why?

Well, one could say that the first one reasserts that dominance we talked about earlier and gives indirectly the interviewer a reason to skip to the next candidate – at least that’s what you instinctively think as a candidate. So why don’t you polish this question a little bit before using it?

3. You have 10 minutes to impress me.

Now that’s one of the most-cited weird interview questions generating a lot of buzz on Quora. Some candidates reported that they walked away from the interview considering this question a red flag about the company culture, while others saw this as their opportunity to shine.

In any case, making even one of your candidates feel like a jester could lead to a negative review and harm your employer brand.

Alternative: So, what’s the alternative? Instead of asking questions that are difficult to evaluate, try creating a structured interview process. Focus on the specific role – skills needed – and a set of questions that identify whether a candidate is a perfect fit for the role. You can also grab ideas from our interview questions templates here.

Pro tip: Did you know that structured interviews reduce hiring biases?

4. Prove to me that you’re smart.

“Smartness is situational”, wrote a Quora user in the discussion about this question. Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences has gained more and more ground over the past few years, especially in education. In short – smartness happens in many different forms. So what can you expect as an answer to this question? And most importantly, how will you evaluate the response?

Alternative: Instead of being driven by how much the answer impressed you (or not), you can add to your list a set of situational and emotional intelligence (EQ) interview questions. This way, you can tighten the focus of candidates’ responses and better compare their answers .

And if you want to evaluate logical-mathematical or linguistic intelligence, you can add an assessment to your hiring process.

5. What was your relationship like with your previous manager?

Remember those times when you were playing ‘truth or dare’ with your friends in college and awkward questions came up when you chose ‘truth’? Well, asking these kinds of questions creates the same feeling in candidates, but with one major difference; if the relationship was not that pleasant, they will never tell.

Alternative: Maybe what you’re actually looking for here is how the interviewee handles difficult situations or which style of management they thrive under. In any case, what you can do is present a scenario which requires interpersonal and collaboration skills to resolve and ask outright about the style of management. Bringing up questions about other companies doesn’t just make candidates feel uncomfortable, it can also be illegal. So, be mindful of that.

Avoiding ghosts

Nobody wants bad reviews haunting your company’s page. By building a structured interview process and taking into consideration the candidate experience, you will avoid unnecessary grudges and bring more ideal talent to your doorstep. And if you’re not sure what weird interview questions give candidates goosebumps, well, why don’t you simply ask them right after the interview with a candidate experience survey?

Related:

6 illegal interview questions not to ask — and legal alternatives

6 best interview questions for employers: alternatives to cliched questions

The post Weird interview questions: How to give your candidates goosebumps appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

• Is remote permanent or temporary for this role?
• Are you planning to reopen the office?
• How do teammates socialize working from distributed areas?

And this is not an uncommon scenario these days. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, loads of businesses have experienced a culture shift. Transition to remote operations, forced layoffs, new health regulations and company policies – all these events have caused changes in company culture in a flash.

As a result, uncertainty levels rose both for candidates and in many cases employees, too. This frustration can be costly on both sides – increased time to hire, less suitable talent, and reduced candidate engagement are among the big risks you may stumble over.

So what can you do to avoid scaring off stellar candidates and bring great talent to your company’s threshold? First step: update your recruitment marketing efforts – how you promote yourself as an employer to attract future candidates. This way, you’ll secure top talent that fits your new work culture.

Top recruitment marketing tips for company culture changes

It may be difficult to get a head start on this; there’s a lot to take into account when revising your recruitment marketing strategy, especially when the rest of your hiring tasks, such as screening and onboarding are still going strong, and the surrounding environment seems to be in eternal flux. Below, we’ve gathered some recruitment marketing ideas to make things easier for you.

1. Revisit your employer brand

What makes you stand out from other companies in the same industry? How has this changed post-pandemic? How do you think the changes in your business will impact your reputation as an employer?

Once you’ve answered these questions, take steps to ensure your employer branding reflects any changes to your culture. Revisiting your candidate-facing content is your first step to success.

Here are some areas you could focus on:

• Mission and vision: If your company has recently changed the way you work, how has that impacted your mission and vision? Do you need to emphasize aspects of your mission more? Have your goals shifted? Candidates should be aware of what your business goals are and how you’ll try to reach them through your new operations and processes.
• Company policies: Whether that’s updating your employee handbook in-depth or adding a remote work policy to your existing library, make sure you have company policies that reflect the current work environment so that everyone is on the same page.
• Benefits: What types of benefits will fit employee needs in the new work environment? Maybe some of your existing perks aren’t useful anymore and you’ll need to revisit them. For example, instead of free lunches, you could offer restaurant coupons or gift cards to employees who work remotely.

How will you communicate all these changes in company culture through your vision and mission with candidates and employees? Start with your storytelling around your brand. Share new values openly and honestly. How? Through your content, of course.

Related: In this article, you’ll find different ways recruiters interacted with candidates during the pandemic based on their company’s hiring status.

2. Update your job ads

Will job requirements for your open roles be the same going forward? Going back to the remote work example, it’s useful to include previous experience or familiarity with telecommuting in the job specification. Plus, adaptability and problem-solving are ideal skills for remote workers that you want to call attention to.

You could also share other valuable information in the job descriptions to put emphasis on specific matters, as Accenture Greece, a management and technology consulting company, did during the COVID-19 crisis:

“The safety and well-being of our candidates and employees remain our priority. Please note tha the recruitment process for opportunities in Accenture Greece will be conducted only via online formatting during the current period” – From Accenture Greece

With this note, not only did they inform candidates about what to expect regarding the interview format but also made clear that employee wellbeing is a top business priority for them.

3. Increase social media presence

Use your social media platforms to showcase your company culture to potential candidates in a more vivid way. If you’ve recently switched to a virtual workplace, encourage your employees to share bits from their remote workstations and post images from team virtual meetings and activities. You could run internal contests to make it more engaging and fun. For instance, you could arrange small prizes to reward employees with highly engaging posts.

Remember to be creative and transparent. There is no need to oversell, just proudly show who you are. You could also show other initiatives that exhibit your culture and values as Salesforce, a CRM software service, did via Twitter:

Now is the time to act – to reimagine the business of business and to ensure that global economic recovery creates a new normal that betters the planet for all.@SuzanneDiBianca shares lessons learned from COVID-19 on fighting the climate crisis: https://t.co/7B3Nw7vQrY pic.twitter.com/ll5O3vsj9z

— Salesforce (@salesforce) August 26, 2020

4. Invest in your careers page

In the talent attraction war, your careers page is your strongest weapon. A neat and clearly structured career site will help you convert ideal candidates into new teammates.

Apart from including your values, open roles and benefits in text, post interactive content to help people understand what your workplace looks like in a more engaging way. Use video testimonials, images or quotes from employees describing a typical working day. Showcase initiatives that reflect your culture and company priorities as Tech will save us, a learning technology start-up, does in their career site:

Plus, if you’ve recently rearranged your benefits scheme, don’t forget to update your careers page with the new perks and clarify what value they can bring to employees’ professional development and wellbeing.

5. Inform your candidates during screening

When interviewing candidates the majority of them want to know what type of company they’re joining first-hand. First tip for interviewers: Share everything you’re proud of – company initiatives, team activities, positive brand stories, but never promise something you can’t offer. When your new hires realize that you described everyday work-life glossier than it really is, turnover will be around the corner – and this will be a real deal-breaker for your company’s productivity and hiring budget.

Also, if you’ve recently moved to remote this also means that you may need to hire people with different or additional skills than you did before. You may need to evaluate roles differently and consider new interview questions like:

• What do you think will be your biggest challenge working as a remote employee?
• How comfortable will you be working with a distributed team?
• Do you like to work autonomously with limited supervision?
• How easily do you adapt to ambiguity in the workplace?

Listen to their answers carefully; if you spot a red flag – for example, a candidate has never worked remotely before and they seem hesitant about it – be as clear as possible to them and set the right expectations.

6. Monitor Glassdoor reviews

Typically, candidates visit Glassdoor to check employee reviews for a possible future employer. In this platform, employees can anonymously share their full experience working for your business, what your culture is all about and be raw about it. Plus, candidates can freely post how satisfied they were during the screening process and their impressions from interviews. And to put it briefly, Glassdoor could become every company’s biggest enemy or foe.

If you’ve recently been through company culture changes that have affected both candidates and employees, monitor the latest Glassdoor reviews and analyze both positive and negative comments. Based on those data points, you can decide what your next moves should be to boost your employer branding and recruitment marketing (e.g. pick a different assessment tool for future candidates).

This isn’t limited to Glassdoor. You will also want to monitor other employer review sites, such as Indeed and Comparably.

A final wise thought

All the above practices seem tangible and easy to apply, but how often should employers and HR leaders run a “culture test” to see where they stand? In a recent webinar, Codility’s CEO Natalia Panowicz shared her insightful take on the matter:

Company culture changes happen organically and at a faster pace than we think. They do not always take place after big events but rather occur dynamically. That’s why we should pay attention to how it evolves over time. If you inspect it methodically and adjust your recruitment marketing in an appropriate way, you’ll communicate it more effectively with talented professionals and make your employer brand accountable to them.

So now you’re one step closer to finding the right talent for your business. Good for you!

The post How to communicate company culture changes: Recruitment marketing tips appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

We asked employers about that and got pretty good responses. For instance, Agneiszka Kasperek has a lot to offer on the topic as the CMO of Estonia-based Taskeo.co, a software supporting companies moving to cloud management. She recommends deliberately hiring people who would be a good fit for remote work.

“That is,” she explains, “people who aren’t intimidated by software or learning how to use it, self-starters, motivated and independent. In remotely working companies, certain character traits are more important than the skills that the new person comes with. The skills can be learned. Character traits – not so much.”

In other words, different people thrive in different environments. When you’re screening applicants for remote jobs, you may need to update your hiring criteria. So what ‘character traits’ can you look for when evaluating candidates?

Let’s start with four common worker archetypes. They are Jennifer, Pam, Lukas, and Esther.

Jennifer

Jennifer is an extrovert who thrives off interaction with others. For her, ideas happen between people, not inside one person’s head. Not only does she inspire others through her contributions to the team; she also is inspired by working closely with others towards common goals.

As such, she excels in a driven office environment where she can walk into a room and take over that room’s energy, and comes up with her best work through meetings and presentations. She can rapid-fire her way through a brainstorming session and thrives in spontaneity. She’s the talkative one at lunch who breaks the ice immediately.

If you had a project that needed multiple team members dynamically working together for it to succeed, Jennifer would be the first person you’d recruit to ensure a successful project.

Pam

Pam, on the other hand, is much quieter. She’s an immensely creative and productive employee, but in a different way than Jennifer. In a busy and noisy office environment, she struggles with all the distractions when she’s trying to get work done. As such, she’ll come early in the morning when few people are in the office to hunker down and do some deep work for a couple of hours. She’ll also find a spot away from others – whether it’s a vacant meeting room, a cafe, or in a quiet corner of the workplace – and work diligently with headphones on.

Those who know Pam know not to bother her when she’s got that game face on. They know they’ll get what they need from her at lunch hour, on a coffee break, or during a pre-scheduled meeting. With all that, you know that if you give Pam a project to complete by a certain date, she absolutely will deliver on time.

Lukas

Then there’s Lukas. Like Pam, he likes to have control over his schedule, because he works better in a predictable and structured work environment. He doesn’t like surprises – he likes to know what he’s in for. He likes to know that the weekly team meeting happens at 10 on Mondays, and that his project is expected on his manager’s desk by EOD on Wednesday – provided it’s been discussed ahead of time.

He doesn’t like to have extra work thrown at him with a “Lukas – I’m really needing to get this done by mid-afternoon today, can you clear your calendar and give this a quick look?”. Likewise, he doesn’t like seeing a meeting on his calendar bumped on 30 minutes’ notice. But if there’s a clear structure and a well-thought-out plan already in place, and if he knows exactly what needs to be done, Lukas will absolutely crush his part of the project.

Esther

And finally, there’s Esther. Like Lukas, she prefers structure and predictability in her work world. And, like Jennifer, she thrives off interacting with people. But she also understands that things pop up and priorities get moved around on a regular basis. She gets frustrated at first, but she’ll take it as it comes and adapt accordingly, knowing it’s better to adapt.

And there’s also a lot of Pam in her – she will absolutely revel in a setup where she can block off a few hours a day to do some deep work and churn out a day’s worth of productivity in those hours. But she knows that she needs to make herself available at any given time in the day, and that she’ll need to adapt accordingly.

And also – if you had a half-baked but novel idea and needed someone to take a deeper look and even bring it to fruition without needing a lot of guidance, Esther’s your go-to person. Likewise, if you had a last-minute project that needed immediate attention and you needed someone to say “Don’t worry, I got this!”, Esther would excel there too.

Evaluating candidates for soft skills

Now, imagine you’re a hiring manager evaluating candidates for a remote position. These four are your finalists. They all tick the same boxes – work experience, education, qualifications, skills. But you’re looking for someone to specifically excel remotely. First, let’s look at the soft skills needed for that.

In the aforementioned survey, adaptability and resilience (67.4%) and self-motivated/self-starter (54.2%) led the way as sought-after traits in the new remote world of work.

Also, a recent survey of Workable’s own employees found that time management, effective communication, and adaptability were the three most common new skills developed when they went fully remote at a moment’s notice in March. While the first two can be good soft skills in any work environment, the third one – adaptability – can be more important when evaluating candidates for a fully remote company.

Does it work in practice?

The signs point to ‘yes’. SmartBug Media CEO Ryan Malone – who has run a fully remote company since launching in the late 2000s – looks at two specific properties when evaluating candidates for their ability to work in a distributed team:

Social energy: Ryan will ask a simple question: “When’s the best time for you to work?” The answer may help him see whether a candidate gains a “freedom” in setting their own hours and removing all the distractions typical of an office environment, as opposed to losing the social aspect of office life (i.e. a lunch with colleagues).

In other words, he’s looking for where they get their social energy from – and that helps him determine if they can thrive in remote work.

Resiliency: Ryan is also looking for people who can adapt and pivot quickly in a less structured work environment, where there are very few windows for employees to walk to a colleague and vent after a hiccup in the workflow.

“So,” Ryan says, “we have to find people that have handled some adversity, and our resilient people can understand [that] maybe a client emergency comes up that you need to move stuff around.”

Alison Bernstein, the president of New York-based real estate firm Suburban Jungle Realty, is also pragmatic about remote work. The ability to be self-organized is high up on her list of highly valued skills when evaluating candidates.

“Having an organized schedule with space, time and childcare (if need be) to take calls, attend video chats, and simply execute daily activities is a great start,” she says. “One must begin to set their own goals and timelines and make sure those goals and deadlines are met.”

Sheena Ponnappan, the Chief People Officer of Singapore-based business outsourcing/offshoring agency Everise, also likes to look for those special signs that a person can thrive in a home environment.

“We have built a high-touch model through the recruitment process where we strategically interview for work-at-home propensity and demonstration of abilities to be successful without face-to-face contact.”

Sheena will go as far as to look for specific regions and population groups with high retention rates when evaluating candidates. Additionally, like Alison, she’s looking for “the ability to self-support home technologies and [candidates] who are committed to remote work as a life choice.”

The same goes for Inna Shevchenko, the CMO at iGMS, a short-term rental management SaaS company headquartered in North Vancouver, Canada. For Inna, determining a candidate’s potential to succeed within the existing remote structure at iGMS is a core focus of her candidate evaluation process.

“I believe that if you hire the right person, getting buy-in, user adoption, and the desired level of learning become less challenging,” says Inna. “This way, we ensure that the new hire will adapt easily and fit into the culture.”

So, who is that ‘right person’?

Let’s go back to evaluating our candidates in the final-four list – Jennifer, Pam, Lukas, and Esther, paying attention to their ability to thrive in a remote work environment.

Jennifer

Jennifer’s productivity might falter without being able to organically interact with her deskmates and colleagues on a regular basis. Unless her calendar was booked with meetings back-to-back or if her manager was connecting with her every day, the hours on end in an isolated home office might negatively impact her energy and motivation.

Pam

Next to a desert island, a remote job would be Pam’s dream job. She would love to stay at home and work 24/7 in her home office, where she’s able to maintain greater control over her own schedule and not “have” to talk or engage with others on a regular basis. She can muster up the needed energy for meetings, but the times in between are those golden solitary times where she can really crank out her best stuff.

Lukas

Like Pam, Lukas may see this remote job as a perfect setup for him. But a remote work environment is not necessarily absent of those unpredictable “pop-up” meetings – loved by Jennifer, Lukas not so much. He functions better when he knows precisely what everyone else is doing and what is expected of him each week. In a remote environment, there’s more of a need to fly by night. If he isn’t 100% informed of his expectations and deliverables early on, his productivity might falter.

Esther

Finally, Esther understands and appreciates the ambiguity of a remote work world and has the resilience that allows her to overcome the little trip-ups and changes throughout. Even if it’s not ideal, she can pivot as needed, whether it’s for a meeting being moved or a lack of clarity as to what’s needed for the client presentation on Friday. She also has the self-confidence to go forward without needing a greenlight or validation from her manager. She can take on a task or project with minimal supervision, and can be trusted to turn out a great product in the end.

Don’t put all soft skills in one basket

So, with all of that, who would you hire for a remote position? At first glance, it might come down to Pam or Esther, with the latter getting the job due to her ability to perform even in a volatile or ambiguous working environment. And in remote – you really do need that because it’s such a hands-off climate.

But take care when evaluating candidates for soft skills. Just because a Jennifer comes off as more outgoing does not necessarily mean that she cannot thrive in a remote work world. Maybe she’s an incredibly quick learner and can adapt to a new balance in her work and life.

Likewise, an Esther isn’t necessarily set for success remotely – maybe she rolls with the punches, but when direction is needed, she doesn’t handle that well or doesn’t know how to follow instructions step by step. You may even come across a Pam or Lukas who turns out to be the very best candidate for the position based on their amazing output and performance in spite of everything else – and that’s OK, too.

Not only that, soft skills are not always easy to gauge in those first few interactions in the candidate evaluation process. Jennifer’s demeanor may seem outright extroverted, but there may be some deeper aspects to her you might not initially perceive in an interview. Likewise, Pam and Lukas might be more adaptable to unpredictability than you – or even they – realize.

In the end, the ‘environment’ matters

Also, while you’re evaluating for skills and best cultural fit, it bears noting that if the rest of your system isn’t conducive to success and productivity, it doesn’t matter who you have in your team. You still need a quality recruitment process, a standardized onboarding, and a strategy to build connections with others.

But do you know what the trickier part really is? In the long haul, it’s still up to you to set them for long-term success regardless of the environment they’re in and their individual traits. That’s ultimately your job as an employer and manager – to bring the best out of your team whether remotely or in the physical workplace.

The post Evaluating candidates for remote work? Your hiring criteria matters appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

• What are businesses planning for the remote work future?
• How important is technology in remote work?

Digital transformation is a long-time buzzword that now means the digitization of information, industries, organizations, and operations. And if remote work is the biggest paradigm shift prompted by COVID-19, remote work technology is the vehicle to make that a smoother transition.

Technology – the great enabler

When we asked respondents what made them able to move to a remote workflow without disruption, more than two thirds (68%) reported it was because they already had the technology for remote workers to do so.

“… industries and businesses are going to adapt to using digital platforms to deliver their work and product. People are adjusting to social distancing and embracing the technology to meet people and make their daily earnings.” – Survey respondent

Of those planning to remote operations or distributed teams, nearly half plan to introduce or increase digital capabilities in that transition – in short, more technology for remote work.

Those in senior-level management prioritized tech adoption in the post-COVID work environment, much more so than those at entry/mid-level. Perhaps executives see tech adoption as a company-wide, internal digital transformation while entry/mid-level employees see it primarily as technology for remote work day-to-day.

“COVID-19 has shown … that weak link [in] being penny wise but pound foolish when it comes to technology adoption. During the shutdown, those who spent on technology were able to be ‘business as usual’ where workforce worked 100% remotely.” – Survey respondent

Those in entry/mid-level employee positions are more concerned about the readiness of their business than those in senior-level management. Also, several custom entries from our respondents indicate the lack of senior-level buy-in.

Some of these differences may indicate potential issues around employee engagement.

“The world of work will be focusing on new technology to make work efficient and boost collaboration in virtual ways, [and] more adaptive to remote working style. The expenses for office rental & travelling will be cut as well, [and] more creative ways in employee engagement events.” – Survey respondent

Want to learn more? Navigate to:

• Chapter 1 on the impact that COVID-19 had on business and processes
• Chapter 2 on the magnitude of the shift to remote work
• Chapter 3 on the challenges of remote working and why
• Chapter 4 on the challenges of remote hiring and why
• Chapter 6 on remote employee engagement in the new world of work 
• Methodology and firmographics
• A collection of open-ended responses from those we surveyed.

The post Remote work technology: the road ahead is digital appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

• How many workers worked remotely before COVID-19?
• How many workers are working remotely during COVID-19?
• How many businesses plan to make the remote workplace permanent?
• What are the biggest paradigm shifts due to COVID-19?
• How do the COVID-19 paradigm shifts differ by industry?

COVID-19 isn’t just a health pandemic – it’s also a social and economic pandemic in that it has significantly impacted how people and businesses operate.

Shift to a remote workplace

The majority of respondents (68%) reported that, prior to the COVID-19 crisis, a quarter or less of their employees worked remotely. Just 11.2% of businesses reported that three quarters or more of their workers operated in a virtual environment before the crisis hit.

And now? A significant portion of respondents (nearly 60%) said at least three quarters of their staff currently operate in a remote working environment.

The stark difference between these two graphs (pre-COVID and current COVID environment) indicates that COVID is a major catalyst in moving to remote, and that this change was very sudden. It also tells us that many companies hit the ground running in that shift – in many cases, literally one day to the next.

Shift to the remote workplace is permanent

When asked about a permanent shift to a remote workplace, 41.3% of respondents said they will move at least some positions to a virtual environment, and an additional 9% said they will be fully remote after COVID. Just over one-fifth (21.9%) said they will not permanently move any positions to remote.

Remote work and distributed teams led by and far in a list of predicted paradigm shifts post-COVID, with a full 71.1% of respondents citing that shift as a new standard. This is well ahead of other options including rules around physical distancing, more tech adoption, and updated workplace design.

“Remote jobs will increase. Companies will adapt to remote working patterns; this will be the new normal even with the invention of a vaccine. As people become used to working from home, meeting physically will be only a matter of necessity.” – Survey respondent

Of those businesses considering a more permanent shift, one-third (33.3%) of respondents said that they plan to move half or more of their workforce to remote going forward. Another 40.8% said they will move 26% to 50% of their workforce to a remote workplace environment.

The difference in the pre-COVID remote work numbers and post-COVID plans – and the large number of businesses who moved some or all their workforce to remote during the crisis itself – tells us that COVID-19 not only is a significant catalyst in shifting to remote, but also heavily impacts future plans around remote work.

Of course, each business has their own unique experience in this shift. Three potential stories are:

• Businesses were already planning to move some of their workforce to a remote environment for a variety of reasons (economics, logistics, engagement, etc.), and COVID-19 merely expedited those plans (for example, Twitter);
• Businesses were considering remote as a possibility, but not as a priority until COVID-19 hit; or
• Businesses did not think remote was feasible or even a good idea, but changed their perspective when forced to operate in that environment by COVID-19.

Numbers differ across industries

Although remote work was the most popularly predicted paradigm shift across all respondents in our survey, those in the healthcare sector say rules around physical distancing (63%) and tech/digital adoption (59.3%) will be as significant as remote work (also 59.3%) as major changes going forward.

And those in education tagged changes in the physical workplace as their second-most popular choice after remote work.

Still, remote work is the clear leader in terms of paradigm shift. This tells us that, regardless of industry, remote work is here to stay.

Want to learn more? Navigate to:

• Chapter 1 on the impact that COVID-19 had on business and processes
• Chapter 3 on the challenges of remote working and why
• Chapter 4 on the challenges of remote hiring and why
• Chapter 5 on the role of technology in remote work going forward
• Methodology and firmographics
• A collection of open-ended responses from those we surveyed.

Want to read it all in one place? Check out the full report here.

The post COVID-19 big shifts: The workplace will stay remote controlled appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

• How did businesses respond to the COVID-19 pandemic?
• What were the effects of COVID-19 on business operations?
• How did COVID-19 change hiring?
• And finally: how are businesses planning for a post-COVID future?

Not only was COVID-19’s impact palpable, it was also very tangible and it forced action in many aspects of business. Let’s look at what our respondents did when COVID-19 became a reality for them.

Business response to COVID-19

As is now known, a significant impact of COVID-19 on business was that it triggered a sudden transition to a fully remote working environment where all employees worked from home. Our survey confirmed this – nearly two-thirds (62.6%) of respondents cited going fully remote as one of the actions their business took.

A third (32.3%) of respondents said they moved part of their operations to a remote environment. It bears noting that nearly a third of all respondents work in IT/technology – considered to be one of the most remote-friendly sectors.

A sizable percentage of businesses introduced precautionary measures at their working location (37.9%) and/or reduced capacity at work, if remote was not an option for all workers (18%).

“It’s going to look very different without a doubt. … Personally, I think it will be good for us, we were starting to lose focus of who we were, it was becoming less important to talk to people face to face and more important to stare at phones. … Yes, we will be using technology more in our day-to-day lives due to COVID-19, but now we are focusing more on what’s actually important.”
– Survey respondent

Economic impact

The economic impact of COVID-19 is also significant in our dataset. A full 12% shut down business altogether – albeit temporarily in most cases. All but one in hospitality and 26.1% of those in education shut down. In terms of company size, 21.7% of those in the 1-9 employee-size bracket opted to shut down temporarily, a far higher rate than any of the other size categories.

More than a fifth of our respondents reported that their businesses laid off or furloughed employees. When breaking down by company size, we found those in the 50-99 and 100-499 employee-size brackets were statistically more likely to lay off workers, with percentages choosing this option being 12.3 and 10.6 percentage points more than the percentages of total respondents in those brackets. The opposite was true for those with 10-49 employees, with just 17.1% in that category choosing to lay off or furlough workers, compared with 26.1% of total respondents falling into that size bracket.

And by industry, those in hospitality (62.5%) and manufacturing (50%) were more likely to turn to layoffs and furloughs as an option, whereas those in healthcare (7.4%) and education (4.3%) were far less likely to choose that route.

Changes going forward

When asked about the changes businesses are planning going forward, the response was comprehensive, with all listed options being selected widely. The most popularly selected moves are travel reduction (59.3%) and a shift to remote (56.5%). Closely following are plans to switch to staggered/flexible work schedules (44.9%) and a redesign of the physical working environment (44.1%).

Many of those in the “Other” category stated they aren’t entirely sure yet, with one indicating they want to see how other businesses fared before taking action of their own. Others plan to increase personal protective equipment (PPE), sanitation protocols, and overall employee safety either in the field or in the workplace. One respondent in the business/consulting sector plans to require clients to be tested beforehand.

Most striking is that just 6.2% of respondents stated that nothing is being planned going forward.

Whether it’s layoffs, a shift to remote, or redesigning workplaces, this response tells us that COVID-19 impacted the majority of businesses in our survey, and drastically altered their planning.

“I think that it will change a lot in the world. Adapting as we have gave us knowledge to be more flexible and change to remote working. I think many people will adapt more wellness programs and education.” – Survey respondent

Impact on hiring

COVID-19 was also readily felt in the hiring space. Two-thirds of respondents (65.2%) said they were hiring less during the crisis or had frozen hiring altogether. Just 8.1% said they increased their hiring in response. Although our own survey results don’t reflect it in terms of healthcare hiring, it’s well documented that healthcare, supply chains, telecommunications, and the mortgage industry are sectors that aggressively ramped hiring in the early days of the crisis.

Company size also dictated responses: smaller companies (1-49 employees) and larger, enterprise-sized companies (>1,000 employees) were the most likely to report that they’ve frozen hiring completely, while a full half of companies with 500-999 employees said they were hiring less than planned.

None of the six size categories saw more than 10% of respondents hiring more than planned.

Want to learn more? Navigate to:

• Chapter 2 on the magnitude of the shift to remote work
• Chapter 3 on the challenges of remote working and why
• Chapter 4 on the challenges of remote hiring and why
• Chapter 5 on the role of technology in remote work going forward
• Methodology and firmographics
• A collection of open-ended responses from those we surveyed.

The post How businesses responded to COVID-19 – and what they’re planning now appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

IMAGR, founded in 2017, has offices in Auckland, New Zealand and Osaka, Japan. Breaking into the $5.7 trillion dollar supermarket retail industry, they work with retailers to remove friction in the checkout experience. Say goodbye to those pesky queues with their SmartCart’s computer vision technology. When Jordyn Riley joined as IMAGR’s People and Culture Manager, IMAGR had 25 employees and were headed for a period of growth. However, they couldn’t visualize a clear candidate journey with their current ATS. They struggled to see a single source of hiring truth, and knew that their candidate experience could be enhanced for both direct applicants and referrals through external recruiters.

“We were looking for something that was really easy for us to use, something that would enhance the candidate experience. We wanted to know where things were at with every single candidate at all times.”

IMAGR needed a system with quick team adoption so that they could continue to meet their hiring goals. Implementation with Workable was complete within a week. Over the course of a year using Workable, IMAGR’s headcount surged to 41 employees with 14 new hires. With Workable, they were able to move away from multiple processes and streamline hiring in such a way that respects candidates and creates a deep active partnership with external recruiters. 

“Every single person that comes through is important,” says Jordyn. “Whether or not they’re going to be successful or not is a moot point. I want to make sure that we’re responding to everybody, and Workable makes that really easy.”

When hiring in Japan, IMAGR found that having feet on the ground in a place with a different market and a time difference has been helpful. The external recruiter portal in Workable makes it easy for IMAGR’s internal team to maintain privacy while allowing their agency partners in Japan to access the information they need to do their job well. In addition, IMAGR is posting to top job boards which have been their main candidate sources, including Seek, Glassdoor, LinkedIn and AngelList. 

Says Jordyn: “Workable links to all of the free jobs in the area.”

Candidate experience and employee experience are top of mind for IMAGR, so Workable’s integration with Bamboo – resulting in a seamless transfer of new hire data to HRIS – makes for a smoother onboarding experience and higher talent retention. During the early months of the COVID-19 crisis, IMAGR hired and onboarded three new employees remotely – and much to IMAGR’s pleasant surprise, one of those virtual hires actually beat their onsite record for time to hire. 

“We just kind of transitioned what we did onsite to virtual, and it’s worked fine,” says Jordyn.

Interest has consistently been strong since the early days, but as of late, their vision for a contactless SmartCart service came just in time for the COVID era. They’ve received additional media exposure, retailer interest, and even inquiries from the general public about investment and partnership. The unique nature of their product also maintains the user’s privacy – it scans what goes into the cart, not the shopper themselves, coinciding with the upsurge in data privacy concerns among people worldwide.

With a steady and healthy stream of new candidates, IMAGR has found a partnership with Workable that encourages both a best-in-class candidate experience and an inclusive hiring process with a diverse range of sources and hiring team collaboration. The trio of IMAGR, Workable and Bamboo means no more issues with multiple disconnected processes and welcomes a single candidate and employee truth. 

The post Workable’s seamless BambooHR integration helps IMAGR hire and retain great talent appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

On the flip side, there are still unconscious traps you could stumble on. Image and sound are powerful, after all. When you see a candidate for the first time and get cues from how they behave, talk, look and dress like you might get unconsciously triggered. No matter how trained or aware you are, biases will always surface and may sidetrack your attention away from what matters.

Video interview biases: most common risks

So, imagine this scenario: you’re about to evaluate 20 video interviews for an open role in marketing. You’ve handed over four interview questions to candidates, one generic (e.g. “Describe yourself and your career goals in two minutes”) and three job-related (e.g. “What metrics would you use to measure our social media’s performance?”). Each item has unlimited preparation time and the answer is set to a maximum of two minutes.

Despite those given constraints, there is variability in interview answers you receive. Some candidates took the whole two minutes to answer the questions while others spent less than 60 seconds on their responses. The actual responses varied, as well, and of course, you can still see and hear each candidate.

In brief, here are some tricky parts that could trigger video interview biases in this case:

1. Protected characteristics are now evident

What you controlled for during the blind hiring stage will be now visible. You need to be careful with this information and how they might unconsciously impact your evaluation. The umbrella of protected characteristics is huge.

It’s not always the obvious traits that trigger us, such as someone’s skin color or dress code. It could also be that a candidate’s accent might sound funny to your ears, or you might take for granted that a 50-year-old candidate won’t be a perfect fit for a senior position at a dynamic start-up environment. All those elements could be misleading.

2. Non-verbal cues can affect your judgment

Sitting in front of a camera presenting yourself to someone you cannot see is not always that easy for interviewees. Some candidates will feel confident and some won’t. However, this is not necessarily an indicator of how they’ll perform their day-to-day tasks – unless the role entails presenting at a high level or communicating in a similar setup as part of their work (e.g. call centers, telemarketing).

Beware of these no-verbal characteristics and how they impact you. There are some common video interview red flags that might mess you up during evaluation – a noisy background or a multicolored top could sway your judgment in ways you aren’t initially aware of.

3. Evaluating video interviews is a rather new thing

Since one-way video-interviews are relatively new to the recruitment landscape, there’s still a lot to discover going forward. We’re still learning and there are likely more biases that we haven’t identified right away.

Picture this in the above-mentioned scenario: you have two final qualified candidates – one answered their job-related question in 30 seconds while the other’s answer took up the full two minutes. If you don’t pay that much attention to each response, you may prefer the one with the longer answer as they had “more to say”.

But the reality could be that the first candidate had a more accurate answer and cut down the fluff. They were more direct and to the point. For certain roles – let’s say, for editors or public speakers– that would be a good skill to have.

Tips to reduce one-way video interview biases

So, as any other recruiting solution that you use to improve diversity in your business, if you don’t use video interviews the right way, there will still be some stumbling blocks.

No tool and feature will enable you to you to directly succeed in ensuring diversity – rather, it will be your mindset towards diversity that will do the job and your persistent attempts to establish diversity in the core of your business…
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To build a strong approach from beginning to end, track all biases that could surface along the way – whether that’s judging a candidate for a facial piercing for “being unprofessional” to ruling out a single mother at the decision stage, taking for granted that she is not going to be as efficient at the job, with so many personal responsibilities at hand.

Here are some first steps you could follow to structure the screening process in a way that improves your diversity efforts before and during the video-interviewing stage:

Plan your early-stage screening

If you post your job ad to several job boards you broaden your sources for candidates – and in turn, the opportunity to diversify your candidate pool. You can also share the job ad through multiple social networks and find candidates where they usually hang out.

Use a blind hiring software at an early screening stage to eliminate unconscious biases from resumes and social media profiles, such as photo, age, nationality, etc. Later on, when you review a video interview, remember that content and attitude matters more than non-verbal cues and other physical traits or elements.

Conduct pre-employment assessments

Implementing pre-employment assessments is also crucial when screening applicants. They produce a mostly accurate result on job-related competencies and help spot what matters the most for a specific role.

Whether that’s an external assessment or an assignment you built yourself, it’s better to evaluate them before or coupled with video interviews to make sure that what you saw and heard during the video assessment doesn’t impact your judgment and your full attention is concentrated on those important job-related factors.

Structure questions wisely

What you really want to learn about a candidate from their one-way video is if they have the right skills for the role. To spot them, make sure to address the top must-have skills in the questions.

To achieve that, design interview questions that don’t require further explanation. For example:

• Describe a time when you faced a problem in project management and how you dealt with it.
• What is your biggest achievement in content marketing strategy?

It would be unfortunate to lose out on a great candidate because of an unclear or vague question that needs further explanation. You also must use the same job-related questions for every interview to make sure that you evaluate all candidates equally.

Share video-interview tips

It would be also helpful, both for candidates and you as an evaluator, to share some video interview tips with candidates so that they have clear expectations and useful resources to prepare the right way. For example, share some tech and troubleshooting tips with candidates to set up their gear.

Remember to try and ignore the background noise or distractions that could trigger unconscious biases, whether that’s the wall behind them or poor audio/video quality. Focus on answers and attitude.

Here, you can find top video interview tips for candidates that will help you unify the process even more, and prepare all interviewees equally for success.

Train recruiters and hiring managers

All hiring managers and recruiters should be well aware of the video interview diversity risks and biases they could come across with. Apart from not discriminating based on protected characteristics, they should learn how to evaluate answers properly, based on related competency and other screening assessments (e.g. resume, pre-employment assessments, etc.).

It’s important to be aware of some of the common video interview red flags mentioned above, such as poor body language, that are not necessarily valid. Once assessors become aware of those mental traps and how to detect them early, your road to diversity will be on a safe track.

You could also design a D&I training to help your employees understand their personal triggering factors that could enforce biases.

Remember – biases are everywhere

Dear George, as you understand, one-way video interviews will help you improve your company’s diversity, but you have to utilize them carefully and combine them with other features and practices. Tech and tools are not going to be the single factor in this effort; there needs to be a strong diversity strategy in place, in every step of the recruiting funnel – and one-way video interviews can only help you get closer to making your D&I vision a reality.

The post One-way video interview biases: potential risks for diversity appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Headquartered in Dubai, GCC operates in countries ranging from Iraq to Indonesia to Australia. Over the past two decades, they’ve established a strong reputation for excellence in their facilities management, providing top-caliber service in kitchen and dining solutions including staffing, facilities, maintenance, and much more. In response to COVID-19, in partnership with Workable, GCC transitioned onsite interviews to virtual interviews when hiring for their global workforce. 

As Roda Collado, Recruitment & HR Operations Lead emphasized, they were already familiar with some video interview technologies when candidates were overseas, but in-country interviews needed to be quickly reestablished virtually.

“What changed is that even the in-country interviews are done either through internet web conferencing or over the phone.”

As the company responded to urgent employee needs and abrupt changes in work-life balance, the corporate team worked to figure out how they’d continue to hire and meet the expectations of their partner companies in these uncertain times. As this was happening, Workable launched their native one-way video interviewing product and GCC jumped at the opportunity to try it out. During this difficult time, GCC started using video interviews right away without expending valuable time and resources learning how to use it. 

“I’ve received good feedback from our hiring managers – even the candidates themselves. I feel that it’s easy to use and that, [on] the recruiter’s side, it’s integrated into their profiles.” 

By eliminating the time-consuming and restrictive phone screen process, everyone on the hiring team could review the candidate profile in their own time, in a previously unachievable way. Instead of the recruiter conducting the phone screen on their own and sharing feedback with the rest of the hiring team, hiring managers got involved earlier and could more actively step in and provide insight on who they wanted to move forward.

There’s the consistency in terms of questions being asked, so the hiring manager, or the hiring team are able to compare one candidate [with another], based on a consistent set of questions.

Candidates were so pleased with the process that they went out of their way to tell the GCC team. Asynchronous video interviews made it easier to schedule (eliminating the need for back-and-forth email communication) and put candidates at ease, enabling them to conduct the interview on their own time and in their own space. This proved especially crucial in that first screening round, before either party had developed a relationship, and increased candidate interest. It also spoke to GCC’s ongoing emphasis on an inclusive hiring process. When Roda compared video interviews with phone screens, she felt that video interviews were less subjective and less prone to bias. 

Speed up your hiring process like GCC

GCC quickly implemented Video Interviews, and in turn actually sped up the hiring process, allowing hiring team members and other company people to focus more on working through this very unusual time while maintaining a high-quality hiring process across all locations.

The post GCC Services fosters a more inclusive hiring process with Workable Video Interviews appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

There are also many ways in how Video Interviews may be helpful to you and your company. Instead of going into detail about what those benefits are and why, we thought we’d make things more fun and interactive for you with a Video Interview Quiz. In this quiz, you’ll learn how one-way video interviews can be one of the most important tools in your recruiting toolbox.

There are no right answers or wrong answers here – every answer is actually “correct”, but you’ll get a different piece of information or an interesting fact or statistic with each answer. And the best part? You can take this quiz again and again and pick up something new every time.

Whether it’s for your own convincing or for someone else’s buy-in to get Workable Video Interviews to optimize your recruitment process, there’s a lot here for you. Ultimately, this is purely for your own educational entertainment.

Without further ado, here’s the Video Interview Quiz!

The post Take our Video Interview Quiz – and optimize your hiring appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.