Workable CHRO Rob Long knows. “It’s a top 5 metric that we track at Workable,” he wrote in LinkedIn. “When it’s high enough, you can do incredible things – things that other companies cannot do. It’s a huge competitive advantage.”

So what is human capital efficiency? Let’s take a look and learn.

What is human capital efficiency?

In short, human capital efficiency refers to how well a company uses its human capital – the skills, knowledge, and experience of its workforce. It measures the output and business impact generated per dollar spent on employee-related costs.

With today’s tight talent market and competitive hiring landscape, human capital is more precious than ever. Maximizing your workforce’s contributions relative to their cost is essential for SMB success.

Why human capital efficiency matters

High human capital efficiency means your workforce is delivering substantial value in relation to what you spend on compensation, benefits, training, and other employee costs. The higher your HC efficiency, the better your return on human capital investment.

For SMBs, improving HC efficiency can lead to:

• Increased productivity and revenues without expanding headcount
• Ability to pay team members more competitively by boosting revenue per employee
• Reduced costs via streamlined operations and automation
• Better identification of skills gaps to target training and recruitment
• More accurate performance measurement to reward top talent

“It’s like an ROI on all the human elements that go into your company,” Rob adds. “When you’re operating a business, you’re making investments in it to make it run more smoothly and bring greater return. Your employees are a huge part of that – you’re investing in your people so they can bring their best to the job.”

So how do you invest in your people?

Rob answers: “Salary is the obvious one. But there are also other investments: benefits, perks, learning & development, all-hand retreats, lunch & learns, even team dinners and social outings. Any and all of these can tie back to employee productivity and a direct impact on revenue. That’s human capital efficiency in a nutshell.”

Calculating your human capital efficiency

So how do you calculate human capital efficiency? Easy – it’s simple math. Take your total revenue or net income, and divide it by your total employee expenses for a given period.

Let’s say your company generated a million dollars in revenue last quarter, and spent $200,000 on employee costs. That means your human capital efficiency would be $1M / $200K = 5.

This means for every dollar you spend on human capital in the last quarter, your business earns $5. The higher the ratio, the better.

You can track this metric over time to monitor what’s going well and what’s not – and benchmark against competitors in your industry to see how you stack up against them.

You can go deeper. Here are three other, more specific ways to calculate human capital efficiency:

1. Human Capital Value Added (HCVA)

This method calculates the economic value added by employees, beyond any material, overhead, and other operational costs.

HCVA = Operating Profit − (Capital Charge × Capital Employed)

Where:

• Operating Profit is the profit generated from operations before interest and taxes.
• Capital Charge is the rate of return required by capital providers.
• Capital Employed is the value of all the capital used in the business.

Then, to get the Human Capital Value Added per employee:

HCVA per Employee = HCVA / Number of Employees

2. Human Capital Return on Investment (HCROI)

This metric measures the rate of return on the investments a company makes in its workforce.

HCROI = Operating Profit / Total Employee Costs (Salaries + Benefits)

A higher HCROI suggests that a company is getting more return from its investments in its people. Conversely, a lower HCROI might indicate inefficiencies or that the company is not realizing the full potential from its human capital.

3. Revenue Per Employee

While simpler and more direct, this method offers a quick gauge of how much revenue each employee contributes to the company. It’s particularly useful for comparing efficiency across different firms in the same industry.

Revenue Per Employee = Total Revenue / Total Number of Employees

This method, although straightforward, is a gross measurement. It doesn’t take into account the nuances of capital structures or the specific roles and responsibilities of employees within different departments. Nor does it give you an indication of how much you’ve invested in human capital.

“We’re always thinking about ways to optimize the work we do at Workable,” Rob says. “When we’re making a decision on people, we’ll ask ourselves; ‘Will this grow our human capital efficiency? And how?’ And that’s our needle for success right there. We want to move that needle in the right direction. These formulas help us measure our progress on that.”

Strategies to boost HC efficiency

Once you know your starting point, here are some proven tactics to maximize human capital efficiency:

1. Analyze revenue per employee: Which employees, teams, or departments are generating the highest revenue relative to their cost? Determine what makes them successful and replicate across your organization.

2. Identify automation opportunities: Can any manual processes be automated to reduce labor costs? Do repetitive administrative tasks take up time that could be spent on high-ROI activities?

3. Review skills utilization: Are employees operating in their strongest skill areas? Are any skills being underutilized that could drive new revenue streams?

4. Invest in training and development: Targeted training to close skills gaps can greatly increase productivity. Offer development opportunities to boost engagement and retention.

5. Reward top performers: Incentivize and retain your standout talent. Be cautious not to overpay low performers.

6. Track performance rigorously: Tie individual goals to company objectives. Maintain clear metrics to identify low and high performers.

7. Promote knowledge sharing: Collaboration and documentation prevent knowledge loss when employees leave.

8. Seek cost-effective hires: Hire for culture fit and train for required skills. This expands your talent pool.

Making the most of your human capital

For SMBs facing stiff competition for talent, maximizing your workforce’s impact is vital. Boosting human capital efficiency allows you to extract more value from your employee investments.

“If you don’t have this metric in your OKRs, you need to add it,” Rob emphasizes. “Your company is nothing without its people. Investing in your human capital is crucial to your success – and so is the return on it. It’s how you can get ahead of others.”

So, as Rob stresses – take the time to calculate your current human capital efficiency, identify problem areas, and capitalize on opportunities to grow this ratio. Your closest business advisors – your employees – are your number-one asset. Optimize their output through calculated input, and your SMB will reap the rewards.

The post What is human capital efficiency and why is it so important? appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The following table of contents contains the topics and suggested rules of using Slack. Feel free to modify it based on your needs and your guidelines.

Slack guide introduction

Slack is a great communication tool, especially for a hybrid or distributed company. But it is not always the best mode of communication. Sometimes an email, call, meeting may be better suited. Consider what you are sending or discussing to decide whether Slack is your best option.

If someone sends you a Slack message and you believe it is not the right place to be discussing the matter at hand, you should let the sender know and suggest an alternative. You are encouraged to do that. “Hi! It sounds like this would be better discussed on a call, I’m free now if you are?”

Some teams also have established norms, these should be explained to you when you’re onboarded but if anything is unclear it is always OK to ask. It’s important you’re not missing out on important information because you didn’t know to join a certain channel or understand a team norm about using Slack.

Slack DMs should not be used for getting formal approvals (e.g. promotions) or anything that requires an audit trail. For approvals use email instead.

Slack channel naming conventions

Here are some common naming conventions [we suggest you use] that should help you search for the channel you’re looking for.

Be mindful of channel bloat. When creating a channel ask yourself whether a DM group would be more appropriate? Channels tend to live for a long time with people leaving/joining, if your need is more temporary a DM group may be more suitable.

Setting up Slack

Complete your profile

Complete your profile with your full name, job title, email, phone (where appropriate).

Setup your notifications preferences

You can click on your profile name on the top right corner of the slack app and go to preferences.
There you can choose when to get notifications on your phone or PC/MacBook.

If people see you active in Slack they will assume you are able to talk. You can also set your notification schedule so you don’t receive notifications outside your working hours:

Integrate Google Calendar

Integrating GCal will automatically update your status in Slack so people know, for example, when you’re in a meeting.

Day-to-day use

If you want time to focus; turn off notifications

You can set a time period for your update, it’s a pro move to use that so you don’t accidentally turn off notifications for the rest of your day.

You can see when someone has paused their notifications:

If something is important and urgent you can choose to “Notify anyway?” to override their paused notifications:

Turn notifications off for channels where you don’t need real time notifications

This is particularly useful in very busy channels especially if you are more of an observer than an active participant. (If you only ever observe, consider whether leaving the channel would be better for you). You can also choose to mute a channel to further reduce its presence.

Leave channels you are not engaging with

Over time it’s easy to join 10s of channels. On their own each one probably doesn’t distract you much. But overtime the combined distraction of those 10s will make a difference. If you don’t need to be in it, leave; there are plenty of other ways for someone to contact you and you can always re-join.

Slack will periodically notify you of channels you rarely use. It’s a good practise to review the suggestions and leave those you’re not engaging with:

Keep your status up to date

If you have integrated your Google Calendar with Slack your status will automatically be updated when you’re in a meeting so people know you’re busy. But there may be times you want to manually update your status.

It is often helpful to add context to your status, for example when going on PTO you can add the date you will return:

Sections keep DMs organized

Sections make it quick and easy to get to the DM you use the most, often your team

Become a Slack Pro

Using keyboard shortcuts to navigate in Slack will save you a lot of time. For example jumping to a specific conversation or going back/forward are great examples.

Messaging Guidelines

[Feel free to modify or add messaging rules and guidelines for your personnel here].

Use @channel and @here with extreme caution

They should only be used for important, urgent messages. If you use @channel or @here make sure your message contains enough information that someone knows if they should respond or if they can ignore it. For example, “@channel please look at the message above” is not helpful.

When you put @here in your message, all users that are members of the channel you are posting and are active will get a notification.

When you put @channel in your message, all users that are members of the channel you are posting will get a notification no matter if they set up do-not-disturb or even mute the channel. People that are asleep will wake up, people will check your message during their meetings.

Don’t expect a response straight away

Slack is a great way to talk directly to people in a more direct way but people might be doing something that can not be left in the middle or have another very important talk.

If you need to communicate with someone urgently you can send them a message explaining exactly that but if you don’t see a response right away there is no point in sending more messages. There are other ways to communicate with a coworker if something is urgent.

Use threads on Channels and group conversations

Threads help keep track of conversations and most importantly replies in threads do not notify all the channel members at all.

Only the parent post creator will be notified and after that only the people who have posted on the thread will get notifications by default.

Don’t just say “Hello”

Do not send someone a DM saying “Hello” and leave it there. Ask the question you would like answered right away.

Acknowledge messages with reactions

Instead of sending a one word answer like “OK”, “Cool” or “thank you” consider using an emoji like a thumbs up. That will help reduce the disruption (no notification or unread notice for the recipient) but at the same time maintains the courtesy. Using keyboard shortcuts for emojis can also save time

Avoid sending multiple short messages that should be one message. The individual notifications are a nuisance for the recipient and it’s difficult to read.

Respect someone’s status

If they say Do Not Disturb, leave them be if you can. Consider sending an email instead. If it’s urgent and important, go ahead and click “Notify anyway?” so they receive a notification.

Consider scheduling your message to send later

Whilst most people will have notifications paused outside their working hours, you can also help by using Slack’s option to schedule your message to send later. Slack will show you the local time for the person you are messaging;

Commonly used emojis for statuses & reactions

If you are ever uncertain about the intended meaning of someone’s reaction to your message, ask for clarification.
Hovering over someone’s status emoji may provide some additional context:

Common Statuses	Meaning
	I’m on PTO
and	I’m busy, please don’t disturb (or on PTO with Google Calendar / Slack integration)
	I’m in a meeting
	I’m in the office
	I’m having lunch
	I’m out sick

Common Reaction Emojis	Meaning
	I’m looking into your message/question
	Thank you
	Go ahead / agreed/ approved

Some channels you might be interested in

[Here, you can add your public channels, specify the topics, and provide useful information].

This is the end of our Slack guide template. You can easily download it by clicking on the link in the right sidebar.

Workable offers thousands of templates to help you hire faster. Check them out here.

The post Company’s slack guide policy template appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Here is what you can do to foster a truly inclusive workforce in your organization.

Making workplaces LGBTQ inclusive

Let’s start by looking at the numbers. A Human Rights Campaign survey found that:

• 46% of LGBTQ workers are closeted at work
• Half of non-LGBTQ employees reported there were no openly LGBTQ employees in their company
• 1 in 5 LGBTQ workers have been told or had coworkers imply that they should dress more feminine or masculine (compared with 1 in 24 non-LGBTQ workers)
• 54% of non-LGBTQ workers said that they would be very comfortable working with an LGBTQ coworker; of those who wouldn’t be very comfortable, a majority said it was because they “didn’t want to hear about their coworker’s sex life.”

LGBTQ employees are not comfortable everywhere they work, and there are some misperceptions out there. No one wants or needs to hear about their coworker’s sex life, which shouldn’t even be an issue on the table regardless of preference.

We share five tips on how to make your workplace more LGBTQ inclusive:

1. Speak with your pocketbook, not your rainbow logo

It’s easy to change a logo, put up a flag, or tweet about happy Pride Month. But LinkedIn took a step further and started paying the heads of their affinity groups $10,000 a year for the extra work. This demonstrates their desire to support all diversity groups, including LGBTQ groups.

Nothing says real support and inclusion like cash which recognizes the hard work these employee resource group leaders put in.

2. Be thoughtful about pronouns

This is a hot button issue at work, and you need to tread carefully. For example, look at the following exchange on Twitter:

Katrina Kibben: One of my Pride wishes this year is to ban the phrase “preferred pronouns.” They are not preferred. This isn’t steak or shrimp. It’s a human’s identity.

Dr. “Coach” Dawn Reid #ReidReady: I respect how you feel and I ask if you can consider preference is about a label choice. I.e., My son is non-binary. He has a pref of they/she/he depending on his affect. It’s his pref of a social label in the moment. Not who he is as a person.

Katrina Kibben: Every experience is different. I respect it. For me? My first thought is that your child may be code-switching for their safety (I do it too), not changing pronouns.

Dr. “Coach” Dawn Reid #ReidReady: Agreed. It’s different for each person. Code switching is another topic. We all do that for communication clarity. The original term/use is from linguistics. And that’s not it for them. It’s his preference. We are talking about this now.

In other words, there is no way to get it right. An October 2020 survey by Tallo found that 88% of Gen Z candidates think it’s important for recruiters to ask them their pronouns. But many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers find it offensive to ask their pronouns. This leaves you to guess, but there are some things you can do.

Listen to what people want to do. Respect and use their pronouns. (But it’s not reasonable for an employee to expect everyone to follow regular pronoun changes.) Allow people (but don’t require) to list their pronouns on email signatures and other work-related things.

3. Don’t make assumptions

Does someone look gay? Is that person trans? Whisper, whisper, whisper. This type of thing makes for a very unwelcoming environment for everyone.

Instead, make sure your staff understands employees treat every other employee and client equally across the board. Everyone gets respect. If you allow people to bring personal items to decorate their cubicles, then everyone gets to bring a family picture – regardless of what their family looks like.

Make sure you schedule and provide promotions and perks based on performance and seniority, not the perception that so-and-so needs a bump in pay because his wife just had a baby. If an employee announces the impending birth of a baby, don’t speculate about just how that baby was conceived or carried. Instead, just say, “Congratulations! Let me get you the FMLA paperwork!”

4. Remove bias from your recruiting process.

EPM Scientific gave five tips for reducing bias in hiring. These are:

• Anonymizing resumes in the review process
• Encouraging validated pre-employment testing
• Pre-employment testing, such as work samples, predict job success.
• Encouraging a diverse interview panel and hiring committee
• Challenging bias in recruitment and hiring decisions

All these things help you ensure you hire the person who is best for the job regardless of their race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age, or national origin. Letting candidates know you do through these processes helps them feel like they have a chance based on their skills.

5. Educate your leadership on the benefits of diversity

You can only increase LGBTQ candidates when you have a welcoming environment. But, to make a welcoming environment, senior leadership needs to be on board. Presenting the business case for making workplaces LGBTQ inclusive will help.

People who have to hide their identities at work experience more stress. Higher stress results in more days off and an increase in medical costs. It’s saving you money to have a welcoming environment.

Consulting giant McKinsey reported in May 2020 that companies with diverse leadership have higher financial returns than those that don’t. While they looked only at gender and race, it stands to reason that bringing in people with different sexual orientations would bring additional viewpoints that would help the company reach different audiences and support all employees.

Finally – candidates, especially Millennials and Gen Z, want to work for inclusive organizations and leaders. They’ve made that clear. So make sure you let them know what your company is doing to ensure everyone feels comfortable.

The critical point of all this is that everyone deserves a job based on their knowledge, skills, and abilities. Everything else should be irrelevant. This means ensuring that everyone is welcome in your company. A simple concept that goes far.

The post 5 tips on making workplaces LGBTQ inclusive appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

It sounds like a science fiction dream come true – and it is. Artificial intelligence in the workplace is breathing new life into those visions right now.

Now evidently more than ever, employers everywhere are reaping the benefits of embracing AI technologies – including ChatGPT and its many relatives and enemies – to enhance productivity and solve modern business challenges.

Is this the end of times? Have the machines arrived. Hardly. Rather, the age of AI is paving the way for countless opportunities rather than simply replacing human tasks.

In fact, let’s explore how AI in the workplace could be your formula to evolve your business and its many workflows.

1. Boost collaboration with sharper insights

Imagine a scenario where a team is brainstorming ideas for a new marketing campaign or a sales strategy. You might even be looking for gaps in your workflows and trying to figure out a way to fill that gap with a new hire. An AI system analyzes each team member’s input, packages it all up, and suggests data-driven insights to optimize their campaign, making the process more efficient and effective.

Is this a threat to human employment or creativity? No – rather, it complements your natural skill sets. You’re synergizing (yes, that word) AI capabilities with human intuition and emotional understanding – which is crucial when managing staff and building new strategies that incorporate a lot of both in the planning and execution.

Related: How AI can enhance human skills and collaboration at work

For instance, Workable helps recruiters identify top talent by analyzing applicants’ job experiences and behavioral traits against company requirements on the fly. You can also use ChatGPT itself to build an ideal candidate profile with the input of information packages including the profiles of team members, the job description itself, and the company’s “About Us” page – all of which, incidentally, are already built by humans.

In short: incorporating artificial intelligence into your daily management style allows your team members to free up headspace and sharpen their focus on critical thinking exercises.

2. Speed up work with automation

Envision a scenario where employees no longer have to spend hours organizing their inbox. Instead, your AI-charged email client sorts and prioritizes messages every morning before you even open your laptop, so you can focus on the important stuff.

That’s just one example. Let’s say you deal with countless tickets and requests every day that require your attention – or rather, your “green light” before they can be moved down the line to the next team. Those still need your eyes, of course, but it’s a time suck to open up each ticket, look through it, click “OK”, click a couple of items in a drop-down menu, drag-and-drop to another field, and then send to the next person.

Automation means you just look through it and click “OK”, and the rest of it is automated. That’s how artificial intelligence workplace solutions can open up avenues for increased productivity across teams.

Another example of AI application is in sophisticated language translation software. With increasing workplace globalization, this kind of tool breaks down language barriers that can hamper international teams. Let’s say Bob in New York needs to talk quickly with Keiko in Japan, but Bob’s Japanese isn’t that great, and neither is Keiko’s English.

But they don’t need to worry about that because everything Bob says or types is automatically translated to Keiko and vice versa, so they can move more quickly on urgent tasks.

3. Grow team skills through custom L&D

Picture an employee struggling with a new software tool. Instead of attending a one-size-fits-all training session, they receive a personalized learning path designed by an AI-powered learning platform, accelerating their mastery of the tool.

With the sheer volume of softwares out there, it almost becomes a necessity to have learning modules customized to the specific needs of individual team members – not just newly hired employees, but also long-time tenured workers.

Artificial intelligence in the workplace isn’t just about refining human-generated output; it’s also designed to tap into each individual’s unique potential by creating custom educational experiences. That’s especially pertinent considering the sheer volume of new tech and software launched on a regular basis. The “standardized” toolbox and tech stack may be a thing of the past – especially during times of great change such as in this new age of AI.

For instance, online learning platform Degreed connects team members with personalized skills training programs fueled by AI recommendations source. And Rallyware streamlines orientation processes via chatbots and automation technology – a ground-breaking approach that increases employee engagement rates during onboarding phases.

Investing in your workforce with these tools can inspire, motivate and grow your teams – which makes for more bang at the bottom line.

4. Make smarter decisions armed with data

There are times where your company may be evaluating the potential of entering a new market. An AI-powered business intelligence system can sift through vast amounts of data and provide valuable insights on market trends, customer preferences, and the competitive landscape – and package all that up into a pretty dashboard to support your decision-making process.

AI in the workplace allows for more informed decision making by analyzing large datasets and turning those into actionable insights. By leveraging AI-driven analytics, businesses can quickly identify patterns, trends, and opportunities that would be overly time-consuming for humans to discern on their own.

For example, tools like ThoughtSpot enable users to ask natural language questions and receive instant, data-driven answers based on what you’re feeding into it – whether its logistics in the manufacturing sector or consumer habits in banking.

Meanwhile, predictive analytics platforms like DataRobot enable organizations to forecast future outcomes based on historical data, such as evolving reporting models to meet new regulatory requirements, identifying patterns to make more accurate diagnoses, and monitoring competitor developments to maintain competitiveness in the marketplace.

5. Detect fraud before it causes damage

In a world where cyber threats are increasingly sophisticated, an AI-powered cybersecurity system can detect and neutralize a potential attack on your company’s network before it causes costly damage.

AI-powered security solutions are increasingly playing an indispensable role in protecting businesses from cyberattacks and fraud. These systems can analyze vast amounts of data in real time, identifying suspicious activities and potential threats that might go unnoticed by human analysts – and flagging those threats for immediate human intervention as needed.

For instance, cybersecurity platform Darktrace uses AI-driven algorithms to detect and respond to cyber threats, while Fraud.net leverages AI and machine learning to analyze customer data to detect and prevent fraudulent transactions for e-commerce businesses.

6. ID and preempt supply chain risks

This may be familiar for a lot of businesses these days especially in the wake of COVID-19: your supply chain gets disrupted due to “unforeseen circumstances”. It’s very much speculation but one wonders if the global supply chain challenges triggered by the pandemic might have been eased for companies that already had an AI-enabled supply chain management system in place.

For instance – an AI-driven software can quickly identify alternative suppliers and adjust logistics plans even during minute disruptions, ensuring minimal impact on your overall operations. This improves demand forecasting, optimizes logistics, and automates routine tasks.

And as above, historical data and real-time information is regularly analyzed to make accurate predictions, helping businesses adapt to changing market conditions and minimize any potential disruptions.

For example, Project44 leverages AI to enhance end-to-end visibility and predictability in global logistics operations.

Evolve with artificial intelligence workplace solutions

If you’re feeling apprehensive or skeptical about AI in the workplace, you likely don’t need to be. Every little challenge has its AI solution – be it in recruitment, supply chain, or market volatility.

You’ve heard of the quote: “improvise, adapt, and overcome”. Commonly credited to Clint Eastwood in Heartbreak Ridge, that mentality applies here as well. These are times that demand increased business agility (in other words, improvisation and adaptability) so that you can overcome challenges that come your way, be they old or new.

Some may see AI as a challenge to our society. That is fair. But in pure business terms, it can become an invaluable asset and a great empowerer. And it’ll only grow going forward as we move into this new frontier of technology.

The post The workplace of the future: How AI is evolving the working world appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

1. Write job descriptions

This may seem ridiculous to use a bot for – after all, you want to describe the job you need to be done, not just a generic job! But the reality is most job descriptions are terrible at describing the actual job.

Why? The people who write them (managers and recruiters) don’t actually do that actual job!

ChatGPT shouldn’t be copied as is, but it can give you a starting point. It may include some important things that you wouldn’t normally think to include. For instance, I asked ChatGPT to write a job description for an entry-level accounts receivable clerk and got this:

Job Title: Entry Level Accounts Payable Clerk

Job Summary: We are seeking an entry level accounts payable clerk to join our accounting department. The ideal candidate will be responsible for the timely and accurate processing of invoices and payments, ensuring compliance with company policies and procedures. This position will report directly to the Accounts Payable Supervisor and will work closely with other members of the accounting team.

Key Responsibilities:

• Receive and process invoices from vendors, ensuring accuracy and completeness of information
• Code and enter invoices into the accounting system
• Ensure timely and accurate processing of payments to vendors
• Resolve any invoice discrepancies or issues with vendors in a timely manner
• Reconcile vendor statements and resolve any outstanding balances or discrepancies
• Communicate with other departments to ensure accurate recording of expenses and proper authorization for payments
• Assist with month-end close activities, including preparing accruals and reconciling accounts
• Maintain accurate and complete records of all accounts payable transactions

Requirements:

• High school diploma or equivalent; some college coursework in accounting preferred
• Prior experience in accounts payable preferred but not required
• Strong attention to detail and accuracy
• Excellent organizational and time management skills
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Proficiency in Microsoft Excel and other accounting software
• Ability to work independently and as part of a team in a fast-paced environment
• Willingness to learn and take on new responsibilities as needed

This is an entry level position with opportunities for growth and advancement within the accounting department. If you are a highly motivated individual with a passion for accounting and a desire to learn, we encourage you to apply.

Takeaway: ChatGPT is a starting point, not an ending point. It will not write everything perfectly for you, and you still must edit.

2. Help to summarize complex documents.

When you are trying to understand a document from the EEOC or a court case, ChatGPT can give you a good summary. For instance, I asked for an overview of the EEOC’s Draft Strategic Enforcement Plan as it relates to talent acquisition. It gave an excellent summary:

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) proposed new guidelines, outlined in the Draft Strategic Enforcement Plan, could impact talent acquisition in several ways.

First, the plan prioritizes addressing issues such as systemic barriers to equal employment opportunities and discriminatory practices in the hiring process. This could lead to increased scrutiny of hiring practices and a focus on ensuring that they are non-discriminatory and fair.

Second, the plan emphasizes the protection of workers in industries that are rapidly changing or expanding, such as technology. Talent acquisition practices in these industries may need to be re-evaluated to ensure they are not discriminatory.

Finally, the plan also highlights the need to address emerging and developing issues in equal employment, such as discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Talent acquisition practices may need to be adapted to comply with these new protections and avoid potential legal action.

In summary, the EEOC’s proposed guidelines could impact talent acquisition by promoting non-discriminatory practices, protecting workers in rapidly changing industries, and addressing emerging issues in equal employment.

Great, right? But be careful. ChatGPT just makes stuff up if it doesn’t know.

For example, I asked it to give me a summary of this recent court case on employees’ reproductive rights. Here’s the response:

Certainly! Here is a brief summary of the court decision in question:

The court upheld a lower court ruling that the New York State law prohibiting the possession and sale of stun guns violates the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution. The court found that stun guns are “bearable arms” that are commonly used for self-defense, and therefore are entitled to Second Amendment protection. The court also rejected the argument that stun guns are “unusual” weapons that fall outside the scope of the Second Amendment.

The decision has implications for New York State, as it may require the state to change its laws related to stun guns. However, the decision may also have broader implications for other states that have similar laws prohibiting the possession or sale of stun guns, as they too

You’ll notice it ends without a complete sentence. That’s because I stopped it because this has absolutely nothing to do with the case at hand. The case actually involves an employer who argued they could take adverse actions against an employee for their reproductive rights decisions. Not a thing to do with guns.

So, while it can be good to summarize things, much like a high school senior, it will just make stuff up if it doesn’t know. An AI bot needs to learn things, and a brand new court case hasn’t been around long enough for it to learn.

Takeaway: You can use ChatGPT to summarize things, but be careful and double-check! If it’s something you know nothing about, this is probably not the best place to start.

3. Helps neurodivergent people

Brenda Neckvatal, Human Resource Professional and e-Commerce Entrepreneur, has dyslexia. That hasn’t stopped her career one bit, and she’s even become a bestselling author. She’s found ChatGPT to be super helpful.

“As a dyslexic person, I find it difficult to accurately compose written text. AI can help me write more effectively by providing me with tools that can check my grammar, spelling, and syntax,” Brenda says.

“AI can also suggest words, phrases, and sentence structures that I may not have thought of, which can help me create clearer, more concise writing. Additionally, AI can help me find more appropriate resources for research, allowing for more accurate and informed writing. With AI, I can write more effectively and efficiently and with much more confidence.”

That’s not the only way someone who is neurodivergent can use this AI tool.

Members of Reddit’s /r/autism group discussed the benefits of ChatGPT for people with autism.

Here are some excerpts from that discussion:

“Being a learning language model, the software can help with just about anything, and I know many people have found it great with assignments for high school/college, myself included.”

“But I have been using it more recently like it is a small neurotypical brain in my phone. Not only can I run social scenarios through ChatGPT, but it’ll talk with [me] about my special interests for hours without getting bored.”

“The software has continually provided great advice on tricky social situations, reminders, and positive reinforcement in my day-to-day activities. It can even give you encouragement/motivational messages.”

“Maybe it’s the technology nerd in me, but I love ChatGPT, it’s free and I don’t think it’s being discussed how helpful this software is for people on the spectrum.”

That’s a massive benefit for HR and employees alike.

Takeaway: Think of it as a translator. ChatGPT can help you write out things you’re uncomfortable with.

4. Personal assistants

Every HR person would love a personal assistant, but what company has the budget for that?

Director of People Support Robert Jumalon said he uses ChatGPT as a personal assistant. The tool figured out how to set up e-signatures and gave instructions for his existing systems, gave step-by-step instructions for filing a legal complaint, and other things. Jumalon is just starting to use it and is excited about it.

But could there be more? Combining ChatGPT with a bit of Python programming can take over a wide variety of tasks that a personal assistant would originally be able to do.

According to Artificial Intelligence in Plain English contributor “Ordinary Programmer”, here are a few of things it could do for you.

• Scheduling appointments and setting reminders
• Answering questions and providing information on a wide range of topics
• Finding and booking travel arrangements
• Making recommendations on books, movies, and other forms of entertainment
• Helping manage finances, such as tracking expenses and budgeting

You say that’s all fine and good, but you don’t know Python, and again, there’s no budget. Well, he also gives the instructions.

Think of the benefits of a recruiter using AI to schedule appointments! That alone could save hours of tedious work, putting the recruiter’s skills to better uses.

Takeaway: Don’t limit yourself. See what ChatGPT can do for you!

5. Helps you be more creative

Creativity is hard work. Anybody who tells you otherwise is probably not very creative, and HR people are often called on to find creative solutions to problems. Brainstorming, list making, and figuring out how to handle a problem employee are all things ChatGPT can help you with. I asked it about icebreakers for HR people and got this response:

Sure, here are a few icebreakers that HR professionals might find useful:

• Two Truths and a Lie: Have each person share two true statements about themselves and one false statement. The others in the group must guess which statement is false.
• Name Game: Have everyone introduce themselves and share one interesting fact about themselves that begins with the same letter as their first name.
• Group Juggle: Have everyone stand in a circle and toss a ball or object to each other. Each time someone catches the object, they must say the name of the person they are throwing it to. After everyone has caught the object once, add a second object and repeat the process.
• Personal Scavenger Hunt: Create a list of characteristics or experiences, such as “Has traveled to more than five countries” or “Has a pet.” Have everyone circulate and try to find someone who matches each characteristic.
• Speed Networking: Set up a series of two-minute conversations where each person has the opportunity to introduce themselves and share their professional interests.

Remember, the goal of an icebreaker is to help people get to know each other and feel more comfortable, so be sure to choose activities that are appropriate for the group and the setting.

If you’re stuck and out of ideas, ask it a question:

What are five ways to help a new employee who doesn’t seem to fit in?

It can be challenging for a new employee who doesn’t seem to fit in, but here are five ways to help them feel more comfortable and welcome:

• Assign a Buddy or Mentor: Pair the new employee with a buddy or mentor who can show them the ropes, answer questions, and introduce them to other colleagues. This can help the new employee feel less isolated and more connected to the team.
• Set Clear Expectations: Make sure the new employee knows what is expected of them in terms of their job duties, goals, and company culture. This can help them feel more confident and less uncertain about their role.
• Provide Feedback: Regularly check in with the new employee to provide feedback on their performance, progress, and any areas for improvement. This can help them feel supported and motivated to succeed.
• Encourage Social Interaction: Create opportunities for the new employee to interact with other team members, such as group lunches or team-building activities. This can help them form relationships and feel more included.
• Be Patient and Understanding: Recognize that it can take time for a new employee to adjust to a new job and workplace. Be patient and understanding, and offer support and encouragement as they navigate the transition.

Overall, the key is to be proactive in helping the new employee feel welcome and supported, and to create a positive and inclusive work environment for all team members.

This type of brainstorming can help you get started when you’re stuck. And it can make things fun as well.

Obviously, this is far more exciting than a regular company picnic invitation. (Note to Workable employees – I just made this up. It’s not an actual event!).

I entered this as a prompt: “Please write a poem in the style of Dr. Seuss inviting the employees at Workable to a summer picnic. It will be held at 12 p.m. on June 7, 2023 at Boston Common. Partners and children are invited. No pets, though.”

This was the result:

Oh, Workable team, listen up, do!

We have a picnic planned just for you!

On June 7th, at noon on the dot,

We’ll gather at Boston Commons, a perfect spot!

Bring your partners and bring your kids,

We want everyone to come and have some fun, we insist!

But leave your pets at home, oh please,

For safety’s sake and everyone’s ease.

We’ll have food and games galore,

And plenty of chances to chat and explore.

So mark your calendars, don’t delay,

And let us know if you’ll be joining us that day!

We can’t wait to see you there,

With your picnic blankets and your flair!

We’ll make some memories that’ll last,

And have a blast, blast, blast!

So come one, come all, and let’s unite,

For a Workable picnic that’ll be just right!

Takeaway: Let ChatGPT help you get those creative juices flowing! It can make a huge difference.

There are a million other things that it can do, and we’re just learning the beginnings. Just remember, ChatGPT is not perfect, and it is biased. (You are too, but it has a problem recognizing its own bias.) It’s a tool, not the solution to everything. It definitely doesn’t replace humans, and it sometimes lacks good sense. But give it a try!

The post What can ChatGPT do for HR? appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

You can probably relate to this: the thought of actioning and capturing each employee’s every little career move elicits nightmares for HR personnel everywhere. Battered steel filing cabinets stuffed with ever-fattening manilla employee records, precious hours spent tracking down signatures, and heaps of paperwork compiled to predict trends are just some of the inconveniences of working in HR.

And for the employees? Wasting work hours to make a simple time off request, or being unaware of the training they can attend to further their careers, are HR red flags for any modern-day company.

As a business owner, how can you eliminate the aggravation of endless, time-consuming admin and increase productivity?

Yes, that’s right. A Human Resources Information System – the aforementioned HRIS – benefits your company hugely.

Why you need one to be using an HRIS

In the rapidly evolving world of business, the need for streamlined, efficient, and accurate human resource management has never been more pronounced. An HR Information System (HRIS) stands at the forefront of this change, becoming an indispensable tool for businesses, both large and small. Why, you ask? Here are six compelling reasons:

1. Onboarding: focus on the experience, not the paperwork

With a capable HRIS in place, gone are the days of dragging a hapless new employee from one department to the next, filling in multiple forms for their induction. Now, a centralized database allows new recruits to enter all their relevant information in one space with company-wide accessibility – the ideal way to avoid double-entry inaccuracies.

Reminders of training workshops, events, and next steps in the onboarding workflow also give your brand-new employee control over their schedule. With the mountain of paperwork out of the way, they can focus on assimilating into your workplace. Over 25% of new hires quit their jobs after just three months, but with automated onboarding, you can beat this statistic with a 16% increase in retention rates.

Workable’s HR solution, already equipped with a best-in-class recruitment software, comes with its own natively built onboarding feature, easing the transition from candidate to employee.

2. Payroll: letting the software handle the hard stuff

Validating employees’ time and attendance, a clock-in clock-out function, and giving employees easy access to view their paychecks are just some of the ways HRIS can work for you. Other capabilities include payroll reports, PTO and overtime adjustments, benefit deductions, tax calculations…the list goes on. HRIS performs complex processes with zero errors and minimal human intervention.

Along with convenience, an automated payroll system awards you some much-needed time. A CareerBuilder study found that managers who did not fully automate lost about 14 hours per week on manual tasks that could have easily been automated. This equates to at least one whole extra day of work that can be dedicated to employee engagement, learning and development, or performance improvement.

3. Analytics: crunching numbers for creative initiatives

The rise (and fall?) of HR analytics researched what its value would be in 2025 and cited that “managers will consider HR analytics an unmistakable link in underpinning and making strategic choices”. That’s all well and good until you have to sift through mounds of data, trying to make sense of the information while picking up on patterns that could predict the future of your workforce.

With an HRIS, however, the data is organized for you and generated in the form of boardroom-ready reports. Make use of templates that consider the usual HR metrics or create a customized analysis specific to your organization’s needs.

Need to convince the board of executives that your initiative has a solid foundation? Nothing lends credibility to a strategy like the numbers that back it up, and with HRIS, those are just a few clicks away.

4. Compliance: Sticking to the rules has never been easier

Whether it’s a US Department of Labor audit or keeping up with government regulations, anything to do with compliance sits firmly in HR’s lap. CCPA, GDPR, EEOC … the alphabet soup of legislation can be disorienting to wade through.

While it’s a necessary aspect of HR, most personnel would rather focus their energy on talent development and employee retention. HRIS gives them the time to do this with standardized reports and graphs that need only have their parameters defined and are quick to access.

But it doesn’t stop at mere information output. Combined with time and attendance data, HRIS tracks working hours, overtime, and break periods – sending an alert when non-compliance may become an issue. It even sends notifications when employees become eligible to enter your company’s retirement program. With fewer items for HR personnel to have to track, you can decrease workload and possible errors.

5. Self-service: opening the portal to employee interaction

When an employee heads to HR to change their personal information, they are distracted from their tasks, which impacts productivity. Time and money are lost for a simple benefits change. HRIS gives employees access to their personal information so they can make certain changes themselves.

Not only does this ensure the information is accurate, it provides your workers with some autonomy while encouraging employee engagement.

Self-service options can include: submitting documentation; viewing paychecks; monitoring time and attendance; changes to benefits; notifications and alerts between management and employees; and access to learning management systems.

6. Time-off requests: saving paper, time, and money with a couple of clicks

Here’s a well-known stat: companies spend $20 to file and store a single document. That’s just the monetary cost of filing one time off request. It also involves the following:

• verifying if it’s unpaid or paid time off (PTO)
• checking PTO balances
• ensuring the correct number of days are allocated when combined with public holidays and weekends
• updating the new PTO balance
• informing the relevant stakeholders

That’s 20 minutes of an office worker’s time doing something that could have been done in less than five.

HRIS makes quick work of this tedious process by instantly sending time-off requests to the applicable manager, updating PTO balances once approved, and sending notifications to interested parties. All this in minutes and with no paper to be seen (or lost) anywhere.

Streamline your processes with HRIS

It’s time to move your operations into the digital age. With a welcoming onboarding program, comprehensive payroll suite, and user-friendly employee self-service function, HRIS takes care of day-to-day duties while boosting company-wide collaboration on a single platform.

In a G2 survey, 80% of HR employees observed that using HR technology improved employees’ attitudes toward the company. It’s a well-known fact that an engaged employee equates to better performance. With the time and money you’ll save, HRIS is the perfect tool for directing your company’s resources to where it matters.

The post How to use an HRIS – and 6 reasons why you need one appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Here’s a list with five thoughtful presents that can be ideal resources for recruiters and talent professionals:

1. A library of templates

Anyone involved in the hiring process knows how much time is spent on writing job descriptions, composing emails to candidates or crafting lists of interview questions. So, for this holiday season, give a recruiter a library of templates for every purpose, from job ads and offer letters to interview questions and Boolean searches.

How do you present this gift? If you want to add a touch of holiday spirit, you could send it as a card. Use a relevant service or create your own card using a tool like Adobe Express Card Maker. Here’s one I created with Spark within 10 minutes:

2. A book on modern recruiting

Recruiting has grown exponentially from the time of newspaper job ads, and it’ll keep evolving and changing. Forward-thinking talent professionals who stay updated on new techniques and technologies will be the big winners in the recruiting game.

So why not give a new, exciting book to a recruiting professional? Here are a few great options:

• Culture-Driven Recruiting by Lee-Anne Edwards (the first-ever book on the topic)
• Smart and Gets Things Done by Avram Joel Spolsky (an oldie-but-goody “concise guide to finding the best technical talent”)
• Exceptional Talent: How to Attract, Acquire and Retain the Very Best Employees by Mervyn Dinnen and Matt Alder (a guide on using modern technology, methods and media to hire and retain great employees).
• Writing Without Bullshit by Josh Bernoff (an easy-to-read, comprehensive guide to better written communications including emails, announcements, and reports)

As for presentation, nothing too fancy is required. Get some festive wrapping paper and you’re all set!

3. A cool subscription

For recruiters, receiving new knowledge frequently is important – you can grasp new techniques, find hiring methods that work and discover new recruiting strategies, just by keeping abreast of the buzz in the market. But how would a recruiter do that easily, when they’re already so busy with everyday tasks?

One thing you can do is to choose a fun, interesting and reliable newsletter/podcast they don’t already subscribe to, and sign them up or send them a link (you can include a card to make it more of a gift). Here are a few ideas:

4. A new Applicant Tracking System

Yeah, I know, shameless plug of our own product. But the truth is, we wouldn’t be making recruiting software if we didn’t think of it as a definite game-changer. If a recruiter doesn’t have an ATS, or uses an ATS that’s clunky and inadequate, you could address this in the new year. That’s especially so if you’re part of the recruiting team or one of the decision-makers at your company.

What you can do is conduct some research on ATS vendors and sign up for a demo or free trial. Then, invite the recruiter to sit in demos or explore the different software solutions along with you. You can also share an RFP template with them to help in their hunt for the perfect ATS.

5. Recruiting swag

Swag is less useful than the other options on this list, but things that cheer us up and boost our morale are always welcome. For recruiters, you could choose a funny slogan (for example: “Keep calm and call that candidate,” “Trust me, I’m a recruiter,” “Talent superstar”) and print it on a mug or a T-shirt.

You could also go straight to websites that sell swag for recruiters, like Etsy, Cafe Press or Zazzle:

You might even look for a stuffed purple squirrel or a mug or T-shirt that has one on it. Recruiters will probably get the reference!

The holiday season and New Year go hand-in-hand for many people. If that’s the case for you, too, then check out our list of 5 New Year’s resolutions for recruiters.

The post Resources for recruiters: 5 fun and useful presents appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Workable CFO Craig DiForte has been through this himself numerous times. He gets straight to the point: “There are two main things you want to look at,” he says. “Cost per hire and time to hire.”

Craig explains that you must break those down into manageable and measurable chunks, and identify the areas where you can optimize to get more bang for your buck.

“You had a budget that said that you were going to spend this much, and that HR was going to cost this much. What really happened? That’s where you need to look deeper.”

“You had a budget that said that you were going to spend this much, and that HR was going to cost this much. What really happened? That’s where you need to look deeper.”

1. Cost per hire

“The first thing to look at is your cost per hire for the past year,” Craig says. Cost per hire is the average cost invested in hiring X people in a time period – it’s easy to measure on the surface. But the solution isn’t as simple as saying, ‘Let’s cut back on our cost per hire.’ You need to drill down to specifics.

First, before planning your recruitment budget, go back to your last recruitment budget (if you have one) to use as an example and baseline. Because 2020 and 2021 are quite the financial anomalies for any company, you probably want to skip further back to 2019 – the last ‘normal’ year. Once you’ve lined up your projected numbers against your actual numbers for the previous recruitment budget, sort out all the costs related to your recruitment into sections, such as:

• Posting job ads
• Sourcing candidates
• Utilizing assessment services
• Running background checks

There are many more, of course, but when you have a list, you can start assigning individual expenses to each step. Then, determine where you went over budget and where you ended up under budget.

You can also include costs related to the hours taken away from someone’s normal workflow in the hiring process, if they’re not in HR. A hiring manager, for instance, will take a number of hours out of their normal workweek every week to look at the final list of candidates, assess them, interview them, and so on.

Assign costs to those invested hours by breaking down the annual salaries of each member of the hiring team into hourly chunks – from there, you can start allocating hours at a fixed “cost” to each section listed here.

(By the way – this highlights the importance of a clear, standardized recruitment process. It’s not just about being organized and uniform in the process itself; it also provides clarity into where you’re putting your money. With a standardized setup, you can start comparing past, present and future budgets by measuring them against established benchmarks.)

2. Time to fill and time to hire

When you put actual costs aside, the rest of it becomes less tangible, says Craig. “It’s not only money that you’re looking at. It’s also your time. How long did it take you to get those sales reps onto your team? Remember, time is money.”

The way he explains it, the time it takes to go from the very first day you start talking about filling a position to the day the new hire signs on the dotted line (or, in some cases, when they’re fully onboarded) – that’s your time to fill.

Time to hire is similar, except that it’s the time elapsed between the date that a specific candidate applied for a job and the date that they’re hired.

Look at your company’s work hours invested in the following categories, for example:

• Hiring team communications to determine the needs for a new position
• Writing the job description, posting and promoting it
• Drafting assessments and assignments
• The selection process itself, multiplied with each additional application:
  • resume screening
  • phone screening
  • one-way video interviews
  • interviewing (drafting questions, arranging time/place, carrying out actual interview)
  • analyzing assessments
  • reviewing assignments
  • contacting references
  • negotiating with selected candidate
  • job offer and follow-up
• Further hiring team communications at each step of the way, both within the team and with the candidate

Again, this is not an exhaustive list.

Time to ramp

Calculating your recruitment “time” budget can also include time to ramp, Craig recommends. He uses the recruiting of a sales team as an example, asking: “What’s the ramp time for a sales rep in your company? Let’s say a sales rep ramps up over three months. If I’m going to hire someone in January, that means I’m going to have only nine months of full productivity from that over the next year.”

In other words, if a sales rep hired on Jan. 1 is expected to close $1 million a year, this means you can actually only plan for that sales rep to close $750,000 that year. It gets worse the longer you wait, especially if you’re building a sales team from scratch. Plus, if you onboard poorly, turnover increases, and you’re back to square one. So looking at time to ramp – and the resources invested in that – is crucial to planning your recruitment budget for the upcoming year.

“That’s the type of ‘cost’ related to your time to hire and time to fill,” Craig explains.

He highlights another scenario: the launch of a new feature.

“Let’s say I was going to launch a new feature in March, and I want my team hired and in place to be able to put it together between January and February, so it’ll be ready to go in March.”

And if you didn’t hire everyone you needed in that time frame?

“Obviously, then, your feature is not going to be ready in March. Now, the feature that was supposed to help generate an extra $200K a month in revenue for the sales team is now delayed by two months to May. And so, I’ve just lost $400K that I had budgeted for.”

There are multiple scenarios here that show the compounding effect of breakdowns in hiring processes. It’s not as simple as backfilling a position – you need to plan ahead of schedule. There are multiple parts that need to fall into place ahead of time so you can meet goals later on. And that of course has an impact on planning your recruitment budget whether that’s directly related, delayed, or indirect.

3. Also crucial: Turnover rate

Yes, even your best people leave for other opportunities. But they don’t always leave because of an offer they couldn’t refuse – they also leave because they’re unhappy where they are, because they don’t feel like the job was a good fit for them, and so on. That’s on you as a company.

So where does budget fit in here? Craig will consult with HR and find out what the company’s turnover rate is – here’s a tutorial on how you can calculate that yourself. Your current turnover rate for the last 12 months also helps you predict the number of hires you can anticipate over the next fiscal year on top of your planned upscale. For instance, if your company plans to add 30 sales reps over the next year, add your anticipated turnover to that, and multiply your cost per hire by that final number to get a good estimate of how much you can expect to put into the recruitment process.

Meanwhile, you can also see how your turnover rate stacks up against the standard, and adjust accordingly. According to Craig, you should look at your numbers and ask:

“Are you hiring effective people? Are you hiring the right people efficiently for the right cost? It’s all about the right person at the right time for the right cost.”

“Are you hiring effective people? Are you hiring the right people efficiently for the right cost? It’s all about the right person at the right time for the right cost.”

The right person hired at the right time will stick around, and that’s good for the bottom line. That means investing the right amount of money and time in the right spots. For instance, you could invest more in employee engagement initiatives – such as a corporate retreat, holiday or summer function, even a new, improved office environment.

Or, as Craig suggests, invest in a referral program to get more internal referrals – because referred candidates tend to stay longer with the company, your recruitment costs will go down.

4. Look to the past, to plan for the future

As Craig says, you need to look at your cost to hire, time to hire, and time to ramp, and figure out where you performed as projected/planned, and where you didn’t, and address the following questions in planning your recruitment budget:

• Did we use too many agencies?
  • Solution:  Bring it in-house.
• Did we not do enough internal recruiting?
  • Solution:  Build an internal recruitment strategy.
• Should we have done a better job sourcing?
  • Solution: Use Workable’s AI Recruiter and People Search and build up your sourcing strategies.
• Can we get people to stay longer?
  • Solution: Implement a formal employee retention program.

You can then ask the more interesting questions:

• Should we have hired quicker rather than waiting for the “perfect” candidate?
• Should we have waited longer for a better candidate to come along?
• What’s going to make it easier and more cost-effective for you to hire?
• What’s going to make it easier and more cost-effective to stay on plan?

Planning your recruitment budget

For many, hiring is about people, but for Craig, it’s about money: “It’s all about how much it costs you to do it. Am I doing it for the right cost, and am I doing it fast enough? That’s why you look at this and see what happened, and then you ask; ‘Where can I make an investment to make this better? Where did I do things that were wrong or expensive? Maybe I should have a better ATS.’”

Obvious plug aside, what may seem intangible in a company budget can easily be dissected and optimized. Think about where you’re overspending, and follow the domino effect – such as the delay in a features release – and trace it back to its cause. It’s all interrelated. Craig sums it up: Start thinking about how to allocate your budget smartly for 2023 so you improve in all areas.

“Once you do that, you can then develop your action plan.”

Need new hiring software but unsure of the cost-benefit? Check out our step-by-step guide to calculate the ROI of an ATS.

The post Planning your recruitment budget for 2023: top tips from Workable’s CFO appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

1. Introduction to Applicant Tracking Systems
2. Overview of Applicant Tracking Systems
3. Is an ATS the Right Choice for your Growing Business?
4. Benefits of Applicant Tracking Systems
5. Choosing an Applicant Tracking System
6. Keys to Recruiting
7. Managing the Hiring Process
8. Optimizing Your Company’s Career Page
9. Managing the Interview Process
10. Assessing Your Requirements
11. Checklist of Applicant Tracking System Features

1. Introduction to Applicant tracking systems

The first applicant tracking systems (ATS) evolved to help employers take that old standby, the paper resume, and scan it into a database. Like most technologies that emerged to replicate analogue ways of doing things, they left a lot of room for improvement.

The processes were bureaucratic, unwieldy and complicated. The aim was to mirror old world paper and filing processes in a custom database. The word “clunky” was often overheard. In its formative years the ATS was similar to basic customer relationship management systems (CRMs), that sought to offer very basic resume screening and trace an applicant’s path through the hiring process.

Just like the CRMs, which began life as digital rolodexes and turned into the current cloud-based powerhouses, the ATS has evolved. Today, there are a wide range of ATS software options, some that concentrate on automating as much as possible of the hiring process and others that help the hiring manager to make their own decisions.

The ATS has become an integral part of every aspect of hiring from building an employer brand and smarter application forms, to resume parsing, automatic retrieval of candidates’ public profiles, and scheduling interviews. Recruiting analytics and reporting tools can now help companies get a clearer understanding of the hiring process and make improvements that have a real impact on the business.

The purpose of this applicant tracking system guide is to help you understand your needs as clearly as possible in order to make an informed choice of recruiting software.

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2. Overview of applicant tracking systems

The quality of a company’s hires are the single best predictor of its future success. Even though this is widely understood, hiring is still seen as frustrating and messy by many business owners, HR Directors, hiring managers and recruiters who grapple with it. But now, better software is righting this wrong.

Human Resources has been poorly served by technology for too long, when compared with the pioneers in sales, but we are seeing a renaissance in HR software, thanks in large part to the potential unleashed by cloud-based computing. At the heart of all of this is the Applicant Tracking System (ATS).

What is an ATS?

What is an applicant tracking system (ATS)? In its simplest form, it offers relief to these commonly acknowledged pain points in recruitment:

Pain: Submitting the same job ad to multiple job boards costs time and money.
Relief: An ATS integrated with these listings sites can post to a wide range of free and paid job boards with a single submission.

Pain: Building and maintaining a careers page takes up valuable developer time.
Relief: An ATS can make managing a careers page as simple as changing your background image and bio on Twitter.

Pain: Recruiting triggers an avalanche of PDFs and emails.
Relief: ATS recruiting means you collect, organize and show job candidates in the same way LinkedIn or Facebook show your contacts or friends.

Pain: Resume styles are nearly as various as the people sending them.
Relief: Recruiting software can parse these resumes, break them down and present the data they contain in a standardized format where it can be quickly reviewed.

Pain: The absence of standardized information like “how many years of work experience has she got?” add to the time burden.
Relief: Applicant tracking software mines the resumes you receive and presents candidate data in a way that makes comparisons fast and simple.

Pain: Precious time is routinely wasted on irrelevant applications.
Relief: ATS recruiting offers the facility to automatically filter dud applications from job candidates or highlight 3-4 priorities on the application form that enable human judgement to be swifter.

Pain: Using email and spreadsheets to track candidates with a hiring team quickly becomes overwhelming.
Relief: An ATS can enable you to add notes to candidates just like you put comments on Facebook.

Pain: External recruiters remain a great resource for high value hires, but they shouldn’t be a necessity for businesses.
Relief: An ATS can provide recruiting tools that let you fill a talent pool and save your recruiting dollars for the tougher hires.

This kind of pain relief is only part of an applicant tracking system definition but it points to what you can achieve with ATS recruiting. The right applicant tracking software is a major step towards creating a repeatable, systematic hiring process, from posting a job to having an offer letter accepted.

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3. Is an ATS the Right Choice for your Growing Business?

Whether you are looking for your first applicant tracking system (ATS) or considering investing in an upgrade, the best starting point is a clear understanding of your needs. The first step to achieving this is to map your existing hiring process.

Questions to get started with evaluating applicant tracking software:

• How do you do your hiring planning and budget costs?
• How are your job ads written?
• How and where do you post your jobs?
• How do you currently collect applications?
• How do you progress candidates through from applied to hired?
• Do you use pre-screening questions or job-related assignments?
• Do you work with external recruiters?
• Who is on your hiring team (this may differ from one position to another).
• How many steps does a candidate go through prior to a final interview?
• Do you conduct background checks prior to a final offer?
• What kind of data and reporting do you use to improve your hiring process?

Now step back and think about how this could be improved. What are the pain points? How do you cope with the volume of applications, how are communications between your team during hiring, how well does your interview and call scheduling work?

The point of this exercise is to identify the gap between how things are done now and what your ideal recruiting process would look like. If you sailed through the 11 questions and liked your own answers you’re in a happy minority. Most companies, of all sizes, find recruiting challenging, in one way or another.

The vast majority of small and medium-sized businesses are still using email and spreadsheets to run their recruitment. Less than one in five SMBs has switched to applicant tracking software, according to most estimates. But the big switch has begun.

Larger companies have long since adopted software for their ATS needs but many of the enterprise solutions adopted by Fortune 500 firms have inherited the same bureaucratic dysfunction they were meant to cure. It might seem sensible to cram in features for all eventualities but feature-heavy applicant tracking software can be both expensive and unwieldy.

Hiring processes are not the same at an organization with 2,000+ employees as they are at a firm with 250 employees, or one with 25. By being clear from the outset over your real hiring needs you can eliminate the prospect of paying for features you don’t need and concentrate your investment on an ATS that does the best possible job on the features that you do need.

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4. Benefits of Applicant Tracking Systems

Most recruiters report that at least 50% of job hunters don’t possess the basic qualifications for the jobs they are pursuing. Applicant tracking systems came about when employers needed a way to deal with this flood of irrelevant resumes.

Today’s ATS systems are developed to scan for keywords, employment history and college records to identify viable candidates. The best ATS now available will take the data entry out of your hiring and leave you time to concentrate on the chewy human question of who you should hire and work with.

Using recruiting software means you don’t have to stitch together spreadsheets, email and elaborate filing systems. The advantage of an applicant tracking system is that it provides seamless and customizable collaboration features so that you’re always in the loop.

Applicant tracking systems help employers by providing a business process to follow during recruiting:

• Save time recruiting by automating job board posting, resume submission, and pre-screening
• Open the way to better candidates with standardized metrics and access to a pipeline of previous successful applicants
• Standardize your hiring so you don’t have to reinvent the process each time
• Keep you compliant with hiring laws
• Give you a headstart on employee retention with better screened and qualified candidates
• Ensure a striking and personalized candidate experience

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5. Choosing an Applicant Tracking System

One of the first questions you need to answer when making the ATS comparison is whether you want an applicant tracking software solution installed on your own server or hosted by your software vendor. The old way of purchasing was to get “on-premise” software but in recent years this has been overtaken by software as a service providers (SaaS), companies who host the software on the cloud and offer it as a service online.

What are the benefits of SaaS:

• Accessible anywhere where you have an internet connection, with some SaaS applicant tracking systems offering mobile functionality for recruiting on the move
• No fixed server costs
• Updates to the software are the responsibility of the vendor
• Removes the need for an IT department

The nightmare scenario for any growing business that invests in the best applicant tracking system for their needs, is for the vendor to then close down for its own business reasons. Yes, this has happened: there are numerous businesses who have seen their ATS shut down. Due diligence in this case means asking the right questions about vendor viability.

Another route altogether is an open source applicant tracking system. The advantage of this option is clear: it’s free, and you can modify the software as you please. Where’s the catch? Do you want to manage your hiring or to rewrite software? Unless you’re more than tech savvy or have an IT team that can afford to spend the time, you will run into issues installing, running and integrating one of these systems. And when you run into those problems there is no dedicated support to turn to.

The sensible ATS buyers’ checklist:

• Does your ATS match your company profile? The three main categories are enterprise, staffing agencies and SMBs. There are good solutions for each of these categories but these are big tents — think clearly about which one you belong in.
• Does the ATS provide real ease of use? There’s no point in investing in software that no one can or will use, or that is stuffed with features that you will not need or use. Look for an intuitive design that your hiring team will buy into. There are systems that require no installation, training or manuals.
• Does your ATS enable you to post to multiple job sites? Overwhelmingly the most important feature for smaller companies. Check which jobs boards and social networks the ATS is integrated with.
• What kind of search capability does the ATS have? Make sure that it boasts a fast, accurate search with results organized in a logical and intuitive way.
• Does your ATS offer strong customer support? This can quickly turn what looks like the best applicant tracking software into an expensive farrago. Be clear over response times and availability in your time zone. Check to see how well organized and detailed the support section of the ATS website is.
• What kind of reporting does the ATS offer? Be clear about your own reporting needs to track your recruiting efforts. Make sure they are matched and covered before making a choice.
• Does the ATS enable employee referrals? Referrals are the oldest and still the best method of finding employees. The best applicants tracking system will provide you with a clear way to attract and reward referrals from your team.
• What kind of candidate experience does the ATS offer? Your team is not the only user of the applicant tracking system, there’s also the candidate to consider. You will lose valuable prospects if its application process is clunky and off-putting.
• Check your applicant tracking system vendor’s viability. You want a solution that will last, make sure the same applies to your vendor’s financials.
• Get references for an ATS like you would for a hire. There are tons of applicant tracking system reviews online, take them into account. From Trust Pilot to Capterra and Software Advice to Getapp, check what other users are saying on third-party review sites.
• It has become standard practice to work on the move. Smartphones and better software allows us to work when and where we want to. Your ATS should not be the exception. The whole of your hiring team should be able to review candidates, schedule interviews, leave feedback and check the pipeline via your ATS on the device of their choice.
• The best ATS options have useful integrations. Check for integrations with leading and niche job boards and for sourcing tools that help you source and attract passive candidates. Your ATS should help you get more candidates by getting your job in front of prospects you can’t reach when you’re manually posting jobs to job boards. Does the ATS offer easy integrations for background checks and with a modern HRIS, like Namely and BambooHR?

If you’re tight on time, this list of the 12 best applicant tracking systems in the market can help guide your decision.

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6. Keys to Recruiting

If you’re not new to the hiring process or you’ve been working without any recruitment software you have most likely trekked through forests of resumes and descended bottomless email threads. This is not to mention giant spreadsheets, and a constant wrestling match to coordinate interviews and feedback.

If you’ve been getting the job done with an older generation applicant tracking system or candidate management system you will have faced different problems: poor or no customization options, usability problems, no buy in from your hiring team, insufficient integration.

Simplifying recruiting means the ability to post to multiple job boards and source candidates from all over the web, making it as easy to browse candidates as it is to follow friends on social networks. It means beautiful career sites that update themselves and good-looking job ads.

For candidates it means one-click applications. For hiring managers it means candidate timelines that show the ‘when and why’ of who made the shortlist. Hiring software should enable you to message candidates and keep track of comments in context.

Social recruiting is still more talked about than practiced but a first step that an ATS can help with is to bring resumes to life by automatically combining them with public social media profiles. Social media integration is a useful first step to getting your whole team involved in hiring. It’s everyone’s job to share open positions with their networks.

The best applicant tracking software enables you to track and reward referrals. The oldest and still the best source of high quality candidates, an employee referral program, relies on having a simple method for employees to recommend prospects and to record the initial source of job candidates (who recommended who). Companies of all sizes are beginning to recognize and reward referrals systematically.

Candidate management

The full value of an ATS becomes immediately obvious once candidates begin to flow into it. With the proliferation of job boards and the facility to apply with one click, many companies have been overwhelmed with applications.

This is where proper resume parsing technology comes into its own. A resume parser takes the weight of candidate data flooding your way, breaks it down and presents it to you in individual candidate profiles with comparable, standardized fields, like years of work experience and education.

The best ATS will enable customizable application forms with pre-screening questions that will quickly eliminate unqualified or irrelevant applications. Applicant tracking software enables you to standardize the information you’re receiving for each candidate, making it possible to be quick and decisive.

Candidate management then becomes paramount. A single profile for each candidate that keeps all comments, notes and documents (resumes, cover letters, work samples) in one place, revolutionizes hiring teams. No more searching inboxes for hiring managers looking for that all-important piece of feedback on a candidate.

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7. Managing the Hiring Process

There has never been a better time for businesses of all sizes to get strategic with their hiring. The tools needed to attract the right candidates and get from application to hire are both more affordable and more effective than ever before. What the best of them deliver is a hiring process that works.

The right recruitment process is streamlined enough not to waste your time, but inclusive enough to enable you to hire ambitiously. Process is not a word to light fires in the imagination but there’s nothing duller than trying to work without one. Having a series of standardized steps in the hiring process that have been chosen because they maximize the likelihood of a good outcome makes sense.

The most effective way to think of the steps of the recruiting process borrows from sales orthodoxy, with a hiring pipeline. Try this simple exercise. Jot down the current basic steps of your recruiting process. It may vary a bit but it probably looks something like this:

• Applied
• Promising
• Phone screen
• On-site interview
• Executive interview
• Offer

The hiring 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.

Rather than floundering with an inbox full of resumes and a thicket of spreadsheets tracking candidates’ progress, the recruiting pipeline tracks and manages multiple candidates offering simple workflow management.

The recruiting pipeline enables hiring teams to work together collecting all comments, feedback, notes, social media profiles or assignment results on the same page. It removes the need for endless email threads and avoids the possibility of misplacing vital feedback or conversations with candidates.

The efficiency offered by an applicant tracking system takes on added importance when hiring at scale or across multiple locations, as is the case for multinationals or the increasing number of SMBs working across borders.

When your business is spread across regions and/or divisions some form of territory management is typically called for. Territory management can apply to any system which groups candidates according to predefined sets of criteria. It enables hiring teams to co-operate on the basis of location, division or function.

This can become even more important when it comes to assessing and improving your recruitment efforts. It can deliver clearer insight into the recruitment results in each territory, as well as generate reports based on locations and divisions to measure relative progress on hiring.

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8. Optimizing your Company’s Careers Page

The clearest way to think about your company careers page is to see it as a shop window. The careers page is not the only means at your disposal to market the job opportunities you offer but it should be the starting point for all these efforts.

Whether candidates note that you’re hiring after seeing your open position on a job board, or hear about it through social media or even a word-of-mouth referral, they will typically head to your careers page to find out more about the vacancy, your company and the application process. In other words, there needs to be something worth visiting when they get there.

Far from replacing careers pages, the proliferation of job boards that began in the 1990s has made a fully-optimized careers page a necessity. Placing the right applicant tracking software at the heart of your recruitment efforts removes much of the hassle associated with creating, hosting and maintaining an attractive and up-to-date careers page.

For companies without the IT resources to develop a careers page in house, the best ATS options offer simple tools to build a good-looking and professional site that’s connected to your applicant tracking system. An ATS offers automated job posting to ensure that all open positions that you post to job boards, social media or any other platform will also appear on your careers page.

But a careers page is about more than getting your jobs seen. It’s also the anchor for your employer brand, a broader concept of your company’s reputation in the digital age. The main difference with reputation is that it’s easier than ever for prospective hires to get an advanced idea of what it’s like to work for your company.

Wherever you, your colleagues or employees appear online whether it’s your company Facebook page, a Twitter conversation, or a Linkedin profile, you’re talking to two audiences: customers and talent. While this makes some businesses nervous, it’s actually a considerable opportunity for companies of all sizes.

It’s become popular to say that “hiring is marketing” because it’s increasingly true. Happily it doesn’t have to be done on prime time television to be effective. Digital platforms offer an affordable and potentially enormous reach. In many ways the traditional strengths of small and mid-sized businesses like personal relationships, approachability and tight-knit teams are ideally suited to the social media age, where authenticity is rewarded.

Feeling unsure what your employer brand is? Give yourself one minute to describe it on a piece of paper or a whiteboard. Stuck? Get some of your core team together and brainstorm on what is unique or special about working for your company as opposed to other similar companies? Is it the people, the mission?

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 9. Managing the interview process

Interviewing is the most interesting and least automated part of the hiring process. This also means it’s the hardest and frequently the most poorly executed part as well. Unstructured interviews are no more likely to end with the right candidate than choosing a name from your shortlist at random.

An ATS can’t teach a hiring manager how to interview, but it can help them create an interview process that assists them in making an informed decision. Interviews don’t begin on the day someone walks into your office. Done properly the hiring process has worked like a funnel, you spoke to some candidates, you met a handful, now you want to work out which is the best of them to hire.

The support that the best applicant tracking software can deliver at this key phase is to streamline the scheduling of interviews and provide a rounded view of the candidate from sourcing or application, through screening and any assignment to the actual interview. It enables hiring managers to approach interviews in a structured and prepared manner.

Scheduling and communications with candidates goes from tangled to straightforward when your ATS integrates with your company email (typically with Gmail or Outlook) and calendar. Proper mail and calendar integrations ensure the right people are informed in a timely manner whether it’s the candidate who needs the time and location of an interview or phone screen, or if it’s the hiring team who need to know when an action is required.

The same is true for feedback that will inform the interviewer’s approach to each candidate. When all comments, notes, documents and communications are in one place a hiring manager can get up to speed in a fraction of the time an old-style briefing or a review of an email thread would otherwise take.

As well as time saving and automation, the benefit that the right ATS can deliver is a better candidate experience. As the hiring process has become more sophisticated it has begun to take longer. The “time to hire” means that in every hiring cycle you are losing qualified candidates because the interview process is taking too long.

The best candidates are fielding multiple offers, or recent research suggests, losing interest in your company because they assume that the lack of response. The response times are critical for the candidate experience, which is where the streamlining, team tools and scheduling capabilities of an ATS can make the difference.

The hiring pipeline offered by an ATS enables hiring managers to keep track of how many candidates are in each stage and where bottlenecks may be developing. Advanced applicant tracking software can also warn you when a candidate has been left hanging for a certain number of days.

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10. Assessing Your Requirements

At the core of the performance of any applicant tracking system (ATS) are its integrations. A full suite would include not just job board integrations that enable a single submission to a host of free and paid job boards, it would also extend to:

• Social media integration with LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook
• Full integration with a trusted background check provider
• Integration with popular office productivity tools such as Slack 
• Give you a headstart on employee retention with better screened and qualified candidates

Since LinkedIn remains the venue for most recruiters’ working lives, an ATS should offer deep integration with the world’s favorite resume repository. Things to look out for include the ability to:

• Use your personal LinkedIn account to sign in to your ATS and post jobs to your own professional network
• Connect to your LinkedIn Recruiter account to post jobs ads
• Buy a LinkedIn job ad directly from your ATS (without the need for a LinkedIn recruiter account)
• Access to LinkedIn Cross System Awareness that enables your hiring team to view full LinkedIn profiles inside their ATS, as well as make candidate information stored on your ATS available in your LinkedIn Recruiter account

Analytics

Recruitment analytics offer a high level view of your whole recruiting effort. Recruiting without the right tools is a disposable experience. To extract full value from any recruitment process the steps taken need to remain visible and repeatable. Recruiting metrics are not just about measuring things, they exist to answer questions about your business and to help you improve your hiring. Which recruiting metrics to use remains contentious with some organizations overly focused on Cost Per Hire (which is open to widely differing interpretations). Some effective recruiting Key Performance Indicators worth tracking are:

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

Most effective recruiting organizations favor a flexible suite of analytics in their ATS that allow for custom reports and a variety of high-level visualizations. Look for an ATS that has the ability to break down reporting areas like candidate flow and candidate source into data that can be exported to Excel.

Complying with the thicket of US equal opportunities employment laws can consume your time and fray your nerves. This process cries out for automation so opt for an ATS with an EEO Reporting feature.

Performance

As we pointed out previously when discussing vendor viability, the right balance of features is ineffective without a viable product and business supporting it. It’s worth checking independent review sites such as TrustPilot, Getapp, Capterra and Software Advice to see how actual customers rate each ATS on its efforts at avoiding downtime.

A minimum should be an up-to-date status page that details all scheduled downtime. But it’s worth spending some time on your chosen ATS vendor’s Twitter timeline to see whether their ATS performance is drawing complaints.

Similar research should quickly establish what levels of support customers can expect from specific vendors. Look out for tiered support tied to the value of your account (with subscription-based SaaS applicant tracking software). At the one extreme you should expect 24/7 support globally but most vendors offer business hours support concentrated on the region where they’re based.

Security

When choosing a cloud-based ATS over an on-premise solution it’s logical to ask some questions about the security of your data. Here is what to ask an ATS vendor regarding security:

• Does the ATS have an ongoing or regularly scheduled process of security and penetration testing of their infrastructure by a reputable third party?
• Does the ATS offer a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which includes uptime guarantees?
• What is the historical uptime percentage of the ATS?
• Does it have a DDoS mitigation infrastructure in place?

Data ownership

Due diligence in choosing the best applicant tracking software would include a clear agreement on ATS data. Check the vendor’s privacy policy and terms and conditions to make sure that you retain exclusive ownership of all your data (if there are exceptions, make sure that they are clear and justifiable), and make sure that you will be able to export your data if you decide to move to a different vendor.

Search functionality

Without a powerful search facility the full promise of an ATS as a candidate database is seriously undermined. Find out whether the ATS search includes natural language processing, semantic search and any extras.

If this sounds confusing ensure that it enables candidate search by name, headline, tag, education/work experience/skills. Does the search draw data from resumes, cover letters and summaries?

A final feature to look out for is what kind of search is offered on the support section of the ATS. Does it offer prompts and auto-completes to offer help documents relevant to your questions? If not, keep looking.

Customization

When choosing a SaaS ATS one of the theoretical cons is the comparative lack of customization. An on-premise solution can be customized, in theory, to meet any hiring needs. In reality this is only an option for businesses with a large in-house developer capacity. If that doesn’t describe your business (or is not what you want your developers working on), look for an ATS that allows significant personalized settings. Look out for customization options for:

• Application forms
  
• Letter templates to candidates
  
• Custom hiring pipeline stages
  
• Custom reports in recruitment metrics

Take time to understand how your ATS vendor deals with managing classified hiring information. The best ATS options enable clear, customizable hierarchies within hiring teams governing which comments are private between the hiring team and the candidates, as well as notes that are not visible to everyone on the hiring team.

Users should be able to invite hiring team members with different status, i.e. admin, hiring manager, team member that govern their viewing and editing permissions, as well as dictating which communications they’re copied into during the hiring process.

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11. Checklist of applicant tracking system

Even the most affordable business software is an investment. The time taken to conduct a proper evaluation and applicant tracking system comparison will pay for itself many times over. Going with the wrong choice now will mean future disruption for your team and more work down the line. To help you make the right decision for your business as you compare applicant tracking systems, here is an evaluation chart to score your top choices.

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The post Applicant tracking system guide: From A to Z appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

The challenge

The solution

• Opening and hiring for a new international office
• Finding and hiring employees who have a passion for solving vision impairment
• Identifying candidates with experience in eye care
• Lack of standardized hiring process, leading to costly inefficiencies and redundancies

• Hire in Pakistan using localized job boards
• Use Workable Referrals to encourage employees to refer like-minded talent
• Source candidates via AI Recruiter that have the exact expertise IrisVision is looking for
• Establish a single-truth system for all recruiters and hiring managers
• Implement a cost-effective hiring solution

According to the WHO, visual impairment is reported as a serious eye health hazard prevalent across the globe. As of 2012, 285 million people were visually impaired worldwide, with 12 million in the United States alone.

For some folks, poor sight may just be a slight inconvenience that is easily catered to with prescription glasses. However, most people who suffer from low vision barely see enough to make it through the day on their own. IrisVision built a team of medical experts and tech workers who together helped materialize the idea of an all-in-one low-vision solution, the IrisVision Electronic Glasses.

This was a challenging feat – not only did this call for employees who share IrisVision’s values of creating a more inclusive world for the visually challenged and legally blind, it also called for a skill set that met the company’s operational and growth needs.

Coupled with plans to expand to international markets, the need for reliable and scalable hiring software became crucial to the success of the company. An unstructured talent acquisition method and time-consuming hiring procedures required a powerful solution.

Instead of manually searching for qualified individuals across several networking sites, IrisVision needed a tool that would help streamline the entire hiring process, from attracting top-tier talent to onboarding the selected few – minus the hassle of maintaining the candidate pipeline or manually looking for candidates who fit the job role.

IrisVision’s vision now in sight

When IrisVision signed up with Workable, it gradually overcame the above talent acquisition challenges. First off, Workable’s automated hiring process simplified the tracking of the candidates’ pipeline – including those who had applied for multiple positions.

“The referral feature on Workable was a game-changer for us. It really helped us make the most of our company’s existing resources as more people poured in!”, said Khayyam Jafri, IrisVision’s Content Marketing Manager.

Workable’s AI sourcing tool was also valuable for IrisVision’s users, enabling members of the hiring team to look up suitable candidates and find those who best fit the job description. This helped IrisVision get the best hires possible, ensuring better employee performance and greater job success in the long run.

Optimization is the way

Another core value of IrisVision is customer satisfaction, which it believes to be at the very heart of the company’s success. Its ultimate goal is to help visually impaired people regain their vision and their independence in daily life.

Because of this, the company requires capable and highly skilled low-vision coaches who can help customers get acquainted with IrisVision glasses, personally guiding and training them to make the best use of IrisVision’s breakthrough technology.

Again, Workable’s software proved to be invaluable, with IrisVision onboarding a number of key low-vision coaches and ensuring a top-quality user experience for customers.

“Workable deserves the credit for equipping us with comprehensive recruitment features that smoothed out the process of searching, identifying, and onboarding new talent,” said Khayyam. “Alongside many others, Workable helped us onboard one of our most talented team players in Brian Murphey, who was appointed as the Director of Sales with 18 years of experience in the eye care and ophthalmic products space.”

And it has a great ROI

Workable became IrisVision’s preferred choice because it offered a cost-effective solution to their recruitment needs. AI-powered sourcing, along with other popular recruiting and HR tools, was a one-of-a-kind package in its price range that turned out to be crucial in making IrisVision’s HR processes even more efficient.

IrisVision is set out to build a team of visionaries to improve eye healthcare and transform thousands of lives, and Workable is supporting IrisVision in achieving this every day.

The post IrisVision grows a team of visionaries with Workable appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

What is an ATS integration?

ATS integrations allow you to connect your applicant tracking system (ATS) to other apps in order to create a seamless expansion of the tools, features, and functionality that help streamline the workflow associated with talent acquisition and onboarding.

What are the benefits of adding ATS integrations?

Applicant tracking systems allow you to manage the hiring process from start to finish — reducing time-to-hire and improving the experience for everyone involved. ATS integrations take all of the benefits automation has to offer to the next level, resulting in a software solution that can do the following:

Speed up the candidate application process

From automatically publishing job postings to providing tools that allow your team to quickly review resumes and provide feedback, the right ATS integrations add more efficiency to the application phase of the hiring process.

Promote better candidate engagement

Using automation for data entry, interview scheduling, updating social media, and to set up triggers for actionable next-step tasks improves accuracy and enhances communication with potential job seekers.

Increase hiring credibility among candidates

ATS integrations can help enrich the profiles of applicants, making it easier for stakeholders to review and share information to identify the most qualified candidates quickly.

Accelerate the onboarding process

Integrating a human resource management system (HRIS) to your ATS adds efficiency to the onboarding process by streamlining steps like background checks and drug screening processes.

Help the newly hired get started faster

ATS integrations help empower your new hire by providing the access, tools, and permissions to support success on their first day and beyond.

Maximize productivity and reduce time-to-hire

Using an integrated solution to handle time-consuming administrative tasks supports hiring managers by allowing them to focus their efforts and experience on more important aspects of the recruiting process, like identifying and engaging with top talent to improve the candidate experience.

Common ATS integration examples

The most helpful ATS integrations for your team are largely dependent on your workflow, but consider the following possibilities:

Business communication platforms

Integrating your ATS with a business communication platform like Slack creates one central conversational hub that makes it easier for members of the hiring team to review and discuss resumes, share feedback about candidate interviews, and offer updates on the timeline and decision-making aspects of hiring.

eSignature platforms

Expedite the act of signing on the dotted line with an eSignature integration like Docusign. Automate the action of generating an offer letter and collecting signatures to execute contracts with more ease and efficiency for everyone involved.

Background check platforms

Complete the hiring process with confidence by integrating a background check platform like Checkr to automatically conduct background checks on your new hire.

An ATS integration makes it easier to automate this part of the process; just set up a workflow that initiates a background check once a signed offer letter is received.

ITSM tools

Integrating your ATS with an ITSM tool like ServiceNow helps transform the many steps of the onboarding process into a seamless experience. Create a workflow that initiates actions to set your new hire up with the software and equipment necessary for their workday.

Need integration ideas?

ATS integrations enhance your recruitment software, which ultimately optimizes your entire hiring process. Maximize productivity, attract and attain top talent, and eliminate the challenges associated with talent acquisition by finding the perfect tools for your team.

Workable partners with the most popular companies in HR and can help make your hiring process as smooth as possible. Click now to try our free trial.

The post ATS integrations: the benefits and examples appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

• What does KPI mean in recruitment?
• What are recruiting metrics?
• What can you learn from recruitment metrics?
• Which are the most important metrics to track?
• How can I have better visibility into recruiting metrics?
• Who should be tracking recruiting metrics?
• How do I calculate recruiting metrics?
• What metrics should matter most to a Talent Acquisition team?
• Which metrics should matter most to an external recruiter?
• What metrics should matter most to HR?
• Which recruiting metrics matter most to the CEO?
• What metrics should I track when working with an external recruiter?
• How do I increase the number of job applicants?
• How do I increase the number of qualified applicants?

Intro to Recruiting Email Metrics

• What are recruiter email metrics?
• How do you measure recruiter email metrics?

More Recruiting Metrics

• Recruiting costs FAQ: Budget and cost per hire
• Time to fill and time to hire metrics FAQ
• Recruitment process effectiveness metrics FAQ
• Candidate experience metrics FAQ
• Job offer acceptance rate metrics FAQ

Intro to Recruiting Metrics

What does KPI mean in recruitment?

KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator and it can be used in any field or business function to measure performance. In recruitment, key recruiting metrics refer to the important factors related to the hiring process that you should consistently examine. For example, the speed with which hiring teams make a decision may be a KPI for a company that values quick turnaround and does mass hiring.

What are recruiting KPIs?

How do you measure success in recruitment? Recruiting KPIs (or hiring metrics) measure how effective and efficient your recruitment process is. Some metrics are expressed as percentages or ratios (e.g. yield ratios), while others are absolute values that you can compare to industry or company standards (e.g. time to hire.) Use them to discover how well your recruitment process works and identify where you could improve.

What can you learn from recruitment metrics?

Recruitment metrics can answer any question you want them to. At a high level, you probably want to know the quality, cost and productivity of your hiring process. More specifically, you could ask the following questions:

• How good are we at spotting the right candidate and how long does it take us to hire them?
• How many qualified candidates do we need to make a hire and how quickly do we move them from one stage to the other?
• Do we effectively engage the best candidates and getting them to accept our job offers?
• How much money do we spend per hire and how does our spending change depending on the role we’re hiring for?
• How efficient is our hiring process and which steps or stages are most productive?

Which are the 6 most important hiring metrics to track?

There are many available KPIs, but what are some common recruiting metrics? Usually, companies choose to track the following recruiting metrics examples:

• Quality of hire
• Cost per hire
• Recruiting yield metrics
• Time to fill
• Source of hire
• Offer acceptance rate

If you want to dig deeper recruiting metrics that matter, add metrics like application completion rate, hiring manager satisfaction or new hire turnover. Choose metrics based on your company’s individual needs.

How can I have better visibility into the best recruiting metrics??

Most recruiting metrics are easy to calculate, but hard to keep track of. The first step is to determine what kind of data you need to monitor. Then, you could invest in an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to track your preferred metrics automatically via a recruiting metrics dashboard and generate reports. Alternatively, business intelligence tools (e.g. Tableau) can collect the recruiting analytics you need.

Looking for better reporting analytics? Workable’s reports will refine your recruiting process. Sign up for our 15-day free trial.

Who should be tracking recruiting metrics?

Recruiters or HR are usually in charge of tracking recruitment metrics. If your company doesn’t have a dedicated recruiting team, executives could monitor metrics for their respective departments and functions. Hiring software, like an HRIS or ATS, can help you collect relevant data.

How do I calculate recruiting metrics?

To calculate various recruiting metrics, use the following process:

• Determine what to measure. Some metrics may be important to your company, while tracking others may be counterproductive.
• Decide how to collect recruiting data. The simplest way is to use spreadsheets and enter data manually. But, this method is not efficient if you’re working with large datasets. To make things easier, it’s best to use analytics software or your ATS to store and report on data automatically. You could also import data from these systems to spreadsheets when needed.
• Identify which calculations to do on your own. For example, your ATS can report on your time to fill or recruiting yield ratios, but it can’t calculate your average cost per hire.
• Collect the formulas. Find the formulas and decide the time frame within which to calculate different metrics. For example, you may choose to calculate new hire retention rates annually, but decide to track your source of hire on a quarterly basis.

To get you started, here are the most common formulas you can use for recruiting metrics that matter:

Common Quality of hire formula:

– QoH index = (PR + HP + HR) / 3 where:
PR: Average job performance of new hires (e.g. 80 out of 100 based on quantifiable targets or hiring managers’ feedback)
HP: percentage of new hires reaching acceptable productivity within a determined period
HR: new hire retention rate after a year

See more about calculating quality of hire.

– Cost per hire formula:
CPH = (Internal recruiting costs + External recruiting costs) / Total number of hires

See more about calculating cost per hire.

– Common Time to fill formula:
Time to fill = Number of days between opening of a position until candidate accepts the job offer

For average time to fill, you add all times to fill from different positions and divide them by the number of positions.

See more on calculating and benchmarking time to fill metric in recruiting.

– Offer acceptance rate:
Offer acceptance rate = Number of offers accepted / Total number of offers %

See more on calculating offer acceptance rate.

– Common qualified candidates per hire formula:
Qualified candidates per hire = average number of candidates who were found to be qualified in each hiring process after the initial screening phases (e.g. screening call, resume screening)

See more on benchmarks for qualified candidates per hire.

If you’re interested in more detailed recruitment metrics examples and benchmarks, check out our complete guide.

What recruitment metrics should matter most to a Talent Acquisition team?

Corporate recruiters can use almost every metric to help them improve the recruiting process, though some recruiting metrics will be more useful than others.

Here are examples of the best metrics for recruiters:

• New hire turnover rate or new hire length of stay. New hire turnover rate measures the percentage of new hires who leave your company before their onboarding period ends (usually three to six months.) If you compare turnover rates over time, you can pinpoint when there’s an issue and look into your onboarding or candidate screening processes. Also, many recruiters measure their success according to the length of time a new hire stays with the company.
• Candidate experience scores. Candidate experience is an essential part of building a good employer brand. Companies can benefit from setting up candidate surveys to discover what candidates liked or disliked about their recruiting process. As a complementary metric, track hiring manager satisfaction with the hiring process, too.
• Qualified candidates per hire. This metric measures the number of candidates who made it past the first stage of your hiring process. This metric shows how effective your sourcing and advertising techniques are in attracting the right candidates.
• Offer acceptance rate. This metric expresses the percentage of candidates who accepted a job offer. If this percentage is low, Talent Acquisition teams may need to rethink what candidates want or how competitive their job offers are.

Recruiting teams can track many more metrics. Ultimately, what you choose to measure depends on your company’s unique goals and needs.

Which metrics should matter most to an external recruiter?

External recruiters are usually evaluated on two fronts:

• How quickly they provide candidates.
• And the quality of the candidates they bring in.

Tracking quality of hire and time to fill over time can help recruiters determine whether they are delivering value to their clients. For example, if their time to fill starts increasing, then they may need to revisit expectations with hiring managers or try new sourcing techniques.

What hiring metrics should matter most to HR?

The HR department has a common strategy and budgets for every function, including recruiting. A VP of HR needn’t delve into the mechanics of the recruiting process, but they are likely interested in metrics that indicate recruiting success. Those include:

• Quality of hire.
• Cost per hire.
• Source of hire.

Source of hire measures how many qualified candidates or hires each recruiting source brings in. HR needs to know which sources are most effective in a given period (e.g. a year), so as to rethink its partnerships and external spend.

Which recruiting metrics matter most to the CEO?

CEOs are interested in the strategic impact of recruiting. Metrics that are concerned with business value and promote action are the most useful. For example:

• Quality of hire. This metric encompasses performance and retention rates of new hires. Retention and high performance increase revenue and are important on a strategic level.
• Actual hires to hiring goals. This metric shows what percentage of hiring goals hiring teams met. It indicates how well the entire recruiting function works.
• Diversity goals. This metric measures what percentage of diversity goals were met or the percentage of diverse hires. If increasing diversity is an important company objective, then this metric can say a lot about your company’s success.

What metrics should I track when working with an external recruiter?

When working with external recruiters, you can still use corporate recruiting metrics (e.g. actual hires to goals), but you should also think about how you’ll specifically measure the external recruiter’s success. Usually, you’ll want to ensure that they provide quality candidates as quickly as possible. You could measure:

• Candidates to interview (e.g. percentage of recruiters’ candidates who were invited to a first or second interview.) If you’re working with several recruiters, compare their scores. Those who deliver consistently low numbers of qualified candidates may not be the best match for your company.
• Time to fill. If your recruiters manage more phases of your hiring process, instead of just providing you with resumes, then time to fill is important to track.

How do I increase the number of job applicants?

If you need to bring more candidates into your talent pipelines, aim to attract more people to your job openings and encourage them to apply. To achieve both of these goals, you could:

• Advertise in both niche and mainstream job boards.
• Enhance your sourcing by using various techniques (e.g. social media recruiting, Google and Boolean search.)
• Hire a recruiting agency that will provide you with qualified resumes.
• Create a short, straight-forward and mobile-optimized application process.
• Ensure your careers page has useful information for candidates (e.g. benefits, culture, perks.)

How do I increase the number of qualified applicants?

Here are ways to attract more qualified applicants:

• Advertise in niche job boards or websites to target a specific audience.
• Write detailed and complete job descriptions to clarify your requirements.
• Add qualifying questions in your job application forms. Your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) can automatically disqualify candidates who don’t answer important questions.
• Conduct screening calls to ensure that only qualified candidates will advance to your assignment and in-person interview stages.
• Enhance your sourcing. When sourcing passive candidates, only contact those who are fully qualified for the job.

Introduction to Recruiting Email Metrics

What are recruiter email metrics?

Recruiter email metrics measure the impact that recruiters’ emails have on candidates. If your emails are attractive, informative and aimed at the appropriate candidates, then candidates are more likely to open, click though and reply to them. Here are four recruiter email metrics:

• Recruitment email open rate: Percentage of (delivered) emails that candidates opened.

• Recruiting email response rate: Percentage of emails that candidates replied to.

• Recruitment email click-through rate: Percentage of recipients who click at least one of your links in an email.

• Recruitment email conversion rates: Percentage of emails that translate into a desired action (e.g. recruitment emails that result in interviews.)

How do you measure recruiter email metrics?

Just count emails that were delivered, since candidates can’t respond to emails they didn’t receive.

More Recruiting Metrics FAQs:

• Recruiting costs FAQ: Budget and cost per hire
• Time to fill and time to hire metrics FAQ
• Recruitment process effectiveness metrics
• Candidate experience metrics FAQ
• Job offer acceptance rate metrics FAQ

The post Introduction to Recruiting Metrics FAQ appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Unfortunately, there is rarely one individual who checks every single box the company prefers. In addition, spending hours upon hours interviewing many candidates is a waste of time. In fact, it’s an added burden on one’s work obligations. “Managers typically have their own job, and when they have an open position, technically may have two jobs,” says a senior advisor at SHRM.

“Managers typically have their own job, and when they have an open position, technically may have two jobs.” – SHRM senior advisor

By scheduling interview after interview in search of the one candidate that fits 100% of the criteria, companies are wasting time and money. Instead of waiting around hoping for that one perfect unicorn to apply, many companies are adopting the 70% Rule for hiring talented employees quickly and efficiently.

Based on the Marine Corps teachings, the 70% Rule says that: “You take action on any decision when you have 70% confidence in the success of the decision”. By using the 70% Rule, hiring managers can cut the time they spend evaluating candidates in half.

In addition, it gives room for talented trainers to bring those 70% employees up to the 100% level they need to be to achieve greatness in that role.

Here are the top benefits of using the 70% Rule of hiring when interviewing and recruiting new employees – we’ve done the research, so you don’t have to:

1. Grow your employees to their full potential

No matter what level of candidate you onboard, everyone needs some sort of training to acclimate to the new work environment – and more so in recent years. In fact, the 2020 Training Industry Report finds that the average number of training hours per employee increased from 42.2 hours to 102.6 hours between 2017 and 2020 for large companies. While training expenditures took a dip during the early part of the pandemic, it’s since bounced back – showing its value.

So, hiring managers might as well onboard professionals who meet 70%+ of their criteria and spend a little extra time training those new hires for company needs. Why not save the time you would spend interviewing hundreds of candidates and just bring on talented employees who will be perfect with a little bit of training?

Think about it. Would you prefer to waste hours of valuable company time sitting in interviews? Or would you rather hire candidates who meet 70% of your requirements and spend that saved time giving them valuable knowledge and experience in the actual job?

2. Motivate your employees to strive for excellence

When employees know that their hiring manager and company took a chance by hiring them, they are more likely to strive for excellence. Hiring someone who may not be immediately qualified, but could soon get there, is one of the best ways a company can develop employee loyalty. This is widely documented, including in a recent Deloitte report on what they title as “unleashing workforce potential.”

The report quotes: “In the 2021 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends survey, executives identified ‘the ability of their people to adapt, reskill, and assume new roles’ as the top-ranked item to navigate future disruptions.”

Likewise, a joint survey by Workable, TalentLMS and Training Journal found that 75% of hiring managers, C-suiters and decision makers saw a benefit to company productivity when upskilling and reskilling their workers.

The emphasis on adapting and reskilling can also be an emphasis on providing new employees with a dedicated training mentor, which will foster a positive work climate while ensuring your new hires are adequately trained. In addition, it is proven that employees who receive attention from an advocating mentor are more likely to feel valued within the workplace.

Creating a sense of inclusion and support within your workplace culture is the perfect recipe to develop happy employees. As stated by the University of Oxford, “Happy workers are 13% more productive.”

Developing employees who are already 70% what your company is looking for will accelerate your efforts to develop a positive atmosphere.

3. Develop your employees to your specifications

Employees who are overqualified or fit 100% of your criteria likely have years of experience in their chosen field. Oftentimes, they come with a college degree and have been exposed to the training programs of a few companies.

As such, they are less likely to develop long-term company loyalty as they are more comfortable leaving workplaces after just a couple of years. Plus, as David Silverberg writes for BBC Worklife: “overqualified workers can develop negative attitudes, such as a sense of entitlement about their skills or resentment through boredom, that can ripple out to every cubicle in an office.”

Another potential scenario is that those “perfect fit” employees are potentially creatures of habit, in that they have succeeded for so long in their way of doing things – which makes it more challenging to onboard and adapt them to your company’s existing work processes.

There’s another possible challenge for employers and hiring managers – the “perfect” hire may inadvertently set high expectations for their managers who may think they don’t need to be managed since they already know how to do the job from day one.

While these aren’t necessarily the case for every overqualified employee, it still makes sense that with onboarding and training being natural experiences for a new employee, employers can take advantage of developing employees to be a stronger fit in their work processes to benefit everyone involved.

4. Save money and retain talent

Plus, there is quite a bit of research that suggests training fresh new hires with less experience may be less costly to the company overall. Statistically, employees who are in-house trained and given ample professional development opportunities are more likely to stay with that company.

Notably, employees value working for a company that invests in their education – there’s a clear link between professional development and job satisfaction. Again, 58% of respondents in the above-mentioned survey saw greater retention when upskilling/reskilling.

Budget-conscious companies also have the option of offering learning & development – which is growing in popularity with candidates – in place of a higher salary.

Hiring employees using the 70% Rule of hiring and providing them with professional development creates a win-win for employers and employees.

Put in 70% and reap the benefits

Today, we are currently living in an era referred to as the Great Resignation. That is, millions of employees are fleeing workplaces in demand of better working conditions. Shockingly, around four million Americans left their places of employment just about every month in the second half of 2022.

That number is projected to continue throughout 2022 as well. Employees are seeking job opportunities that align with the lifestyle they want to live. This includes holding a job that brings them a sense of connectedness and fulfillment.

Hiring employees who meet 70% of the requirements to perform the role of the job is a surefire way to save time and money. This method can have both a long-term and short-term positive impact on the company.

The short-term impact is that the hiring manager will save time by reducing the number of interviews they conduct while holding out for that 100% employee. On a related note, the long-term impact is that those 70% employees are more likely to stay, thrive, and excel as they receive professional development.

Ron Sharon is an IT executive and cybersecurity leader leveraging 17+ years of experience translating business requirements to deliver innovative solutions and mitigating risk. Sharon was named Vice President of Information Security for Mercer Advisors in 2021 and is happily married with one wonderful daughter.

The post The 70% rule of hiring: When ‘hired’ is better than ‘perfect’ appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

They’re there for a reason – to keep the books aligned. The person in charge of finance is an empathetic, patient person with enough organizational skills to ensure that everything is as much balanced at year-end as at year-beginning, and with enough contingency planning in place to allow the company to successfully navigate even the rudest awakenings that befall organizations.

That’s where Craig DiForte comes in as Workable’s CFO. He’s been in the finance biz since graduating with an MBA in Finance from Boston University Questrom School of Business in 2002 and has been managing Workable’s money since 2016.

So, he’s seen a lot in his work. He also knows what costs money and what makes money, and to take it to another level, he knows where money can – and can’t – be spent in order to have it reflect on the bottom line. And mostly, he knows how to make sure it all ties together into a nice bow.

So, according to Craig, here are seven ways you can optimize the recruitment pipeline without getting hit too hard by the actual cost of hiring staff:

1. Communicate, communicate, communicate
2. Measure the process regularly
3. Remember, timing is money
4. Consider different timing processes
5. Plan for the inevitable turnover
6. Implement clear processes
7. Keep checking in

1. Communicate, communicate, communicate

“The one thing you have to make sure that you’ve done,” Craig says, “is that you’ve effectively communicated the plan to all of the hiring managers.”

He explains, using an example: everyone – including the hiring managers – needs to be fully informed on how many they can or need to hire that year. “If your VP of Sales doesn’t know that she only has the budget to hire 20 heads,” he says, “and she opens up a requisition for 30, you’re immediately going to have a problem.”

That scenario is a lot of things, but it’s especially a problem for Finance. This planning conflict will throw the books out of whack because your VP of Sales has put a process in place for something that your budget won’t allow for. Ten additional heads being hired means 10 more salaries than you’ve planned for. And 10 more interview processes that are a time and resource suck for your hiring team. And, of course, there’s the expensive damage control in rolling everything back to the original 20. All of these things cost money and force Finance to move things around to accommodate.

You don’t want that to happen in your company, so you need to make sure everyone is on the same page for absolutely everything. This means meeting regularly, keeping communication channels open and keeping everyone together in the loop as to where you are and where you’re going in the hiring plan.

“You need to make sure that this hiring plan is communicated,” Craig reiterates. “You want to be sure that the plan has been communicated out, and that you’re now executing on it.”

2. Measure the process regularly

You must continually check the pulse of your recruitment process at regular stages, and measure where you’re staying on plan and where you’re going off plan, Craig says.

“Your [hiring] plan basically comes down to the question: ‘Have I hired the people that I meant to hire, at the time that I meant to hire them?’ There’s a timing variance you need to think about.”

Measurement doesn’t just apply to timing and scheduling – true to Craig’s background, he reminds us to look at the actual money being spent on payroll: “Did I hire them at the right salary that I thought I was going to hire them at?” he asks as an example. Again, a slight variance in salary for multiple roles can add up, creating a fresh headache for Finance.

Salary differences isn’t the only flux in the cost of the hiring process: measuring also means looking at reports and identifying the areas where you can optimize the recruiting process.

For example, Craig asks: “What are the savings related to cancelled hires?” Once that’s in place, he says, “then you can have a net hiring plan adjustment number, where you can say; ‘OK, the original hiring plan has 100 people, but we added 15 and took out five, so now we’re really at 110.’”

“The extra cost of doing that is Y, whatever Y happens to be. That’s one metric you want to be able to track,” he says, because you’re going to want to measure your anticipated outcome against your real outcome. “You want to be able to ask, ‘How am I doing against the original plan? And what are my variances?’”

When you look at reports regularly, and identify opportunities for optimization, then you’re tightening up the process and making it move more effectively – making things more cost-effective. You’re not just saving money, you’re also making your existing money go further.

3. Remember: timing is money

Drilling down deeper, Craig says that looking at the savings opportunities in the hiring plan isn’t just about looking at salaries. When you’re looking at the cost of hiring staff or hiring ahead of schedule, you also have an opportunity to cut back costs.

Craig says, “Hiring people too slowly can be a bad thing from a performance standpoint, but it can save you some money because you thought you were going to fill a role in January and you didn’t fill that role until March. That might be a problem from a company performance standpoint – but from a headcount standpoint, you just saved two months’ worth of salary.”

It’s just one example of many, but the intricacies of the many moving parts of the recruitment pipeline are such that money will always play into the overall equation. It’s not so easy to budget for a hiring strategy, particularly since you’re often accounting for unexpected events and benefits.

Crunch those numbers: learn how to calculate recruitment costs for budget planning in our new tutorial.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking timing alone is a valid criterion. For instance, you may need to speed up the hiring process and hire someone earlier than originally planned – despite the cost of doing so – if this means you’ll hire an exceptional candidate who may not be available later.

Or, in some cases, it makes sense to offer a higher salary because of the higher productivity that new employee can bring to the table. You’re not necessarily costing your company money if you paid a higher salary than a competitor – you’re recruiting better talent who will ultimately boost productivity.

In short, keep an eye on timing (when you open up a new requisition and when you hire a new person compared to when you need them), but also factor in these other qualitative and quantitative gains.

Craig explains further: “You need to be able to find the mechanism to take all of those things into consideration to determine; How much am I saving on my hiring plan right now? Or how much am I costing myself more? Because if I’m hiring everybody fast, and I’m hiring them at higher salaries than I thought, I’m costing myself too much money.”

“But maybe,” Craig notes, “I’m making myself more productive. There can be a benefit.”

4. Consider different timing processes

You also have to think about onboarding schedules for new hires and upcoming projects that you’re hiring for. These both take into account the type of roles you’re filling for.

“For instance,” Craig says, “if they’re salespeople, there can be a great benefit to hiring early because they start ramping faster and they’re going to get to full productivity earlier.”

The impact to the bottom line is easily tangible for sales: with more salespeople – particularly if commission-based – you get more sales, and your company is more productive.

But what about engineers? “If you’re hiring an engineer for a certain project that you’re going to work on, but the project doesn’t start until April and you hire them in February, that might not be the best early hire; depending on the project, and the skills of the person you’re hiring, the ramping time can be different in each case.”

Whether you’re hiring ahead or behind, Craig says, it’s a strategic decision based on the role you’re hiring for. You don’t want employee salaries burning a hole in your pocket when they’re not contributing anything to your bottom line or producing anything.

5. Plan for the inevitable turnover

“You’re going to have something come up during the year,” Craig warns. “The ubiquitous backfill. Some people will leave – there’s no getting around it. You’re going to have to replace them.”

Of course, turnover is a real fact of business. But there’s something else impacting the cost of the hiring process: “One of the things that you need to make sure of in your plan is that when you backfill, you’re not adding an extra position.”

This could happen if, for example, “Jane tells you she’s leaving, but gives you a month-long notice and you say, ‘Well, Jane is very important. She has to be replaced.’ So you open a new request for Jane’s replacement while Jane’s still there.”

Which is fine, until: “A month later, Jane actually leaves. Then if you’re not watching your hiring plan, somebody might open a new request for Jane’s replacement because Jane has actually left now,” Craig says.

“That’s how one position turns into two positions. You want to make sure that you have a good process for managing your backfills and how they go into your hiring plan so that you don’t double-count them.”

6. Implement clear processes

“You could have created the greatest budget in the world, and within a month or two months depending upon the industry that you’re in, it will start to go sideways a little bit,” says Craig. “You’ll find out that either because certain people leave or because you come up with new initiatives, or because something changes the economy or the market, that you need either more or less people than you thought you did.”

So, you need to have a procedure in place from the get-go for removing or canceling hires and requests in the hiring plan. You’ll also want to open up some resources – be it time, money, or otherwise – to accommodate unbudgeted hires.

And what’s more, Craig says, you have to have a clear approval process in place. “What’s your process for making sure those [new hires and cancellations] get approved? Sometimes people forget to get approval on both sides of that – they know they need an approval to add a new hire, but they forget they need an approval to remove one.”

And communication, again, is key. “Sometimes they’ll remove one, and then the manager will think they still have a request in place and they’ll try to hire for that role.”

Check out here how GCC Services fosters a more inclusive hiring process with Workable Video Interviews.

7. Keep checking in

We come full circle here: in the spirit of communication, keep checking in with each other on a regular basis. “You need a clear communication and approval process for making sure everyone’s coordinated on how you put in new positions and how you take out positions you decide you don’t need anymore.”

Once you have those kinds of changes, you’re adding another level of complexity to your reporting where, Craig notes, you want to measure, for instance, the added cost of unbudgeted hires.

Again, communication is key, Craig says. And this involves everyone who’s involved in the hiring plan, including HR, Finance and hiring managers. “Plus, the hiring manager should understand clearly what’s happening with their respective teams so people know where they are.”

In the end, your hiring strategy for the upcoming year should be run like a business within the business. Have regular meetings and check-ins with everyone who’s a part of the whole process. “Make sure that you have policies and procedures in place to handle changes to the plan, which could be additions, subtractions, cancellations if you will, or backfill positions. You need to have processes for all three of those.”

And then make sure you have the numbers crunched regularly. “You want to know: what are your metrics and what are you reporting against in terms of total cost-to-hire, total time-to-hire. Then, there’s the other more nuanced pieces that we talked about; that is, how many are you hiring early? How many are you hiring later? What’s the net effect of that on your numbers for your total cost?”

Craig smiles, knowing this is a lot to take in if you want to run things smoothly with an outcome as optimal as possible. What if you don’t have the time to incorporate all of that into your hiring process? Well, he has an answer to that, adding a joke about shamelessly plugging the Workable product: “That’s one of the reasons the Hiring Plan module in Workable is incredibly useful, because everybody has access to the same platform and can check in and see what’s happening at every step of the way.”

That’s a sure-fire way to get Finance on your side in the hiring process. Your work life will be a lot easier in the end, and the bottom line will thank you.

Want to figure out what’s normal and what’s not in your budget calculations for a hiring plan? Check out our tutorial on how to do that.

You can also see Craig and Matt Buckland – who was Workable’s VP of Customer Advocacy for two years – on planning a strategy for high growth in this webinar:

The post Devil in the details: The cost of the hiring process and what you can do about it appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Consequently, to stay relevant and apace with increased competition for new hires, recruiters and hiring managers need to possess sharp talent acquisition skills and have a robust recruitment tech stack to capture the best talent for the position. Recruitment guru Josh Bersin emphasizes the evolution of recruitment and how this is an opportunity for recruiters to really step up their game.

One big step in the right direction is purchasing an ATS and other technologies to support that. If it’s your first time investing in recruitment software, ensure you have the following capabilities in your recruitment tech stack:

1. Employee referral program
2. Chatbots
3. Candidate texting
4. Email automation
5. Social media automation
6. Talent network
7. Virtual recruiting events
8. Job postings
9. Content management system
10. Candidate relationship management

1. Employee referral program

An automated employee referral program helps in creating a solid company culture by building high-performing teams. It reduces the hiring process and costs and, at the same time, getting more high-value future employees.

Most recruitment marketing softwares have built-in employee referral programs. Job openings are automatically sent to the employees’ email addresses with the job description and the ‘refer’ button to submit the referred candidate.

Some of the automation rules or processes you can create with your referral program include:

• Monitoring where the referred candidate is in the hiring cycle and send updates to the referrer.
• Linking your ATS to your payroll system, so referral fees go straight into your employee’s salary.
• Measuring the success of your employee referral program – i.e. number of shares via email or social, number of referred candidates, number of successful hires and the quality of those hires.

Check out our complete guide to employee referrals.

2. Chatbots

Chatbots are a form of AI used in messaging applications. They are automated programs that interact with web visitors like a human would do.

In recruitment, chatbots can help increase your engagement with candidates, hasten the recruitment process, reach out to more candidates, and provide quick answers to their questions.

Chatbots can be the first point of contact after the candidate submits his resume. They can be tasked to contact candidates to explain the overall application procedure.

Chatbots can also gather contact information, answer applicants’ initial questions and schedule interviews. More advanced capabilities include ranking and scoring candidates, enabling recruiters to remove unsuitable candidates for the specific role.

Incorporating chatbots eliminates the HR team’s repetitive tasks so they can focus on more critical activities. In addition, chatbots are easy to scale and can keep the hiring process progressing fast, even when you are inundated with candidates for an open role.

3. Candidate texting

With candidate texting technology, recruiters can send job openings right to candidate’s phones. It is a big help for recruiters, especially during seasonal or bulk hiring or in sectors with a large component of deskless workers and high turnover such as in hospitality or food services.

Plus, with a 98% open rate for SMS and text messages, it’s a great communication tool with assurance that your message will get through.

Recruiters can reach thousands of job seekers quickly with customized text messages. Textbots can automate screening, so the process continues. Since these texts are integrated into the recruiting software, data is collected automatically so interviewers and hiring managers can evaluate whether to pursue a candidate or not.

Another feature is automated intelligent interview scheduling. Texting makes it easier for candidates to reply and confirm interview schedules. Scheduling changes or unexpected cancellations can be communicated instantly.

The automated messages help answer common application questions quickly on the candidate’s side, empowering them to screen and move ahead or out of the recruiting process quickly.

If they’re hired, automated text-based communications will help facilitate the candidate’s onboarding process and provide a seamless candidate experience.

Read more on candidate texting best practices and texting strategies for different scenarios.

4. Email automation

Automated email sendouts allow personalization at scale and can recommend ideal content for every candidate.

Despite being around for some time, HR teams can still capitalize on this marketing strategy to communicate with targeted candidates regularly and stay on top of their minds.

Email marketing automation comes with templates and sequences to save time and resources when reaching out to candidates to introduce the company, announce current job openings, send follow-ups, send alerts for future vacancies, etc.

Once the candidate is hired, you can send an email on the first day of work explaining the onboarding process and setting expectations. The hiring manager can then send a follow-up in six weeks to check how things are going and maybe schedule a call or a lunch.

And then again, if they’re on a fixed contract, emails can be scheduled at a determined later time if they’re reaching the end of their contract and looking for their next opportunity.

5. Social media automation

Social media automation enables recruiters to distribute jobs across Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels. They can set logic-based rules around which vacancies should be sent to which social networks, the date they should be posted and taken down, based on the performance of specific jobs.

Social job distribution can also broaden the demographics of the target job seekers – a must for any DEI-minded employer – enabling recruiters to broaden the candidate pool by reaching out to media-savvy social applicants.

Recruiters can also compose and edit new content via mobile devices while on the go. This ability to work remotely provides flexibility to deliver other content like blogs, industry updates, company news, etc.

The benefit of using social automation tools ensures that recruitment messaging is consistent across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and other social channels. It also helps you find qualified candidates easily, and add them to your list of potential hires in the future.

Check out our FAQ guide on social media recruitment strategies.

6. Talent network management

You can automate your talent network by adding a form to provide an alternative for candidates to opt in if they don’t complete the application. Having CTAs scattered across your site and content can capture those all-important passive candidates.

Once the candidate opts in, you can set up rules in your recruitment marketing platform to segment talent based on preferences, interests, and skills. You can send preference emails asking the types of content they want to receive and the types of roles they are interested in, and record email opens and links clicked.

To set up your automation, you need to understand and build your target candidate personas and the type of information they are searching for. Then, create a messaging sequence for their journey.

The more targeted your messaging, content, and job you send to your talent network, the better candidate experience you can deliver and possibly, outbid your competitors for those star candidates.

7. Virtual recruiting events

Virtual recruiting events allow HR to expand and diversify the talent pipeline by reaching to them anytime, anywhere. It can also improve your diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts.

With this software, you can build your events page that allows you to handle interviews and registrations. For career expos, as an example, candidates undergo a screening process set with pre-qualifying questions. They are scored and matched directly towards jobs and recruiters for engagement.

VRE software provides a better candidate experience and avoids wasting each other’s time if they do not match.

Other features include the ability to promote events across social media, manage on-site attendees, capture leads and resumes, and build employer brand by emailing invitations, post-event surveys, and other campaigns for ongoing candidate engagement.

Some virtual events you can adapt to suit your staffing objectives: career expos, professional development events, educational workshops, info sessions, hackathons and creative challenges, theme-based panels or presentations, virtual presentations, and much more.

8. Job postings

A good recruitment marketing platform allows you to automate the process of writing (with pre-defined job description templates) and posting jobs on various free and paid job boards and social media networks within a single platform.

You can also manage your media budget and inventory and even facilitate the use of programmatic job advertising to optimize advertising spend.

Check out our Ultimate Guide to Job Posting.

9. Content management system

Today’s candidates search employers the same way consumers find products and services.

To stand out in the crowd, organizations must build unique candidate experiences through employer brand content and recruitment marketing strategies to attract the right talent. This is called inbound recruiting, as emphasized by Hubspot:To perform inbound recruitment, you need a CMS.

With a CMS (Content Management System), you can quickly and easily create and update content, optimize your job listing and share vacancies on social media, to name a few. You can also integrate your applicant tracking system (ATS) and configure your content to be searchable on search engines.

10. Candidate relationship management

CRM (Candidate Relationship Management) helps you nurture relationships with passive candidates.
With the right CRM, you can:

• Track candidate’s journey during the application process
• Easily build and segment talent pools and cascade targeted communication to the right job seeker at the right time
• Update all your ATS information so you can target the best applicants for open roles
• Automatically track and measure your campaigns’ performance and results to improve future marketing strategies

Your hiring tech stack matters

Talent acquisition is poised to evolve post-pandemic and beyond as recruitment platforms become savvier and more sophisticated, largely due to AI and emerging technologies.

Hence, it would be best to keep abreast of the latest developments in recruitment automation software to stay ahead of competitors in the high-stakes talent game.

Gem Siocon is a digital marketer and freelance content writer at Recruiter Copywriter. She specializes in recruitment marketing and employer branding, helping staffing agencies and recruiters for over 10 years. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

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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.

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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.

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HR audits are a critical part of ensuring an organization’s employees are productive, satisfied and constantly improving. Audits are kind of like checklists for HR managers. According to SHRM, audits are most commonly used to go over current HR policies, systems, documentations and other various aspects within an organization.

After working in human resources for various corporate organizations over the last 20 years, I know firsthand how important auditing is to both HR professionals and to the overall health of an organization. Audits and productivity go hand in hand.

Here are a few auditing tips for HR professionals to facilitate an organization’s workflow.

1. Focus on the employee experience
2. Fine-tune your candidate experience
3. Conduct ROI analyses
4. Create consistent audit schedules
5. Survey your employees

1. Focus on the employee experience

When auditing an organization’s workflow, the best place to start is by focusing on the organization’s employee experiences. Look at the recruiting, onboarding, service/performance milestones, and administrative processes you have in place. Ask yourself, are they intuitive? Are they simple? Are they effective?

If not, identify areas of improvement within the organization so employees will want to brag about where they work. If employees have positive experiences, they’re more likely to be more productive.

Factors that may contribute to a positive employee experience include:

• Meaningful work
• Growth and promotion opportunities
• Healthy/positive work environment
• Trust in leaders and supervisors
• Supportive management

Additionally, employees with a more positive experience are more likely to produce higher rates of employee retention, customer satisfaction, profitability and work performance.

Read more: Josh Bersin also has a lot to say on the subject of employee experience. Check out our top 10 insights from a recent webinar.

Because of the abundance of hiring laws involved in nearly each step of the employment process, it is also critical for HR professionals to constantly conduct audits to ensure their organization’s workflow is in compliance with all applicable policies and laws in their jurisdiction.

2. Fine-tune your candidate sourcing

Whether or not your candidate sourcing process is effective can also have a massive outcome on the number of new hires your organization receives, as well as the types of hires your organization receives.

How often an organization audits its candidate sourcing practice will vary from business to business. An easy rule of thumb to remember is, if your hiring successes are low, then your audit has been delayed for too long.

Start out by determining how candidates are entering your hiring pipeline, from what sources, and whether or not you’re finding the right kind of talent. Are you using hiring boards? Social media? Have you noticed a pattern since using these sources?

Experience the process as a candidate

This step is more focused on mapping out a potential candidate’s journey. By doing this, HR professionals can clearly see an overview of what an organization’s application process looks like, and whether or not it is effective.

It is important to constantly adjust these processes to ensure your organization is focusing on hiring relevant talent that will only contribute to the growth of an organization.

Define your candidate persona

Additionally, in order to effectively recruit potential employees with relevant work experience for your organization, you must determine more than just where and how candidates are applying in the first place. Start by creating a candidate persona and aligning that persona to the employer’s or organization’s brand.

Next, check the engagement numbers on each of your recruiting platforms. Is posting on Instagram more effective than posting on LinkedIn? Is that technique bringing in large amounts of potential candidates with relevant work experience?

Auditing the hiring process goes beyond avoiding candidates with little to no relevant experience. Ultimately, it saves an organization time, money, energy and resources.

3. Conduct ROI analyses

Return On Investment (ROI) is a term used when measuring the financial return on an investment made. This concept can be applied in HR when conducting audits to analyze employee productivity, budgets, future initiatives, and of course, an ATS.

If you’re looking to build a case for a new ATS, we’ve got an ATS ROI Calculator to get you started. You can tell your decision makers that a good ATS can save your business $127,875 annually – no exaggeration!

When auditing an organization, you should also analyze your budget forecast and scrutinize your spend. This can be achieved by determining which items make sense to continue to invest in and which areas are no longer needed.

This ultimately frees up dollars to improve the HR workflow. Organizations can gauge whether or not they need to reinvest in employees, or save for a future initiative. ROI analyses help HR professionals clearly see what is worth spending on, rather than continuing to spend company dollars on expenses that have a low ROI.

4. Create consistent audit schedules

Most HR processes are heavily dependent upon employee data. Keeping the data clean and updated is imperative in order to create analytics dashboards that help your organization make important people and business decisions. Audits are a reflection of the data at your organization. If your audits are consistent and accurate, then it will reflect in the data you collect.

Regular process audits keep data clean and serve to identify breaks in the process before those breaks become a huge problem. Process audits examine a set of results and then determine whether the activities, resources and behaviors that caused those results are being managed effectively and efficiently.

HR professionals will most likely create a schedule for their process audits, either annually, monthly or quarterly. Each organization’s auditing needs will vary based on many different factors such as the employee workforce population size, the company’s size as well as the company’s overall goals.

Process audits can also help HR teams better assign roles and responsibilities within the team, identify administrative burdens and ways to resolve them, and whether or not the process is worth continuing altogether. In turn, process audits boost the overall productivity of an organization.

5. Survey your employees

Surveys are an important tool, often overlooked by many organizations and HR professionals. The best and most effective way to know what your HR team should be focused on, is by simply asking your employees.

Begin outlining your survey by deciding what type of survey you would like to conduct in order to answer your question. Different types of surveys produce different outcomes. Do you want to conduct a qualitative survey, focused on written feedback? Or would you like to gather data by using a quantitative survey instead?

Planning these surveys out can be easy and quick, depending on the content and length of each survey question.

Surveys, while sometimes cumbersome, provide the insight you want and the opinions you need to hear to overhaul processes and develop a meaningful people strategy. They blatantly show us what we should be focusing on, as well as how employees feel toward certain elements of your organization.

Employees are willing to tell you where you are falling short, what things they love about the company, and what things need more attention. Asking for employee feedback also establishes a level of trust between supervisors and employees; if employees feel safe enough to give quality, in-depth feedback, most HR professionals can assume they have a high level of trust with them.

Auditing is worth the time

While auditing may seem like an unnecessary or time consuming process to many people, HR professionals know how important auditing is. Auditing an organization’s processes, employees, investment returns and hiring practices ultimately give HR professionals a clear picture of what’s working and what isn’t.

They save organizations time, money and resources while continuously striving for improvement and improving workflow. That’s exactly why audits should be included in every organization’s HR toolbelt moving forward.

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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.”

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Return to office and Delta: 6 tips

1. Pay attention to state laws

The CDC issued guidance that just about everyone – vaccinated or not – should wear a mask when inside where social distancing isn’t possible. But, the CDC’s guidelines are not laws. Your state and local governments decide what the binding rules are for this.

Texas, for instance, has no statewide mask mandate and prohibits local governments from implementing a mask mandate. However, several counties have created mask mandates and are battling against the governor. How do you win in a situation like this?

You can always require more safety measures than the government requires, so you will not be in the wrong to require a mask for your employees and customers in the workplace. So, even if you’re in a state that does not have a mask mandate, you can make one for your employees.

Some states do have mask mandates, such as Oregon’s, which went into effect on Aug. 13. If your business operates across multiple states, you’ll need to pay attention to all state laws to make sure you comply with the mandates in each jurisdiction. This may mean employees in different sites face different rules when returning to office.

2. Consider vaccine mandates

Federal law allows you to require your employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 (as long as you have exceptions for medical and religious reasons). As long as this doesn’t violate state law, you can create a vaccine mandate to help protect your employees.

Read more: Vaccine policies in the workplace

However, keep in mind that you may end up with a disparate impact claim, as vaccination rates are not consistent across racial groups. Black people, for instance, are far less likely to be vaccinated than their White counterparts.

If you’re having trouble recruiting or retaining employees right now (which many businesses are), limiting your applicant pool to fully vaccinated candidates may impede your ability to hire. It’s worth thinking about how your policies impact your business.

In the return to office during Delta, you can provide incentives for employees to vaccinate rather than punishing those who don’t. The Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) has said that you can offer a reward as long as it is “noncoercive.” So, yes, you can offer a $500 reward to employees who receive a vaccine against COVID-19.

3. Extend working from home

Rather than implementing mask rules, mandating vaccines, or requiring people to test for COVID regularly, you should extend working from home if possible instead of asking employees to returning to office during Delta. Indeed, not all employees can (or should) work from home, but those who can should continue to do so.

This may be the easiest way to reduce the risk for your employees – even vaccinated employees. People with health concerns are the ones that remain at the highest risk from COVID-19.

If an employee requests to work from home, and there is any way to make that happen, you should strongly consider allowing the employee to do so.

4. Prepare for school shutdowns

Unlike last school year, most schools are open for in-person schooling. This is important for your employees, as they rely on schools not only for education but for babysitting. Last school year, children who were doing online school required a parent at home to monitor and help – which created a difficult situation for many working parents.

However, the Delta Variant seems to spread quickly – more than previous COVID incarnations – which means that just because schools are open today, they may not be tomorrow. That’s doubly so because vaccines for younger children are not yet available, making them more vulnerable to infection. Most likely, you will see individual schools or classes put into quarantine to stop a local outbreak rather than an entire state closing its doors.

If you plan for this, it won’t be a shock when your employees call in because their kids are quarantined and have no childcare. Don’t punish or terminate employees who are stuck in this situation – it should not count as a performance issue if the schools shut down.

Talk with your employees now about plans for dealing with school shutdowns. If you make a plan today, the impact will be less than if you wait until the school boards make a decision.

5. Prepare for angry employees

No matter what decision you make as a business owner, you will not have 100% happy employees. If you mandate vaccines, some employees will quit, or you will have to fire them for not being vaccinated. Some employees may quit if you don’t require vaccines because they don’t feel safe at work.

If you mandate masks for everyone, you may get a revolt from some employees who feel that this is an overreaction. If you don’t mandate masks, you may find other employees complaining that you aren’t doing your best to create a healthy workplace. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

You need to take health and local sentiments into consideration. It’s a balancing act, and what is best for your business may not be best for the business across the street. Who is your clientele? A nursing home should have different requirements than a fast-food restaurant down the road.

You will need to explain your decision to your employees. Consult with a local employment attorney before announcing your policy.

6. Require COVID testing

You can require mandatory COVID-19 tests regularly. Some businesses want unvaccinated employees to pay for these tests as a punishment for not receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, but this is not a good idea. First of all, free COVID tests are available in all states. Second, if free tests aren’t available in your area, you should pay for them. Employment attorney Jon Hyman explains:

“EEOC guidance strongly suggests that the ADA requires employers to cover the costs of COVID-19 testing. The EEOC’s Enforcement Guidance on Disability-Related Inquiries and Medical Examinations of Employees Under the ADA provides that an employer must pay for all medical exam related costs when an employer requires the examination because the employer reasonably believes the employee poses a ‘direct threat.’”

The only way out of this

Everyone is tired of COVID, and the Delta Variant doesn’t help. But, we’ve either got to get sick or get vaccinated to get done with this. The Delta Variant spreads faster than the original virus, and even vaccinated people can still (occasionally) get sick. However, if you are vaccinated, you’re much more likely to have a mild case.

Whether you decide to mandate vaccines or require masks, encourage your employees to receive the vaccine. The CDC just approved a third dose for people who are immunocompromised. Let your employees know about this as well.

Let’s all work together so that we can end the pandemic and return to the office – and get back to normal life.

The post Return to office and the Delta Variant: How do you manage it? appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

When you plan to grow, make sure to set down some basic hiring patterns. Once you start growing – and scaling your hiring process – you can just customize and adapt. A shedload of those patterns is directly linked to HR and hiring managers’ cooperation. (In startups, hiring managers are usually executive team members, C-level representatives, and team leaders.)

It may seem clear-cut, as a lot has already been said and written about successful hiring – but it becomes a much more complicated business when it’s a high-growth environment.

Here, I want to share five simple and clear steps that can significantly impact your hiring and allow you to scale the team successfully in high-demand conditions.

1. Establish a hiring plan

The growth phase is one of the most challenging moments for your company. People and teams are at the center of this growth and, even if there is a slim chance of being accurate in estimating your hiring needs, it is uber-crucial to keep HR in the loop about them.

You need to know where your company is going, at least in the near term. Your estimate might encompass one quarter or half a year – either way, it will create a place for proper planning and taking care of the essential positions by the HR team.

This all requires a clear, well-thought-out hiring plan when scaling your hiring process. It should, ideally, include the following information:

• the domain of the most-wanted specialists
• specific areas of expertise within the said domain (ideally)
• the level of knowledge and background you are looking for
• the desired timeline of hiring (this one is all-important for HR)

Once your hiring needs are estimated and documented, the future success of your hyper-growth will have a strong foundation. Both HR and hiring managers will be on the same page with the same vision and context of the company’s needs.

This is the moment when we jump into role definitions.

2. Define brand-new positions clearly

Once the company starts scaling rapidly, you will have less and less time. Once the hiring plan is established and you’re ready to start scaling your hiring, there comes a point when you should redefine existing positions and define new ones. By that, I mean writing down the whole package of vital information you will use in the upcoming recruitment process or adapting to future ones.

One good practice that still remains is to have a pre-prepared kick-off template to make the brand-new position definition as easy as it is possible for both the HR practitioner and hiring manager. At this point, I want to share with you a very brief kick-off template that could be extended or, in any possible way, modified accordingly to your specific needs.

You should define every position clearly and narrowly by asking more clarifying questions, not fewer. This will bring numerous assets for HR and the hiring manager. These include:

• The kick-off meeting is the opportunity to build a common understanding between HR and the hiring manager (kick-off meeting template provided by Infermedica).
• Two-way street communication never hurts. It will create a space for cooperative and respectful relationships.
• Once you define the position clearly and diligently, compile the information which can be re-used for job description publishing, promoting, sourcing, or redefining the initial assumptions in a future situation.
• The job description should be shared later on with people interviewing for the role (everyone involved in the process – including the jobseeker – will then be aware of the experience and background you are looking for).
• Both kick-off meeting notes and job descriptions will direct HR into clear boundaries of future sourcing.

3. Refine your sourcing strategy

Let’s be honest, there is no way to hire for some roles without properly sourcing or directly messaging people who you think would be a great fit for the company.

The talent market is getting more and more competitive and, along with the rapid growth (which is no doubt very exciting), it rushes a tremendous amount of hiring. This is the moment when you should really try to dedicate time to preparing your sourcing strategy.

No matter what stage your company is in at the moment when scaling your hiring process, you should never forget that you represent the company in the eyes of the candidate. You advertise it, sell it and create a candidate experience that will be shared with other people in the market sooner or later. You are the face of the company’s employer brand during the sourcing process, and it should be planned wisely.

There are two things you should be focusing on here:

• Reaching out to candidates who fit the job description.
• Reaching out to candidates with the best possible message.

This is where HR and hiring manager collaboration comes into the picture. It doesn’t mean your hiring manager should jump into HR shoes and learn how to create a Boolean string in LinkedIn, nor does it mean you can tell the hiring manager what they need exactly for the role.

What might work great for pinning down the sourcing strategy is:

• Create and share a direct message template that you are planning to use with the hiring manager (this might take some time, but the input HR might get here is gigantic)
• Share a few ideal candidate profiles, ideally four to seven, which will ensure that both HR and the hiring manager are on the same page. It’ll also establish a good marker role for further sourcing.

4. Interview Prep Kit is a timesaver

Adam Robinson, author of The Best Team Wins: Build Your Business Through Predictive Hiring, says that 90% of companies lack a structured hiring process. I am unsure if this number reflects the current reality, but an unstructured process can be excruciating for the company.

Structuring the hiring process is an enormously broad topic, so I will focus on one of the things that might drive a better outcome and better experience (both for the candidates and the hiring team) as they pertain to scaling your hiring process.

When you are interviewing the candidate and there are numerous people involved, you should establish a structure with interview questions. I will be honest, this is very time-consuming, but only at the beginning.

The main problem we are solving here is:

• Clarifying the areas that should be evaluated during the interview.
• Matching questions to make this evaluation more efficient.

Preparing an all-purpose interview prep kit will benefit hiring managers during both the ongoing and future interviews. Prepared once, it could be tailored, extended, or modified to specific needs later on.

5. A scorecard might be a good idea

We can all agree that being on the same page regarding professional areas that should be evaluated is a key to the successful recruitment process.

What might escape us is that we are working with different people trained in varying approaches to interviewing. But, sometimes, this is not even the main challenge. High-growth environments can force employees to fast-track the art of recruiting, and this is where HR teams should step in with something more clear, shorter, and concrete than an interview prep kit.

Interview scorecards might be a great alternative. The list of qualifications, traits, and skills will:

• Help you zero in on your ideal candidate characteristics.
• Guide the hiring team through the most important areas of the person you want to hire.
• Create a very simple and clear evaluating process (and also structure the whole hiring process).
• Simplify the process of sharing opinions about the candidate with all interested parties.

Simply put: remember that there’s no one general hiring structure that will work for every high-growth company. Learn from companies that are or were, a while ago, exactly where you are now. Take into account their best practices, but remember to build your hiring strategy and processes based on your specific environment dependents.

We wish you the best of luck in scaling your hiring needs!

Oleksandra Chernyak is a Recruitment Manager at Infermedica, which creates AI-powered healthcare solutions that support patients and physicians in making the best clinical decisions.

The post 5 tips when scaling your hiring in a rapid-growth company appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

A Microsoft study from earlier this year found that 41% of the global workforce are considering leaving their employer this year, and those intentions are becoming a reality already.

The number of workers who quit their jobs in the month of April alone was the highest it’s ever been since this metric started being recorded about 20 years ago; nearly 4 million people quit, pushing the quits rate to 2.7% of those employed.

Hence the terminology: The Great Resignation, coined and foretold by a Texas A&M professor in May 2021.

So what can employers do, now that this massive talent migration is fully underway?

The first step is to change old ways of thinking: your biggest obstacle is not a shortage of talent, but a widespread shift in job candidates’ motivations. You need to evolve your employer brand using new employee value proposition examples.

Talent shortage vs. evolving candidate motivations

Even before the pandemic, the concept of a “talent shortage” has largely gotten the blame for why it’s so difficult to hire skilled workers. This is still true; a recent global study showed that nearly seven in 10 (69%) of companies have reported talent shortages and difficulty hiring.

But that’s not the full picture.

Yes, there is some level of talent shortage, but candidates have also evolved in what they expect from a job. Many don’t want to simply “go back to normal” and have decided they’d rather pursue something else. So, companies hiring in this labor market aren’t just competing against each other, they’re also competing against:

• early retirement
• the gig economy
• self-run businesses
• unemployment benefits
• a search for a new environment
• prioritization of a flexible schedule to be with loved ones

How should companies use this information?

Well, if your company wants to attract candidates in this labor market, you should be thinking about how you can directly address these new candidate motivations. Although salary, perks and benefits understandably are top of mind for candidates, there are many ways where you can further evolve your employer brand.

That’s especially when your budget doesn’t allow for higher salaries or you have difficulty competing with Amazon, Google, or any other competitive employer for talent.

What that all boils down to is evolving your employee value proposition (EVP) so that working at your company actually contributes to – rather than competes with – the life they’re trying to make for themselves.

These four employee value proposition examples can help you evolve your employer brand so that working at your company is attractive to today’s talent:

1. Offer true work flexibility – in location and schedule

The ultimate dream for most employees is to work anywhere they want and whenever they want, doing work that offers fulfillment and growth. What’s ideal about this type of setup is it gives employees the autonomy and freedom they want and need in their day-to-day lives, while also being able to do work that feels purposeful. This is part of the employee value proposition at companies who are already or have shifted to remote-first.

However, for a great number of employers, this isn’t a desirable or feasible option. They’re not willing to let go of the very real benefits that regular in-person, in-office work brings to culture, collaboration, and unity around a common purpose for the whole organization.

If your company is decidedly not going to go fully remote, here are some ways to get as close to that level of flexibility as possible. This will make a world of difference in helping you attract (and keep) the talent you need.

• Offer employees the option to work from home at least a few days of the week
• Let employees choose what days of the week they’d work remotely vs. in the office
• Allow employees to shift their daily work hours around to when they prefer (e.g. starting and ending early)

2. Have a mission that goes beyond ‘the work’

Younger workers have always paid attention to what a company stands for as they look for a job and that interest has become even more pronounced, especially in these recent years of social and political unrest.

What these candidates are really striving for is to find work that means something and stands for something. This means company values that go beyond making a profit. These could include:

• backing BLM/LGBTQ movements
• establishing environmental equity
• building up societies
• supporting mental health and wellness

The list goes on. Candidates today are driven towards employers who have a clearly defined vision and values that are actually lived and felt among current team members.

Remember, though, that you can’t just pick a popular cause and slap that on all of your recruiting materials as your new mission. That isn’t genuine and candidates will see right through that. What you can and should do is talk to your current employees and do some internal introspection and brainstorming as a team as to how the work that you do helps make the world better.

Aside from your actual day-to-day work, you could also introduce:

• paid volunteer days
• charitable donations and company matching
• team fundraising events.

Workable’s mission and vision are a great example of an employee value proposition: the entire organization is driven toward helping great companies and great talent find each other. It’s a very people-driven concept and it attracts candidates who love the idea of supporting it.

3. Foster genuine employee connections

While talent today overwhelmingly prefers remote work over going back to the office five days a week – and many big-name companies feel the same – there’s one aspect about office life that’s still important to them: connecting with other members of their team in a meaningful way.

Just think of all of the different ways employees connect with each other organically throughout a work day when in the same physical workspace:

• seeing each other daily face-to-face
• catching up over a snack or drink break
• real-time in-person meetings
• lunch-time banter
• mini-celebrations in the desk aisles

And so many other impromptu moments. In this shift to remote work, that’s what employees today are missing.

Even though “employee events” isn’t on their job search list, companies who prioritize employee connection in their company culture (especially while remote) will attract more talent than those who don’t.

For example, some companies fly everyone together into a really cool location once a year and call it their annual kickoff or team retreat – including Workable. Many also hold regular all-day events for things like team bonding, new hire orientation, and strategy sessions.

Making time for employee connection in these ways is huge for building morale, and people have something exciting to look forward to doing together. It’s one of the most powerful employee value proposition examples you can implement at your company.

4. Offer programs to support work-life integration

If your company is letting go of some or all of your office spaces in favor of remote or hybrid work, you haven’t actually eliminated the office – you’ve simply shifted “the office” into employees’ homes. The name of the game is then no longer about employees’ work-life balance, but work-life integration.

Learn how SmartBug CEO Ryan Malone manages work-life integration at his company – which has been fully remote since its inception in the late 2000s.

Knowing that this is the new way, supporting your employees’ work-life integration will be a huge differentiator for retaining and attracting talent today. To do that, it’s all about helping employees create a fluid and healthy environment where both their personal life and work life can co-exist and not constantly compete for their attention.

It also means addressing the additional financial burden many employees are taking on due to working from their own homes, such as caregiving costs, internet bills, and paying for technology to help their time management.

Here are some programs you’ll see most commonly these days among companies who prioritize healthy work-life integration:

• one-time or recurring home office stipends to cover all equipment needs
• subsidized food delivery or monthly flexible meal stipends
• monthly cellphone and technology reimbursement for ongoing tech needs
• wellness apps or a monthly flexible wellness stipend
• backup childcare, caregiving support, and general family stipends that support all types of families

Get ready: evolve your EVP

Even though signs of the Great Resignation, or the “turnover tsunami”, was identified way back in February, none of us could have known how massive the impact would actually be.

These four employee value proposition examples are just to get you started. It’s ultimately up to you as an employer to show how quickly you can move and how nimble you can be in addressing this evolving talent market – by also evolving yourself and what you’re really offering your people.

The post 4 employee value proposition examples to survive the Great Resignation appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

In some cases, this makes perfect sense, and in some cases, it does not. Here’s what you need to know when making a decision on whether or not to outsource recruitment.

What is recruitment outsourcing?

Outsourcing is hiring someone outside of the company to do a task. This can be a consultant or a contractor, or a company. It can be someone who lives and works in the same town or lives in another country.

When you outsource a task, you give it to an outside person or organization. When you outsource recruitment, you can use several different types of outsourced recruiting.

• Headhunters. This is the colloquial term for recruiters that recruit for specialized positions. They often work on a commission basis. While they can technically recruit for any role, they often have specialized areas. Headhunters increase their value by building relationships in their chosen industries. Companies, not candidates, pay headhunter fees (usually a percentage of the salary if they place a candidate). Some executive or highly specialized headhunter contractors are retainer-based. In this case, the recruiter receives pay for providing candidates and sourcing, and is not contingent on job acceptance.
• General recruiting. You can hire an outsourced recruiter or recruiting firm to handle all your recruiting needs, regardless of specialization. Again, the company, not the candidates, pays the recruiters.
• Staffing companies. These companies not only find people to work for you, but they hire them and pay them as well. Consequently, the employees work for the staffing company and not for you. This model is popular in industries with high turnover and low-skilled labor. It’s also popular for some IT roles, and larger companies, including Google, use this model.

When outsourced recruitment is good

Suppose you are a startup looking to hire your first of everything. In that case, it’s far better to hire a professional recruiter to help you find a CFO than to appoint your college roommate who majored in musical theater but never managed to get their big Broadway break.

For senior roles, the headhunter option generally remains a good idea, as these positions are highly specialized and critical to company success. If you get a mediocre junior analyst, it can get expensive (as bad hires tend to be), but if your newly recruited Chief Marketing Officer is a failure, it can tank your entire company.

You may also want to consider outsourcing recruiting during intense hiring phases, as your in-house HR may not have the bandwidth to take it on. For instance, if you are launching a new product and you need to hire 100 new salespeople across the entire country in a short time, your lone in-house recruiter may not be able to handle that added workload (although a great ATS can help alleviate that stress!).

You can, of course, use a contracted recruiter for all your positions, and some companies do this. Smaller companies can’t afford a dedicated recruiter or don’t hire enough people on a regular basis to warrant an extra employee for that task.

When outsourced recruitment is bad

Relying on someone outside the company to market your jobs, source candidates, and screen them, can be problematic in many situations.

If you want to build a specific company culture, you probably want to bring your recruiting in-house. An external recruiter generally has multiple clients at a time and won’t be able to dedicate themselves to the unique needs of your company as well as an in-house recruiter can do.

Because external recruiters typically get paid upon placement, there can be a bigger push to fill the role than to focus on finding the right person for the position.

If your turnover – whether voluntary and involuntary – is higher than the industry average, you may wish to take a look at in-house recruiting. People do leave when they feel that the company is a bad fit for them. You also need to fire people who turn out to be not a good fit for you.

If your turnover in either of these categories is too high, it could be due to wrongly or poorly targeted recruiting. There are times where assigning the recruiting to someone who knows the employees personally, who walks your warehouse floor every day, or sits in on exit interviews and sees the problems firsthand can result in a better candidate fit.

If you have the proper HR systems in place – a good applicant tracking system and a compatible HRIS – running the recruiting in-house can save you time and make your reporting more straightforward and more accurate.

If you choose outsourced recruitment

This is a path that fits some companies, and if you go in this direction, there are a few things you need to remember when you search for your recruiter.

• If employees work in the office, ensure the recruiter has visited and understands the working environment firsthand. There are different challenges in different businesses, and seeing the physical facilities can help the recruiter’s understanding.
• Go over the job descriptions with the recruiter in depth so that the recruiter understands the key points to look for. You can’t assume an external recruiter understands the unwritten rules of your business because she doesn’t work there.
• Consider the costs. If you hire more than one or two professional people per year with a headhunter, the associated costs can become higher than an in-house, salaried recruiter.
• Keep communication channels open. Hiring managers often change criteria during the recruitment process. If you aren’t communicating clearly, your recruiter will waste valuable time looking for the wrong candidates.
• Figure out how you will coordinate your onboarding process. Frequently, in-house recruiters handle that part of the process. If you outsource recruitment, someone in-house will need to process the paperwork and new-hire orientation.

In-house recruitment benefits

Whether you’re growing or in a high-turnover industry, you might consider bringing the whole thing in-house – the technology is there to help even the leanest hiring teams manage the recruitment process, and at cost. And the benefits of doing it internally can far outweigh the conveniences of outsourced recruitment.

Consider the following:

• Your recruiter can help identify internal candidates that may or may not apply for an open position. Someone with an intimate knowledge of the business will have powerful insight into people who can fill gaps when an external recruiter cannot.
• You can control costs. Many employers outsource recruitment to reduce costs, but filling two senior positions in a year with an external recruiter can cost more than a full-time salary for an experienced in-house recruiter.
• You have more flexibility. If you think you need to do a job fair, you can organize one. If you’re working with an outside firm, you may have to renegotiate the entire contract.
• An internal recruiter can help anticipate business needs. They can spot things before requisitions appear and plan ahead.
• Internal recruiters have a better understanding of company culture because they work there every day. They have a vested interest in getting the right people in roles because they have to work together.

Whatever you decide for your business, remember that good quality recruitment needs to be a high priority. Your business needs people to succeed, and that can’t happen without quality sourcing, recruiting, and hiring.

The post Why companies outsource recruitment (and why you shouldn’t) appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

1. Avoid bad hires

A bad hire is shorthand for a new employee who leaves the business within 12 months of their hire date. The US Department of Labor estimates that the individual cost of a bad hiring decision is roughly equivalent to 30% of that new hire’s first year salary.

Bad hires can be especially costly. For one, a longer time to ramp can result in delays in other areas of the business, such as a product launch. Even after all that time and training, a bad hire may never ultimately realize their revenue-producing potential at your organization.

In short, you have no choice but to cut your losses and start over with a new hire.

So, how can you quantify the cost of all bad hires to your business? First, you need to estimate a few numbers:

1. Estimated number of hires in the next 12 months
2. Average % of new hires that leave w/in 12 months
3. Average employee salary

Once you have those numbers, it’s time to start calculating. Follow this formula:

Cost of Bad Hires Calculation

For example – let’s say your company is planning to hire 20 new employees this year.

The average salary of those 20 employees is $55,000.

Historically, 15% of your new hires churn within the first year.

(Avg. employee salary) * (30%) * ((estimated # of hires in the next 12 months) * (% of hires that leave w/in 12 months)) = Annual cost of bad hires

First, multiply that average salary of $55,000 by 30% to calculate the cost of one bad hire. Then multiply that by the projected number of bad hires in a year (20 employees * 15% churn).

That brings your total annual cost of bad hires to your business to $49,500.

Total Annual Savings: Avoiding Bad Hires Calculation

Now, in this same example, using the formula below, imagine you’re able to decrease bad hires by 25% using the ATS you’ve selected. It’s as easy as taking that $49,500 total above and multiplying it by 25%.

(Annual cost of bad hires) * (% decrease in bad hires) = Total annual savings from avoiding bad hires

That totals $12,375 in bad hires, alone – a worthy addition to the ROI of an ATS.

So, how does a good ATS help you avoid bad hires? It helps you:

• Find more qualified and diverse candidates to choose from. With Workable, you can find more qualified candidates using proactive sourcing tools like AI Recruiter, People Search and Referrals.
• Make better hiring decisions with fair and consistent evaluations. With Workable, use standard interview kits and scorecards, objective cognitive pre-employment assessments, and one-way video interviews to help you screen more thoroughly at scale.
• Engage your hiring managers from the start. With Workable’s click-efficient UI, global support and industry-leading mobile app, hiring managers will be more engaged throughout the entire process.

2. Reduce external costs

Think about all of the extra money you spend on different softwares and services in your tech stack – can you eliminate any of them with a good ATS? In the short term, your ATS will cost money, but in the long term it can actually save you money.

With Workable, for example, most customers can rely less on external agencies and costly third-party sourcing tools because Workable has a full suite of sourcing features built right into the ATS.

Now, you need to show that to finance. How can you calculate the reduction in external costs to your business with an ATS? Think about the following:

1. Average annual spend on job boards and third-party sourcing tools
2. Average annual spend on agency fees
3. Average annual spend on third-party tools (like e-signatures, assessments providers, video interview providers, texting providers, etc.)

First, add these costs together to understand the total cost of all of your external recruitment tools. Then, think about which ones a good ATS can help with. You’ll find that you can reduce some costs – and eliminate others outright. Remember, in the eyes of finance, every little bit of savings helps.

For example, if you can decrease reliance on expensive external staffing agencies by just 20% AND get rid of just one other third-party subscription, the combined savings from these alone will likely far outweigh the cost of the ATS you’re asking finance to approve.

Total Annual External Costs Calculation

Let’s try out this scenario: every year, your company spends $20,000 on sponsored job posts and third-party sourcing tools. Add to that another $37,000 on agency fees, bringing that total to $57,000.

That’s not all; there’s another $15,000 being spent per year in combined costs for e-signature software to get those employment contracts signed, plus a texting tool so you can quickly contact interested applicants.

Just put them all together into one tidy sum: your total external costs per year.

(Avg. annual spend on job boards and third-party sourcing tools) + (Avg. annual spend on agency fees) + (Average annual spend on other third-party tools) = Total external costs per year

In this case, the total annual cost to your business of these external tools amounts to $72,000.

Total Annual Savings: Reducing External Costs Calculation

Now, imagine that you decrease the reliance on your sponsored posts and external agencies by just 20% now that you’re able to use passive sourcing features and a referrals platform. Plus, the new ATS includes e-signature offer letters and texting built right into the software – so you can fully eliminate the cost of those subscriptions.

So, in this case, you take that $57,000 spent on agencies, sponsored posts, and other third-party sourcing tools, multiply that by 20% – bringing the total to $11,400.

((Annual spend on agencies, sponsored posts and third-party sourcing tools) * (% decrease in)) + (Average annual spend on other third-party tools)) = Total annual savings from reducing external costs

Add the annual costs of the other third-party tools ($15,000), and you have $26,400 saved in external recruitment costs with the addition of an ATS. That’s a compelling addition when presenting the ROI of an ATS.

So, how does a good ATS help you reduce external costs?

• Native sourcing tools bring sourcing in-house. With Workable, best-fit candidates are automatically recommended for every job. Prefer to reach those candidates via social media channels? Workable makes it easy to extend your reach through custom Facebook and Instagram campaigns to those highly valued passive candidates.
• Most hiring teams rely on a suite of tools from different providers to get hiring done. With Workable, most of those tools are built right into the ATS, eliminating the need for additional, costly subscriptions. Native video interviews, assessments, texting and e-signatures not only save your organization money, but they create a more natural and cohesive candidate experience.

3. Increase recruiter productivity

One way to demonstrate the value an ATS provides is to calculate the bottom-line impact of a more productive recruiting team. This is especially important for scaling companies, where the talent team is often asked to do a lot more with the same resources – or in some cases, leaner teams and budgets.

Our first impulse is to often use time-saved to demonstrate ROI — but for a finance team that’s focused more on revenue, time doesn’t always calculate well. Yet, you can still make a strong impression on your C-suite and decision makers when you highlight the real value of time in terms of salary.

So, what’s the best way to calculate this? You’ll need these inputs:

1. Number of recruiters on your team
2. Average recruiter salary + benefits
3. Estimated increase in productivity

Added Recruiter Productivity Calculation

Now, let’s say there are three recruiters on your team, with an average salary of $71,500 (including benefits). You can increase the productivity of the team by 20% with an ATS that reduces or even eliminates bottlenecks via automated email scheduling, automatic approval workflows, and more engaged hiring managers.

You’re looking at total cost savings of $42,900 – that’s over half the cost of an additional recruiter! That speaks volumes for the ROI of an ATS.

Total Annual Savings: Increased Recruiter Productivity Calculation

(Number of recruiters) X (Average salary + benefits) X (% increase in productivity) = Total cost savings from increased recruiter productivity

So, how does a good ATS help you increase recruiter productivity?

• Intelligent automations that eliminate tedious, administrative tasks and reduce human error. With Workable, automated actions keep interview scheduling and candidate communication completely streamlined.
• Engagement and collaboration is key. Your ATS should keep the entire hiring team engaged from the start. Workable’s mobile app is the perfect personal hiring assistant for busy hiring managers, and our two-way email and calendar sync keeps all communication easy to find in one place.

4. Decreased time to fill

Reducing time to hire and time to fill are at the top of every recruiter’s wishlist. And, at first, it seems pretty straightforward to measure. After all, if your time to fill was reduced to 29 days from 36 days after you implemented your ATS, it stands to reason that your new ATS reduced your time to fill by seven days. Pretty simple stuff, right?

But, that doesn’t really tell the whole story. Reducing time to fill can have a massive impact on your business. With a few simple calculations, you can help your C-suite understand how critical that seven-day reduction can be to the success of your organization.

So, how can you better quantify the ROI of decreasing time to fill?

You’ll need a few key inputs for this one:

1. Current time to hire
2. Desired time to hire (what you think a good ATS will help you achieve)
3. Estimated number of hires in the next 12 months
4. Annual company revenue
5. Number of full-time employees in your company

Total Cost of Time to Fill Calculation

Calculating the total cost of our time to fill will take a few steps. The first thing we’ll do is calculate revenue per employee:

(Annual company revenue) / (Number of full-time employees) = Revenue per employee

Next, we’re going to to calculate the cost of vacancy, per day using 220 (roughly the number of working days in a calendar year if you’re in the US, for instance):

(Revenue per employee) / (220) = Cost of vacancy per day

To calculate the total vacancy cost for your organization, simply multiply cost of vacancy per day by current time to fill and the number of estimated hires for the next 12 months:

((Cost of vacancy per day) * (current time to fill)) * (Number of estimated hires in the next 12 months) = Total cost of time to fill

For example: you’re a company with $2.9 million in revenue. You have 60 full-time employees and you want to add 30 more over the next 12 months. This means your revenue per employee is roughly $48,300. Divide that by 220 working days, and you have a cost of vacancy per day of roughly $220.

Multiply that cost of vacancy per day by those 30 additional employees you plan to hire, and multiply that by your current time to fill of 36 days – and your total cost of time to fill is about $237,600.

With that, you can calculate the total annual savings when you decrease your time to fill by seven days. That calculation can give you a pretty compelling case when presenting the ROI of an ATS.

Let’s give it a try: subtract the desired time to fill from the current time to fill (resulting in seven days in this case), and multiply that by the cost of vacancy per day ($220).

(Current time to fill – desired time to fill) * (Cost of vacancy per day) = Money saved per hire

The result is your money saved per hire, which totals $1,538.

Total Annual Savings: Decreased Time to Hire Calculation

You can then project your savings out over the entire year when you multiply your money saved per hire ($1,540) by the 30 hires planned over the next 12 months.

(Money saved per hire) X (Number of estimated hires in the next 12 months) = Total annual savings from decreased time to hire

The result is your total annual savings from your decreased time to fill, which in this scenario would be $46,200. Your ROI of an ATS just got even stronger!

So, how does a good ATS help you decrease time to fill? It helps you:

• Attract more qualified candidates. The faster the right candidates find you, the faster you can hire them! With Workable, you can expand your reach with one-click job board posting and boost your brand with a highly customizable and engaging careers page.
• Create a modern candidate experience. From the moment a candidate applies to the moment they (electronically!) sign the job offer – Workable is designed to make it easy, fast and enjoyable for candidates to move through the process.

5. Total ROI of an ATS: Putting it all together

Now that you’ve done your research, gathered all the inputs and made your calculations, it’s time to put it all together into one compelling case. Here, you’ll want to show all of the expected monetary savings, along with the added value the ATS provides.

Using the examples and calculations above, here’s how you can pull it all together into a simple sheet presenting the ROI of an ATS:

The post How to calculate the ROI of an ATS: A step-by-step guide appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

That’s not all. There’s the extra burden placed on your day-to-day with legal and moral expectations to meet diversity, equity and inclusion metrics, increased compliance obligations including data privacy, employee vs. contractor classifications, and wage regulations.

And all of that while working on the same hiring budget you’ve had on your desk since before the pandemic – but with one or two less people in your team. That’s a lot to ask of a hiring team – especially in terms of time.

So, to help you out, here are 11 recruitment time-saving tips to help you optimize your hiring process while working with a lean budget and lean team. Spoiler: Workable’s recruitment solution can help you with pretty much all of them.

11 recruitment time-saving tips to speed up hiring

1. Automate the process
2. Offer self-scheduling options for candidates
3. Take advantage of templates
4. Enable mobile-friendly recruitment
5. Introduce e-signatures
6. Utilize a user-friendly career page builder
7. Take advantage of AI
8. Clone the process
9. Post to multiple job boards with one click
10. Automate your reporting
11. Remote interviewing

1. Automate the process

When handling large numbers of applicants, it becomes nearly impossible to engage each and every one of them personally, even when shortlisted.

Luckily, there are tools available that allow you to automate different steps in the process. Steps that can be automated include:

• An initial thank-you email in response to an application
• A rejection message for those who are not the right fit
• Moving candidates through the pipeline based on assessment scores
• A calendar self-schedule link sent out to someone who’s been moved to the next stage (more on that later)

Remember, you’re still dealing with human beings in the process. An automated, impersonal, careless rejection email can be off-putting for the candidate and may even impact impressions of your company in their network. Ensure that the tone and style of the email is appropriate, and always prioritize that candidate experience!

Workable’s automated actions tool can help you preset emails and processes while providing the templates (more on that below) to help you get started on recruitment time-saving.

2. Offer self-scheduling options for candidates

Whether you’re a recruiter or hiring manager, you know how much time can be spent communicating back and forth when planning for a phone screen, a video interview, or an in-person interview at any stage in the process. Factor in the number of candidates involved, and you can see how you might be wasting time that’s better spent on other, more applicable tasks.

All of that can be eliminated, however, by giving the candidate the opportunity to reserve an available time slot right through a link to your calendar. Workable’s self-scheduling tool enables easy scheduling from start to finish – and is one of the leading recruitment time-saving tips in this list.

3. Take advantage of templates

Writing a job description or a series of interview questions from scratch for every job opening can be a time-consuming task, especially when you’re hiring en masse after a new funding round or expansion to a new market. It’s also potentially susceptible to bias in terms of the language used, job requirements listed, and questions asked.

Save your time by utilizing templates. Templates, of course, don’t need to be posted as is – rather, they provide a great foundation for you to start to customize to each job. Plus, they save you a lot of time in the workflow.

Workable has more than 700 job description templates, 390 interview question templates, dozens of company policy templates, checklists, emails and much more that can be imported right into your applicant tracking system.

4. Enable mobile-friendly recruitment

Recruiting is a full-time job for recruiters, but is an added workload for hiring managers and executives whose decisions are needed to move candidates through the pipeline. Bottlenecks will happen as a result.

You can alleviate those breakdowns by giving busy hiring managers and executives the option to sift through candidates on their smartphone. Think about it – they’ll be able to check in during their commute, while taking a break in their day, or when (ahem) taking care of other business. That’ll speed things along.

Workable’s mobile-friendly app enables all of that, and more. Ben O’Mahony, from Cytora, commented on why the mobile app is awesome for busy hiring managers:

“They don’t need to see the entire recruiting pipeline at all times. They just need to see who they’re interviewing. And this is quickly done through the Workable app.”

5. Introduce e-signatures

Getting candidates to sign that job offer so you can close the books on the process is easier said than done, especially when it’s a remote hire or a new employee from another location. Having contracts delivered to and from the new hire is a time-consuming process, and that piles up when you’re handling multiple hires at once.

E-signing can solve all of that hassle. Everything’s going digital now – especially as the work world becomes increasingly remote. That includes all the legal stuff, like contracts, in a fully secure online environment to boot.

Workable’s ATS comes ready-made with its own e-signature tool to meet those important signature needs and is a small but important recruitment time-saver.

6. Use a user-friendly career page builder

Careers pages, like anything else in your website, can involve a lot of design work involving a team that’s already busy working on marketing and sales materials day in and day out. Plus, there’s a lot of back-and-forth involved where you have a ‘perfect’ careers page in mind and you’re working with design to make that happen.

You can skip all of that by bringing in a feature that enables even the least tech-savvy HR manager to build an impressive careers page using click-and-drag options.

Workable has its own advanced careers page builder built into its software. And this tutorial can help you whip together an amazing careers page in a short time, putting your employer brand on a pedestal and attracting the very best candidates to your company.

7. Take advantage of AI

We’re now in a strange time where many companies are experiencing difficulty finding the right candidates – or even a satisfactory number of candidates – for specific job postings. This especially applies when you’re hiring in a hyper-competitive space, such as developers or software engineers, or when looking to fill a niche role – both situations that often result in a shortage of candidates. This can put the onus on the recruiter to seek out potential applicants – including passive candidates – which involves a lot of legwork and time invested.

But there are ways around that. Artificial intelligence, when used in the right way, can seek out and find great candidates for you based on your job description and other parameters that you set – including specific keywords, qualifications, and other directives.

Workable’s AI Recruiter was introduced specifically for this purpose. And it can come in especially useful for you right now.

8. Clone the process

When someone – especially one of your top employees – puts in their notice, it feels like you have to start all over again. Not only is it like capturing lightning in a bottle, it also takes time to set up a new job ad, put together a new series of interview questions, create a new assessment, etc., etc., etc.

What if you just went back to that original process that led to the hire of this amazing employee, and simply cloned it? Not only can you replicate what was successful before, you can skip those steps doing this for high-turnover roles such as in sales and hospitality.

9. Post to multiple job boards with one click

Your job description is approved and you’re ready to distribute. Next steps:

• Step 1: Post job ad to LinkedIn.
• Step 2: Post job ad to Facebook Jobs.
• Step 3: Post job to Indeed.
• Step 4: Post job ad to Glassdoor.
• Step 5: Post job ad to Monster.
• Step 6: ….

You get the point. Doing that over and over and over again can eat up all the hours in a day, and that’s just for a single job opportunity. Although it’s standard to expect an ATS to deliver job ads to numerous job sites automatically, you want to be sure you have the right ATS to post to not just the most job sites, but the right ones.

Check out the list of Workable’s existing job site integrations to get an idea of how many job sites you can post to with one click using our recruitment software.

10. Automate your reporting

Reporting on recruitment metrics is crucial to successful hiring, but it can take quite a bit of time to analyze data and then break it down into reports for the C-suite who are most interested in how your hiring process impacts the bottom line.

There are many different reasons you need reports in hiring, such as:

• Identifying breakdowns and bottlenecks in the process that can prolong time to hire and time to fill
• Understanding where your best candidates are coming from
• Tracking diversity metrics in your candidate pool
• Staying compliant with government-mandated requirements, including EEOC, CCPA, and GDPR protocols

All that data in your recruitment process can be automatically turned into reports to benefit all of the above, including having reports sent directly from your software. Workable’s software has reporting functions to meet each of the above needs.

11. Remote interviewing

While it’s not necessarily time taken out of your own work day, you’re asking a lot of a candidate when you schedule an in-person interview. Assuming the commute takes an hour each way door-to-door, you’re making the candidate spend three full hours – or more – for a one-hour interview. Not only that, it doesn’t bode well for candidate experience, especially in an increasingly digital work world. A recruitment time-saving tip here will be invaluable.

With a few exceptions – such as the more intensive later-stage interviews – do your candidates a favor and carry out your interviews via phone or, ideally, video. There’s a multitude of tools out there that can help you – including Workable’s one-way video interviewing tool which can take care of the screening stage and even that first “interview” stage in one step.

Optimize and grow

Of course, these time-saving recruitment tips won’t free up your entire day – but they can free up a good number of hours in your workflow that can be better spent on the more in-depth work.

You can now invest time and energy into branding yourself as an employer, meeting with hiring managers to best understand what they want and need in a new hire, and overseeing new employee onboarding.

Not only do these increase your profile within the company as someone who can do the job without fail, you can better participate in more high-level discussions around workforce planning. It’s a win-win all around – for yourself, for candidates, and the company as a whole.

The post 11 recruitment time-saving tips for the overburdened recruiter 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.

Events since 2020 have been a much-needed eye-opener for many corporations, with many taking steps to move DEI into a central role of their corporate culture and strategy. Diversity in the workplace is already a key component, with clear benefits. Mentoring is part of that – and at a deeper level, diversity mentoring.

The benefits of mentoring

Organizations that want to attract, engage, and retain diverse talent make this happen through mentoring as a key piece of their talent development strategy. The benefits of mentoring are huge:

• It helps employees feel more valued by their employers
• It builds supportive networks with coworkers
• It develops critical skills that help advance their careers

And that’s just the first phase of output.

All of those can lead to job growth opportunities, more engagement at work, and longer tenures with the organization.

A survey of mentees and mentors by MentorcliQ found impressive results:

• 90% of participants said mentoring helped them develop a positive relationship with another individual in their company
• 89% said mentoring allowed them to contribute to the success of their company
• 89% said that they felt like their company valued their development because they offered a mentoring program

The importance of diversity mentoring

Taking this a step further, many companies that want to retain and engage diverse talent in the workplace have implemented diversity mentoring programs as a way to provide visibility with senior leadership for diverse employees.

One type of these programs is reverse mentoring, which are different from other types of mentoring programs in that senior leaders participate in the programs as mentees being mentored by junior employees – in the case of reverse diverse mentoring, junior employees from diverse backgrounds are the mentors with executive mentees.

This type of program helps mentees and executives increase skill and knowledge in sometimes challenging content areas, while also bolstering engagement and career opportunities for mentors.

According to Camille Lloyd of Gallup, “Black employees in the U.S. are significantly less likely than White employees to report seeing leaders of their own race in their organization, and that appears to matter in creating a healthy corporate culture.”

Addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion through a mentoring program has become a way for many companies to engage employees in a thoughtful way that doesn’t involve stale training sessions that will soon be forgotten.

Examples of diversity mentoring

A great example of a strong diversity mentoring program is the Nielsen marketing research company which, as part of a larger diversity and inclusion strategy, implemented mentoring as an innovative and thoughtful way to weave DEI into all aspects of career development.

Fueled by employee resource groups, its MyMentor program matches mentors and mentees of all backgrounds across different functions, lines of business, and job grades for increased social connectedness, developmental learning, and culture building.

In the program, individual and career development emerged as key discussion topics and the program has received rave reviews from people at all levels of the company as well as amongst participants. In the program, Nielsen learned about the challenges their associates faced and how to overcome them, as well as what areas of professional development were most important.

Since its initial success, Nielsen expanded their programs to support targeted growth throughout the organization.

How to create a diversity mentoring program

Every mentoring program is different, but a few key best practices should be followed to ensure success. First, standardize the process with the following:

Determine length of program

Based on what we’ve seen, a six-month timeline is beneficial for both mentors and mentees. This duration strikes the right balance between being long enough to work on goals related to more complex topic areas such as implicit bias, while also being cognizant of demands on senior leaders’ time.

Establish relationship structure

One of the defining characteristics of these mentoring programs is a one-to-one (1:1) match between mentees (senior leaders) and mentors (junior employees).

Participants often discuss complex and sensitive topics, which requires a high level of trust and comfort best accomplished in a one-to-one format.

Use match logic

Mentoring programs use a combination of rules based on participant profile, stated preferences, and the results of a personality survey for match scores. A few areas we’ve found are important for matching including: identity & experience, expertise and job-specific skills.

We’ve also found it’s essential that the mentor and mentee do not have a direct-report relationship. Plus, if the company is distributed across time zones, ensure that there’s enough overlap in the work schedules of both mentor and mentee.

Don’t forget the human

While other factors might impact the type of matching process used, we’ve found Admin Matching works best for these programs. Program administrators, who are able to see all of the data and make the best decisions, can select participants based on their match score, and then match mentoring partners across different aspects of identity and experience.

Diversity mentoring action items

Once you’ve put down the groundwork, it’s time for action. To implement a powerful and effective top-down mentoring program that will help retain and engage diverse talent, follow these four tips:

1. Listen

Listen to your diverse employee populations. Ask them what they need, understand the obstacles they face, and work to uncover what will help them advance and grow with your organization.

2. Include

Include your diverse employees in the program planning process, get their input on key factors of your mentoring program design, and ask them to be ambassadors for the program to help spread the word.

3. Act

Act on the feedback you hear from the employees, create a program that reflects their needs, and look for opportunities for growth within your mentoring program to help you create and sustain a mentoring culture.

4. Expand

This is only a first step. Use feedback from your mentoring program to understand where additional opportunities may be necessary. Include supporting sponsorship opportunities, paid anti-racism / racial justice education, and encouraging community building through employee resource groups for starters.

Research shows that diverse workforces outperform less diverse organizations by 35% in profitability. Diversity mentoring programs are instrumental in helping achieve diversity, equity and inclusion goals; in fact, it may be the springboard you need.

Lora Zotter is the VP of Employee Experience at MentorcliQ, a mentoring software solution that helps organizations launch, support, and grow high-impact employee mentoring programs. As VP of Employee Experience, she makes sure MentorcliQ is an amazing place to work by leading talent attraction, onboarding, and retention initiatives.

The post How to create a diversity mentoring program 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.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Evaluating free vs. paid applicant tracking software
  • Features you can expect on a free ATS plan
  • Features likely to be missing from a free ATS
• Who are free applicant tracking systems suitable for?
• Signs a paid ATS may be more beneficial for your business
• Top 5 best free applicant tracking systems
  • SmartRecruiters
  • Zoho
  • BreezyHR
  • Recruitee
  • Teamtailor

Evaluating free vs. paid applicant tracking software

Luckily, there is applicant tracking software available for any budget or business need. Rather than just choosing one from our list, check out the pros and cons of each to see what is right for your organization. After all, there’s no reason to pay for a level of service you don’t need and won’t use, but free applicant tracking systems do have limits to what they can offer.

Features you can expect on a free ATS plan

So what kind of features come standard with most free ATS plans?

1. Seamless job posting

One of the most useful tools an ATS can offer is the ability to post job listings across many platforms at once. This saves time and effort for your HR department.

2. Resume aggregation and management

When applications start coming in from the many places you posted your job listing, an ATS can help you aggregate and sort the resumes that you receive. Free applicant tracking systems have features built in to allow you to search for candidates in your applicant pool by background, job title, skill set, and other factors. This helps you pull the most qualified candidates for further research and interviews.

3. Communication & automation

Many free applicant tracking systems also come with communication features that streamline the applicant management process. This means that key elements of the communication process with job applicants – such as email communication, interview scheduling, and first-round interviews – can be automated in order to save time and labor costs. Depending on the type of free applicant tracking system you’re using, this can range from simple communication features to full, large-scale process automation.

Features likely to be missing from a free ATS

Free applicant tracking systems may have a lot of time-saving features to offer, but paid applicant tracking systems have some seriously useful features that you just can’t get with a free plan. These may include:

1. Unlimited job postings

Free applicant tracking systems often have limits on the number of job listings you can post at a time. They might also limit the number of websites that they cross-post your job listing on, whereas more robust paid plans offer access to many websites at once and unlimited job listings.

2. Resume storage, CRM-style

This feature stores applications and resumes submitted in a searchable database that your HR team can access at any point in the future, essentially giving you a ready-made talent pool of candidates interested in your organization, even if they were not selected for the role they originally applied for. Free ATS’ usually have limits on how long your resumes can be stored for, if they retain them at all. However, know that the recent growth in data privacy legislation will require more attention on compliance than in the past.

3. Social media functionality

A free applicant tracking system can aggregate and filter applications for your HR department, but it usually can’t pull information from social media as well. A premium ATS finds candidates through their social media profiles as well as through submitted applications. This broader candidate pool is a huge asset!

4. Analytics

Another paid feature is data analytics for your talent pool. A paid applicant tracking system can gather and analyze data on your candidates. It can also monitor for compliance and DEI goals when using candidate surveying tools.

5. Mobile compatibility

When you use a free applicant tracking system, you pay with less access to features like mobile compatibility. With so much work activity done on the go these days, it may be worth paying for a system that includes a native app or, at the very least, is mobile compatible.

6. Ad free & secure

One way that companies can afford to release free applicant tracking systems is by running ads on their systems. This not only makes for a distracting and messy user experience, but also poses potential security risks.

7. Scalability

Due to their limited features, free applicant tracking systems are not great for businesses that may need to quickly scale up in the future. If your business is growing quickly, it’s a good idea to invest in an ATS that can handle a higher load of applications.

Who are free applicant tracking systems suitable for?

Free applicant tracking systems aren’t the best choice for everyone. There are real limits to the features they offer, and in many cases, paying for an upgraded program is far more cost-effective. Here are some scenarios where a free applicant tracking system may work best for your organization:

1. Your recruitment process is pretty simple

There’s no need to overcomplicate something if it’s already working for your business. If your recruitment pipeline is simple yet effective, a free ATS may be all you need.

2. You only hire a few candidates each year, or have a small recruiting budget

If you only fill a few job openings each year, it may not be worth the cost of a paid ATS to fill those openings. A free ATS can get the job done in this scenario, with limitations.

3. You have an IT team that can alter open-source software for your ATS

There are a few open-source ATS solutions out there. If you have an in-house IT team with the bandwidth to tweak and customize this open-source software for your company, that may be a better solution than paying for a full service ATS. Bear in mind, however, that you’re also limiting yourself to your IT team’s capabilities and while the ATS is “free”, the amount of hours invested in customizing the open-source ATS solution can be seen as an added expense.

Signs a paid ATS may be more beneficial for your business

If you have a feeling that your organization could benefit from a more sophisticated program with better features, here are some signs a paid ATS could be worth it for you:

1. Your hiring process is complex

Larger businesses with complicated talent pipelines can benefit from the features offered by a paid ATS. A paid applicant tracking system can help you standardize your recruitment process. It can also make continuous hiring a breeze, which is great for industries with high turnover.

2. You hire many people per year

The cost of a wrong hire is a price no business can afford to pay. But the larger your organization is, the more likely you are to be hiring for a number of management positions, which can be some of the most costly to hire or replace. A paid applicant tracking system with better features will easily pay for itself in an organization that hires many people each year.

3. You want to free up time for your HR/recruiting staff

With the automations, streamlined communication, and analytics offered with most paid applicant tracking systems, your HR team will save valuable time that can now be spent on resolving internal matters or interviewing high-value candidates. A paid applicant tracking system will also keep your hiring team on the same page throughout the hiring process.

4. You want to keep track of standout applicants

A paid applicant tracking system often includes the ability to store resumes from applicants in an easy-to-use database, allowing hiring managers to search the database for qualified candidates, even after the position they applied for is filled. Again, as above, be mindful of compliance considerations when storing candidate data.

5. You want to find the most qualified candidates

Free applicant tracking systems simply can’t compete with the premium features offered by paid versions. If easily finding the most qualified candidates is your top priority, it’s probably worth investing in a service that will truly get the job done.

6. You want to audit your recruiting process for efficiency

Is there time waste in your HR or recruiting department? Has your organization gone through the frustrating process of multiple bad-fit hires? The automation and other features that a paid ATS offers can help your leadership pinpoint and correct areas of inefficiency and waste.

Top 5 best free applicant tracking systems

But not every organization can afford or needs what a paid applicant tracking system has to offer. If you’re still interested in trying out a free applicant tracking system, here’s a breakdown of the five best free programs out there and what each of them has to offer.

SmartRecruiters

SmartRecruiters offers tons of features for large firms to recruit and hire; their free version is great for smaller companies who are looking to fill fewer positions. Unlike many free applicant tracking systems, their free version offers most of the same features of their paid version, the main difference being limits on the number of active job postings they allow.

Zoho

Zoho’s free applicant tracking system is tailored for recruiting and staffing firms, so if you’re in another industry, you might want to take a look at the other free ATS’ listed here. That being said, it has many useful integrations like evaluation management, job description templates, and background check software.

BreezyHR

BreezyHR is one of the few applicant tracking systems to offer a limited version for free forever, rather than just a short free trial of the full version. Highly rated by software review site Capterra for its robust features, Breezy offers many features other ATS’ don’t, like skill assessment and a native video interview system. The free version only allows for one active position and one active talent pool at a time.

Recruitee

While free only on a trial basis, Recruitee is a highly flexible ATS with all the features you’d expect from a free ATS: resume search, job posting, and interview scheduling automation. It also offers integrations for internal HR processes, like recruitment goal checking, and workflow management. Recruitee does not include onboarding software.

Teamtailor

Like Recruitee, Teamtailor offers a free trial as opposed to an outright free option. With branding features, an easy-to-use interface, integrated onboarding, and mobile compatibility, Teamtailor is yet another great option.

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.

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Leaders must think about the employee experience in the same way they do the customer experience. In order to create win-win scenarios, they must become truly inclusive leaders, and listen to the diverse voices inside their organizations and take time to understand what’s important to them in order to unlock valuable insights that will inform future successes.

Bridge the gap between office and home

As the world reopens, competitive advantages will need to be leveraged in order for organizations to bounce back quickly. Creative problem-solving, innovative thinking, and seamless collaboration across teams will help them authentically communicate in a voice as diverse as their audience. All of this requires a different approach to leadership in the new world of work.

Before the pandemic, leaders focused on how their employees performed in the office. It took a global pandemic to break the disconnect between work and home life and give people permission to bring their authentic selves to work. Video conferencing calls have allowed us to witness how our colleagues interact with family, pets, or an inconvenient parcel delivery during an important meeting. In this way, we are now better able to empathize with each other and build trust within our teams.

Leaders now need to embrace this opportunity to lead the whole person in order to help both their teams and organizations achieve more.

Why managers need to lead the whole person

Employees look to leaders for guidance to help them overcome challenges. A caring leader understands that they will get more from their team by building relationships with those they lead. But to do this, they also know that they need to look beyond performance reviews and life inside the workplace. To lead the whole person, leaders must consider the mind, body, spirit, and emotions of those they lead.

By investing the time to see the world through your employees’ eyes, rewards can be unlocked via increased performance across your organization. But before you can lead the whole person, you need to build a safe space where every employee can feel comfortable sharing their fears, questions, and concerns without judgment.

There are many ways in which you can build a culture of listening. You can empower teams to create open forums like roundtables or coffee hours to connect at a deeper level with their people.

Whole-person leadership in the hiring process

It doesn’t matter if you are working in a B2C or B2B environment. We are all in the people-to-people business. Every organization must be as diverse as its audience to thrive and survive in an increasingly competitive environment. These changes also demand a different approach to recruitment.

The ROI of a diverse workforce that ensures everyone feels included and a sense of belonging will transform your culture and pave the way for your future success. By contrast, departmental silos and HR technology that feels dehumanizing to prospective candidates looking to join your team will stop any progress in its tracks.

Whole-person leadership is also critical in the hiring process, especially when recruiting new managers. If we fail to communicate trust and authenticity and set those expectations as we advance, leaders won’t like the reflection of themselves that they see. The bottom line is that employees that aren’t growing feel unappreciated and don’t feel safe or mimic the poor behavior of a bad leader will quickly result in low morale and a toxic culture.

Phil Cohen, founder and president of Cohen Architectural Woodworking, addressed the leader’s responsibility to lead the whole person with me: “We have to be cognizant that people present with their own unique lenses based upon their background. We take that in when we bring them in as an employee. They don’t just leave that at the door.”

The understanding that there’s a gap in perception between how the employer perceives the employee experience it offers compared to the employee feedback they receive is just the first of many stages of your journey of continuous improvement. Leading the whole person is not a scalable concept. It is building individual relationships with our people and paying close attention to the details of their lives.

We can now work from anywhere and everywhere. How we define the workplace has completely changed in just one year. From the recruitment and onboarding process to managing the entire employee experience, it’s time for a caring leadership style to bridge the gap and empower managers to lead the whole person.

Heather R. Younger — author of The Art of Caring Leadership — is an international speaker, consultant, adjunct organizational leadership professor, and facilitator who has earned her reputation as “The Employee Whisperer.” As a champion for positive change in workplaces, communities, and our world at large, Heather founded Employee Fanatix, a leading employee engagement and leadership development consulting and training firm, to inspire others by teaching the kind of caring leadership that drives real business results.

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• What is workforce planning?
• What is involved in workforce planning?
• How to create a workforce plan

What is workforce planning?

Workforce planning is the people side of planning, but some businesses skip it, thinking that people will just appear when needed. Workforce planning aligns core business goals with people strategy. It makes no sense to plan on a new product launch next year without thinking about R&D, supply chain, and sales staff.

Workforce planning is the tool you use to ensure that alignment.

What is involved in workforce planning?

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) identifies the critical points of workforce planning as follows.

1. Reduce labor costs in favor of workforce deployment and flexibility
2. Identify and respond to changing customer needs
3. Identify relevant strategies for focused people development
4. Target inefficiencies
5. Improve employee retention
6. Improve productivity and quality outputs
7. Improve employees’ work-life balance
8. Make recommendations to deliver strategic value through talent

This article will break down these points and how they apply to your business.

1. Reduce labor costs in favor of workforce deployment and flexibility

Labor is often the highest cost for businesses outside of manufacturing. Some estimates put labor costs at 60% and even 70% of expenses. With these costs, planning to reduce costs while increasing flexibility is critical to continued success.

This isn’t advocating for low-balling employees or providing rotten benefits for employees. It’s about getting the right people in the correct positions. An engaged, competent, happy employee will cost less than an unhappy, unqualified employee. Remember, turnover is expensive as well.

2. Identify and respond to changing customer needs

The classic case study of a company that didn’t respond to customer needs is Kodak. As the king of film, Kodak had digital technology early but decided to focus on film, thinking digital was a fad. It wasn’t, and the company struggled for survival, dropping from a peak of 145,000 employees to 5,000 as of August 2020.

Human resources departments need to be a bit of a fortune-teller to accurately predict workforce needs. Because SHRM doesn’t issue crystal balls, HR needs to work closely with each department to help predict needs and create plans for meeting these. Open communication between HR and each department is critical.

3. Identify relevant strategies for focused people development

The very premise of workforce planning is that business changes, and because business changes, people need to change. Figuring out talent gaps and plans to fill those gaps is a core function of workforce planning.

People development needs to happen before the need exists. Remember, you can go out and search for the “unicorn” candidate to fill a need immediately, but it’s often more manageable if you plan and develop an employee to take care of that specialty skill gap – if you do it right. This can mean training classes, graduate programs, or stretch assignments.

4. Target inefficiencies

If you’ve ever heard “we’ve always done it that way” as an explanation, then you know that the business has inefficiencies that can be rooted out. Good HR will ask; “What should we stop doing?” as well as “What should we do?”. You can find inefficiencies in all areas of the business.

5. Improve employee retention

Turnover is expensive – not only does it take time and money to find, interview, and onboard a new employee, training them can take months. Good HR focuses on retaining employees who have potential. (You shouldn’t retain just to retain – if someone is a toxic employee, giving them more technical skills won’t eliminate their toxicity.) Creating career paths within the company can be an excellent workforce planning tool to aid employee retention.

6. Improve productivity and quality outputs

While managers need to figure out how to improve productivity and quality, HR can provide support. For instance, are there policies and procedures that can increase productivity and quality? What support do employees get for reaching their goals? When HR takes a look at the workforce, they can spot problems that decrease productivity. For instance, an employee who bullies their coworkers can destroy productivity in a department.

HR needs to plan to find, coach, or remove such employees, as well as helping managers find better ways to do things.

7. Improve employees’ work-life balance

Employees are at the center of workforce planning – without employees, all plans are worthless. You can increase your productivity by requiring everyone to work 80-hour weeks, but your turnover will shoot through the roof, and your quality will collapse.

Through making sure that employees have sufficient downtime and are supported at work, your workforce will be a lot more stable.

8. Make recommendations to deliver strategic value through talent

Sometimes managers can undervalue employees – they think if they can get someone cheaper, they should. But, good workforce planning demonstrates that you pay for top skills. While we use the word talent often in HR, you really should think about it in terms of skills. What skills do these employees have that can make a difference in your business?

Remember that treating employees right is a lot easier than trying to squeeze value out of people who are exhausted and burnt out.

How to create a workforce plan

This is more than just figuring out who you need to hire. There are many ways to approach this, but here are four critical elements that will make your workforce planning a success.

1. Understand the company’s mission and goals

Workforce planning doesn’t exist in a vacuum – it needs to support the company’s goals. Are you looking to expand across North America? Well, that’s quite different from a company that is content operating out of a single location.

The company’s mission matters as well. What’s the most important thing to the CEO, shareholders, employees, and customers? Make sure you have that answered before you move to step two.

2. Conduct a present gap analysis

This is a systematic method of understanding the gaps in the organization. What is missing? While workforce planning focuses on the people side of the business, keep in mind that a gap analysis looks at all business areas, not just skills and talent.

People aren’t at their best unless they have the equipment, training, and support they need. This is looking at the situation now. Remember all the points above – you need to look for improvement in all these areas.

3. Project for the future

This involves speaking with company leadership and involving every unit in the business. You’re looking for where the growth will be and where the workforce will shrink. You want to determine what skills the company will need in the coming years, not just now.

4. Conduct a future gap analysis

Knowing what you do about the current employment situation and the business’s goals and projected path, put together what the workforce will need and look at your gaps:

• What do you need to reach these goals?
• Do you need more employees?
• What type of training will your current staff need?
• Can you conduct this training in-house, or do you need people to receive formal training or even degrees?
• Do you have a formal employee training and development company policy in place?

Make sure you look at external trends as well. In 2019, no one would have guessed the massive shift toward remote work, but now, you’d be remiss not to consider where the workforce will be in the future. Will employees continue to work remotely or will they expect to? If so, is your company prepared to support people in other states? Or do you want to limit hiring to your local area, regardless of where they work?

Of course, there are many more things that you can do to plan for your workforce’s future, but these will get you a solid foundation. And, one last note: remember to be flexible. Plans change, and your workforce planning documents need to flex as the world changes as well.

The post What is workforce planning, and why is it important? appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

You may even recognize that a diverse employee population where everyone feels included and their voice is heard is the simply right thing to do.

But, like me, you may not know where and how to start your DEI journey.

The challenges of diversity recruitment

This is particularly apparent in some industries including manufacturing (with which I have considerable experience), where 22.4% of respondents to Workable’s recent DEI survey indicated that they want to invest in DEI but don’t know where to start.

This challenge can be compounded where geography and demographics make it difficult to recruit diverse candidates and build diverse teams.

There may also be some discomfort that comes with pursuing a diversity strategy. After all, if you don’t already come from a diverse background or environment, engaging with others who are different from you can at first feel intimidating and uncertain.

To build and lead diverse teams, the approach I believe works best is to start by following your curiosity.

The staples of a diversity recruiting strategy

Growing up in a small town in Newfoundland, Canada, in the eighties was a very homogenous experience for me. With only one or two visible minority families in my town of 3,500, and probably less than 100 in the province at that time, diversity had yet to flourish in this flung part of the world.

But that didn’t mean that diversity didn’t exist.

For example, I remember one boy with whom I was friends being the cultural anomaly in my community as he was the only Pakistani kid in town. His name was Jesse and although we went to different schools, we played together and hung out during 5th and 6th grade.

For me, it was fascinating to be around him and his family. They spoke English with an accent, had different customs and beliefs, and ate the most amazing food. I was curious about his culture and did what any kid would do when they want to learn more: I asked a lot of questions and was continually inspired to learn more.

There are a few important lessons here that have since guided my curiosity about diversity:

• A spark is often needed to light the flame of curiosity. I love to eat so, naturally, my spark was food!
• It’s OK to ask questions about other peoples’ cultures and experiences respectfully.
• By being curious and continually learning about other people’s lives and unique experiences, you can add value to your life – and theirs.

Why is a diverse recruitment strategy important?

Apply that spark to your business: why does it matter to establish a diversity recruiting strategy in your workplace?

There are two prevailing arguments about why leaders should implement DEI policies within their organization: it’s good for business (21.7% according to the aforementioned DEI at work survey) and it’s the right thing to do (50.6%).

I’ve been fortunate in my career to be a part of many different types of teams, from homogenous teams that look and sound exactly like me, to teams with an incredible diversity of thought, opinion, and idea, with people from different cultural, disability, socioeconomic, religious, and political backgrounds.

I’m my experience building and leading diverse teams, here’s what I’ve found:

1. Diverse teams strike a good balance between speed and quality when solving problems. They develop more innovative solutions in less time, which leads to more profitable solutions.
2. Diverse teams have a functionally reserved professionalism that’s engendered through mutual trust and respect. I’ve always found this hard to put my finger on, but this fabric of professionalism keeps cliques, clubbiness, and groupthink at bay and is unique to diverse teams. When harnessed and employed toward common goals, this professionalism leads to better results.
3. Diverse teams are more resilient. Much like in nature, a disturbance to a diverse ecosystem (for example, the stress created with a new project) is hardly noticeable, while a disturbance to a homogenous ecosystem can be disastrous (think homogeneity and the end of the dinosaurs).

Now that you know the top “whys” of diversity recruiting, you must define your own purpose if diversity is to become an integral and sustainable part of your business. Once you do, here are a few steps to help you build and lead diverse teams.

How can you diversify your recruiting process?

Pursue your curiosity. The process of building a diverse team starts with you as the leader and your curiosity about diversity. It can be hard to know where to start, so here’s one option: Identify someone in your network whose background is different than yours who you’re curious about and with whom you can engage. Invite them for a coffee or a virtual get-to-know-you lunch. Let them know why you’re curious and start by sharing something about yourself. Don’t feel as though you need to pepper the conversation with diversity-based questions; just get to know them and you’ll each share your experiences naturally.

Seek new sources of talent where diverse candidates are located. This might be particularly relevant if your local talent pool is not diverse and your recruiting methods have traditionally returned a great deal of homogeneity in your candidates. Check out the diversity Working site as one potential source for your diversity recruiting strategy.

Hire ‘anonymously’. For the next position for which you hire, use anonymized screening tools when reviewing resumes and behavioral assessments to minimize ever-present unconscious biases. This means identifying the skills, knowledge, and abilities of the person you need upfront, in addition to their behavior style.

How can you lead a diverse team?

1. Know yourself. Determine your behavioral style (using a DISC method or similar) to understand better how you will lead collaboration and constructive conflict on your behaviorally diverse team.
2. Actively promote diversity with inclusivity. As gung-ho as you may be to build more diverse teams, the reality is that it’s not going to stick or be sustainable if you’re missing the inclusion piece. Take the pulse of your employees with a survey – do they feel like you’re listening to them? There’s a good chance it’s not as good as you think. For your employees, being able to voice their concerns, contribute new ideas, and provide feedback is important. To be truly inclusive as a leader, you need to start by listening.
3. Celebrate the differences of your diverse team, using this as an opportunity to add depth to the relationship between team members. Start with something casual like a culturally focused potluck where everyone on the team brings their favorite dish or a lunch and learn event where your team has the opportunity to learn and ask questions about someone else’s culture. In my experience, one of the most effective ways to break down barriers is through the shared enjoyment of eating together. Be sure to celebrate the differences equally – check out these 10 ideas to celebrate diversity.

We’re all in this together

If you’re feeling stuck in building a diversity recruitment strategy because of a lack of a diverse personal background, you’re not alone.

It can be hard to know where to start to build a diverse team, and that’s why I recommend you start with your own curiosity. Getting started in diversity recruiting can be innate and within your control, and doesn’t involve a big initial investment.

Let your diversity grow, nurture it in others, and you’ll be amazed at how exciting it can be to build diverse teams and realize the outsized results they can generate.

Luke Sheppard is an executive, manager, and engineer from the heavy equipment industry turned coach, consultant, and speaker. He’s the author of the new book Driving Great Results: Master The Tools You Need To Run A Great Business. Learn more at consultsheppard.com.

The post How to think about diversity recruiting strategies 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.

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.

A recent Mercer study proves this lack of diversity in leadership:

The demographics of leadership

• 85% of US-based executives and 83% of senior managers in the survey are white, compared with 64% of those in support and operations.
• 77% of executives and 71% of senior managers worldwide in the survey are male, compared with 53% of support staff.

Seeing these numbers, you’d expect some momentum to increase that diversity at the executive level. There is – but not to the scale you might think.

Contents:

• The demographics of leadership
• Prioritizing diversity in leadership
• Why is diversity in leadership important?
• Diversity in leadership: The payoff
• Diversity in leadership: The initiative
• Diversity in leadership: The action items
• Diversity in leadership: Leaders demand it

Want to see the full infographic? Download it for yourself here. Or read on:

Prioritizing diversity in leadership

In Workable’s survey on DEI at work, 64.8% cited diversity throughout the entire company as an area of priority in their overall DEI strategy.

But when it comes to leadership at the top level, just 25% of respondents included that as a leading priority in their strategy.

So, not only is there not much diversity in leadership, it doesn’t even seem to be as important as overall diversity in the minds of business professionals.

If you can’t point to equal representation at the top level, then how can you really declare real progress in your company DEI strategy? Ticking off that “diversity” box doesn’t mean much when the distribution of that diversity remains uneven.

Why is diversity in leadership important?

So, why should you care? Well, there are three major reasons.

1. Your leadership sets the tone.

Work processes and company cultures are traditionally guided – and influenced – via a top-down approach. If you have a lack of diverse leadership in your workforce, you’re not going to make real progress in the equally essential and more impactful cousins of equity and inclusion. They are all different parts of the whole, after all.

2. Your employees want to feel included.

Think about your employees. If you already feel underrepresented in everyday society – whether you are Black, female, non-binary, etc. – and that underrepresentation is even starker at the top level in your workplace, how can you expect to feel truly equal, included, and understood as an employee?

Related to both #1 and #2: The employee experience is crucial. We’re no longer in a time where there’s a clear separation between personal life and work life. You want all your employees feeling safe, appreciated, valued, and included in the workspace – thus bringing their full selves to work.

3. Your bottom line is at stake.

The payoff can be immense. While there’s no arguing about the moral imperative for ensuring diversity in leadership, doing so actually has a positive influence on your bottom line.

Diversity in leadership: The payoff

The data proves the real and positive business impact of diversity in leadership. Let’s look at the numbers from a McKinsey study:

• Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity at the executive level are 21% more likely to generate higher profits and 27% more likely to have superior value creation.
• Companies in the top quartile for ethnic/cultural diversity on executive teams are 1/3 more likely to have industry-leading profitability.

What’s more, if your leadership is homogenous, there’s a negative impact on your bottom line.

• Those companies in the bottom quartile for both gender and ethnic/cultural diversity are 29% less likely to be above average in profitability.

Diversity in leadership: The initiative

Let’s go back to our own survey, where we asked respondents when they introduced diversity in leadership as an action item. One in five said they did so in 2020. Another fifth say they’ll implement it as an action item going forward.

• 20.8% of companies introduced diverse management and leadership as an action item in 2020
• 19% will do so going forward.

Diversity in leadership: The action items

Do you have leadership diversity in your strategy or do you plan to? More so, what can you do to increase diversity in leadership? It’s no longer about raising a flag in support of DEI – you need to act to make a real difference.

There are many ways to do it – including establishing clear, attainable goals, for example:

“Our executive team will be fully representative of our society’s demographics by June 2022.”

You will also need to define action items to reach each goal.

For example:

“Implement a process to track advancement metrics throughout the organization.”

When you track representation in your hiring, you can establish a baseline and identify opportunities for improvement. You can do that using an anonymous surveying tool such as Workable’s Candidate Surveys.

Another example:

“Utilize tools to reduce unconscious bias in the hiring process.”

Hiring the right people to lead your business is clearly top of mind – but are you also doing so in a fair, unbiased way that treats each candidate equally? It’s possible that you’re unintentionally excluding or disadvantaging certain minorities, as suggested in another Mercer report.

You can reduce that unconscious bias from the recruitment process via anonymized screening where candidates’ names and other identifying features are removed from their applications. There are tools to help you there, such as Workable’s Anonymized Screening.

Diversity in leadership: Leaders demand it

There is a growing call for action from investors, and implementation of new standards and expectations are being set by regulators – including S&P. Some organizations are even seeing leaders stepping down on the requirement that their replacement contributes to a more accurate representation of the overall community.

If you do it right, you’ll be able to have a diversity pyramid that now looks like this:

Company diversity is great – but it’s the equal distribution of that diversity that really counts. It’ll really show your mettle as a business that values employee experience when you have diversity in leadership.

Let’s get to work!

The post Diversity in leadership: Why it matters and what you can do appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

There’s a lot more. Let’s take a look how the world of work has changed and will continue to change in the coming years.

1. EX marks the spot
2. ‘Moneyball’ HR
3. IT takes the wheel
4. Redefining departments
5. Going (fully) remote
6. Flexibility goes mainstream

1. EX marks the spot

Just like in Stevenson’s classic, Treasure Island, where X marks the treasure, EX is making a mark on the rapidly changing workplace around the world.

Employee experience (following previous hits such as UX and CX) is gaining momentum and moving front and center in the world of work., According to Josh Bersin, the value of the EX industry rose to $15 billion during the pandemic, which included surveys, feedback, case and knowledge management, and other developments.

In the past, EX was often an HR project on the back burner, mainly concerned with core metrics such as retention and productivity. It’s since moved through phases of development corresponding with business trends, including resource and time optimizations for a certain job, employee engagement, perks and benefits, and standard HR fare.

Now we’re seeing a fundamental shift in corporate culture, signaling long-term changes in EX through organizational overhauls.

While the brand-defining aspects of EX unfolded with bigger players long before the pandemic, including Google, Facebook and Apple. The new EX brings a deep culture shift in the business world and encompasses every stage of the employee lifecycle, starting with the initial candidate experience:

• The job ad and careers page
• The application process
• Screening call / one-way video interview
• Face-to-face interview (be it video or in person)
• Job offer and acceptance of offer

And then the experience of the role itself:

• Onboarding and training (including in remote environments)
• Working across and within teams
• The day-to-day of the role
• Management of the employee
• And every other element of the employee’s tenure with your organization

And finally, the overall employee experience lifecycle includes moving on to another job: how the news is received and handled, the transition phase, and even the exit interview.

EX efforts have recently transformed from passive observation to active action-taking, designing the full experience on top of the basic tenets of monitoring, surveying, and responding as needed. The pandemic has driven numerous challenges to the forefront.

Remote work has unique challenges for EX, and women are more affected than men – from parenting to racial issues to other inequalities underaddressed until now. From an EX design perspective, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion is top of mind.

As an HR practitioner, know that the advent of EX is penultimate in the list of workplace changes for the 2020s.

2. ‘Moneyball’ HR

Much like Brad Pitt in Moneyball, the new HR will not use their stats just for making reports, but also to pre-define strategies and come up with solutions for new challenges. This is a shift in focus from analysis to proactive planning.

The major upskills for HR specialists will focus mostly on soft skills: learning to identify problems and solutions faster, and implement them. This requires clear communication at all levels, especially in a remote setting. Clear discussion in a language that makes sense to the person you’re talking with will become crucial for a problem-solving approach to work.

Other skills that make HR a bigger player include:

• Analytical thinking and attention to detail – taking information from hiring managers, datasets, economic and hiring trends, etc., and turning that into meaningful guidance for your organization’s hiring plan
• Employee personas – i.e. defining your “perfect” employee and designing your recruitment strategy to attract those candidates
• Developing scenarios and strategies, and executing on them

These all need to be backed by a continuous influx of quality data. In doing so, the goal of the HR department will be to address individual requirements in more detail, but also to develop a strategic approach to potential problems and challenges, including safety and health issues of working from home, a plan to hire at scale, or the implementation of a new policy.

Oversimplifying again: the new HR needs to leverage people analytics while maintaining genuine connections on a human level.

2020 saw cuts in HR staff around the world, while the department faced entirely new challenges (which often came with a bigger workload). This is not exclusive to 2020. HR is already notoriously understaffed, even when dealing with an increased workload or a growing workforce. The pandemic has led to limited MOs in all types of businesses, leaving HR practitioners to find solutions on leaner budgets – and find them fast.

The new – sudden and unexpected – close collaboration with IT, business intelligence, and other data-focused teams might be the answer to these pain points, even in the long run. HR is now:

• Accessing and recruiting a new type of labor with different needs and requirements
• Needing solutions for new developments such as virus strains, vaccinations etc.
• Taking into account increasingly louder calls for greater diversity and equality;
• Crunching serious numbers into stats and reports.

The new processes and solutions need to be standardized, reliable and adaptable, since they need to accommodate for a diversified talent pool and new lines of communication. The need for quicker and better decision-making and problem-solving, with a leaner HR team and budget, while simultaneously incorporating new developments, is putting another department to the forefront – IT and data.

Brad Pitt’s character in Moneyball, Billy Beane, led his Oakland Athletics to a string of winning records year after year – all the more impressive considering his tight budget. One of the big developments in that story was the hiring of an expert data analyst (played by Jonah Hill in the film), who played an integral role in Beane’s data-focused approach to baseball.

As Jonah Hill’s character says: “Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players – your goal should be to buy wins.” Is Moneyhire next?

3. IT across all departments

The previous decade saw a steady rise in digital economy – with it, IT rose as a core function. IT is developing automations not to replace workers, but rather, to support them. As Josh Bersin says, “You’re getting augmented; you’re not getting replaced.”

The sudden shift to remote work in 2020 identified bottlenecks in various workflows: some long-awaited workplace changes were expedited to enable successful remote work. When executed well, it contributes to a better EX.

A much closer cooperation with other departments is benefiting IT experts as well: they are becoming multidimensional workers, not only IT specialists. Their soft skills are now more important than ever, especially in working with team leaders.

Closer cooperation with staff and the need to quickly overcome challenges adds value to everyone’s role. And the crucial goal is better and more uniform data distribution across all departments – including HR.

4. Redefining departments

As mentioned above, the newly evolved EX will require different functions and departments working more closely together in a flexible and streamlined manner.

Working remotely and managing labor – which can now be located across the globe – will require newly designed and defined workflows, including easy-to-follow roadmaps, flowcharts, clearly defined procedures, concept maps and similar fresh approaches to recruitment, interdepartmental projects, safety protocol implementation, and other standard business processes.

With the trend towards “flatter” organizational structures, employees now have a more direct influence and better engagement – they can work directly on solutions for their unique needs. These tasks often involve close collaboration with other departments. While this usually required a stroll down the hall to your colleague’s desk or office, things can become more challenging in a remote setting.

Which brings us to:

5. Going (fully) remote

Even as the pandemic becomes a thing of the past, workers will likely continue to be free to choose their locations. In fact, a Microsoft study states that 46% of them plan to move since work is no longer necessarily tied to a physical location. The shift to remote was also one of the biggest workplace changes we identified in our New World of Work survey.

This can work both ways: it means access to a larger talent pool for employers, but also a bigger job market for candidates. Likewise, tools are being developed to streamline recruitment at both ends, making remote work easier for candidates and HR specialists. Remote work also prompts dialogue on reimbursements for Internet charges, utilities and other home office-related expenses.

However, a physically distant work environment brings new challenges. It requires a proactive approach to re-skilling or up-skilling on all levels, especially soft/social skills, asynchronous communication, and resiliency. This will include both existing employees – especially HR, Management and IT – and job candidates.

Nevertheless, candidates and employees can now leverage all of the above for their own benefit, and it seems we have a new umbrella term for it: work flexibility.

6. Flexibility goes mainstream

The primary concern in 2020-propelled changes was productivity, as well as trust levels between employees and management. Both remained high throughout lockdowns.

Following this success, flexibility is becoming mainstream in 2021 and beyond: new work relations in a post-COVID place more value on empowering the labor force. The workers have more control of their time and careers, which leads to more engaged employees, which leads to better performance.

There’s a downside to it as well: working with ambiguity, always being ‘on standby’ for new measures and guidelines, etc. – but as is the case with every new trend and development, new processes and policies are introduced and adapted.

Again, like remote work, flexwork is less of a trend and more of a paradigm shift. In April 2020, Forbes found that 63% of leaders expected increased flexibility in time and location; by September 2020 that expectation grew to 87%.

Workplace changes are here to stay

From implementing safety protocols, to providing all the necessary hardware and software for remote work, to maintaining a sense of community, the leverage now shifts to the employee. The employee now expects these things from their employer. Not only that, but new candidates can leverage a host of newly-available options and requirements as well – as an HR practitioner, you need to stay on top of this with a candidate-first approach.

In the workplace itself, culture is transforming from mere ambient care to having proactive team members who are initiators, making sure all employees feel a connection to their work beyond their paychecks. This all means a better EX.

2021 marks a period of stabilization after the rollercoaster of 2020. It’ll define and consolidate what 2020 (sometimes hastily) set in motion. Let’s see how the new normal transforms into the next normal, paying close attention to our workplaces and work environments. With a touch of proactivity and a pinch of creativity, it could include resolving issues and progressing in areas in dire need of attention.

—

Silvana Carpineanu is a Marketing Specialist who works at mindomo.com. Driven by passion and creativity, she’s responsible for copywriting, advertising, SEO, and content creation. She does all of this knowing that for every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.

The post 6 workplace changes we can expect in the 2020s appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

We’re in the industry ourselves, so we know how overwhelming it may be. To make it easier for you to decide on an ATS best suited to your needs, we’re presenting you with the best applicant tracking systems in the market today.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What is an Applicant Tracking System?
• What are the Benefits of Applicant Tracking Software?
  • Are They Worthwhile for Startups and Small Businesses?
  • How does an ATS Work?
• How We’ve Compared the Best Applicant Tracking Systems
• Top 12 Best Applicant Tracking Systems
  • Workable
  • Greenhouse
  • Lever
  • Teamtailor
  • Jobvite
  • iCIMs
  • Taleo
  • SmartRecruiters
  • JazzHR
  • Zoho Recruit
  • BreezyHR
  • Recruitee
• Time to make a decision

What is an Applicant Tracking System?

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is a software that automates administrative tasks in recruitment and hiring. For example, an ATS enables faster interview scheduling, easier job advertising, optimized referrals, automated processes, and more. Overall, a good ATS helps relieve many recruiting pains that recruiters and hiring managers often face.

Alternative names for an applicant tracking system include: ‘hiring software’, ‘talent acquisition software’, ‘hiring platform’, and ‘recruitment software’.

What are the Benefits of Applicant Tracking Software?

It’s not out of sheer luck that applicant tracking systems (or generally, recruiting software) keep gaining popularity in the business world. They take a huge burden off the shoulders of hiring teams and give them time to focus on what matters – connecting with candidates and making hiring decisions.

Some major benefits of applicant tracking systems include:

• Increase in productivity and efficiency when hiring – particularly at scale
• Better candidate experience through faster scheduling and communication – especially in remote and hybrid work environments
• Access to multiple job boards and the ability to manage all applications in a centralized location
• Improved employer brand that attracts great candidates
• Valuable metrics and reports to improve the hiring process (e.g. HR analytics)
• Easier compliance with laws related to recruitment

Are They Worthwhile for Startups and Small Businesses?

In a word, yes. Everyone involved in recruiting, such as business owners, hiring managers, and recruiters, will find an applicant tracking system or recruitment software to be incredibly useful when building teams. Whether they’re making those first few hires or growing their business by adding team members, an ATS can help optimize the hiring process both in terms of time and money.

How does an ATS work?

Simply put, an ATS is a software that helps you standardize your recruitment process for a variety of reasons, including hiring at scale, operating with leaner HR teams, making a quick hire, and more. With an ATS, you can do the following:

• Posting to multiple job boards at once, exponentially increasing your reach across popular and niche job sites
• Scheduling screening calls, one- and two-way video interviews, in-person interviews, assessments, and other key components of candidate evaluation
• Moving candidates from application to offer in the hiring pipeline
• Communication between candidates and hiring teams
• Collaboration with teammates to enable unity when it comes to making hiring decisions
• Legally compliant candidate sourcing
• Candidate evaluation with the use of assessments and scorecards
• Employer branding to convey the company culture and vision
• Measuring hiring effectiveness through recruiting reports, e.g. candidate sourcing reports

How We’ve Compared the Best Applicant Tracking Systems

Each ATS may specialize or excel in specific recruiting areas. Before purchasing an applicant tracking system, it’s useful for organizations to compare several options with each other.

To do so correctly, they may map their individual hiring methods, analyze the problems they need to resolve or identify opportunities for improvement. Then, they can evaluate available systems based on important criteria.

Top 12 Best Applicant Tracking Systems

We’ve researched the top ATSes extensively so you don’t have to. And we’ve come up with these 12 best applicant tracking systems that will help you make the best decision on what to use for your organization. Of course we’re aware that we’re in this list, but rest assured, we’ve done our best to be as impartial as we can because we want to help you make the best decision for your company’s needs.

Workable

We know we’re patting ourselves on the back here, but we really think we have good reason to do so. Workable provides best-in-class recruitment tools, processes and automation in one complete solution. Whether you’re hiring employee #2 or 200 new employees, Workable’s scalable tools, know-how and support help you make the hires that make your business great.

With clients including RyanAir, Sephora, and Soho House, Workable is the solution of choice for many reputable brands interested in boosting their employer brand, attracting the right candidates, managing high volumes of applicants, and streamlining their recruitment process.

Companies who use Workable get from requisition to offer letter faster, with automated and AI-powered tools that source and suggest candidates, simplify decision making and streamline the hiring process.

More than 20,000 companies ranging from local chains to global enterprises have used Workable to hire over one million people in 100+ countries.

Workable leads all other ATSes in G2’s Best Applicant Tracking Systems list for 2021, with a cumulative score of 4.5 out of a potential 5 stars.

Greenhouse

We won’t lie – Greenhouse is one of the world’s leading recruitment software companies. It is listed near the top alongside Workable in many lists of best applicant tracking systems. Headquartered in NYC, its software caters primarily to the mid-market and enterprise, and integrates seamlessly with many other HR tech vendors.

Greenhouse offers many of the same features as Workable, with notable differences in product implementation, integration options, sourcing capabilities, hiring team communication, and hiring manager engagement.

Compare Workable to Greenhouse

Lever

Joining Workable and Greenhouse in many best applicant tracking systems lists, Lever is a recruitment solution based out of San Francisco and Toronto. It’s tailored to tech startups as well as midsize and enterprise organizations.

Again, like Workable, Lever offers many similar features, with notable differences in native product offerings, integration options, implementation and support, candidate sourcing, and scheduling capabilities.

Teamtailor

Teamtailor is a Swedish recruitment solution operating primarily across Europe, with a heavy emphasis on its employer branding and recruitment marketing capabilities. It prides itself on its native careers page feature, capabilities for marketing to specific talent markets, and features including text recruitment, referrals, and candidate nurturing.

Jobvite

Headquartered in Indianapolis with locations in Portland, the UK, and Canada, Jobvite started out as a social media-focused approach to recruitment for enterprise-sized businesses. Its platform augments the recruitment process with AI-powered processes, including the ability to automatically screen and rank candidates based on preset parameters.

ICIMs

iCIMS, which stands for Internet Collaborative Information Management Systems, was one of the very first SaaS companies in a fledgling recruitment software market in the early 2000s. It’s a reliable legacy solution suited for enterprises, and continues to present itself as innovative and forward-thinking with a continually evolving product roadmap. It operates out of the US and UK and enjoys a worldwide market base.

Taleo

Originating in Quebec, Canada, and now headquartered in California, Taleo is more of an all-inclusive talent management software than a dedicated ATS, presenting modular offerings based on the size and complexity of customer needs. It describes itself as an easy-to-use Fortune 500 ATS interface catering to candidates and hiring teams alike, and focuses on a mobile-first and data-driven approach.

SmartRecruiters

Unlike other ATSes which focus on startups and SMBs, SmartRecruiters is tailored towards enterprise-sized organizations looking for a larger solution for their recruitment challenges. Headquartered in San Francisco, SmartRecruiters is one of the largest ATSes in the recruitment solutions market, offering numerous integrations in a number of languages.

JazzHR

This US-based recruitment SaaS presents itself as a lower-priced solution that offers users the opportunity to rank, track and collaborate in the candidate evaluation process with custom workflows for each job opening.

Zoho Recruit

Zoho Recruit pitches its ATS as being designed for both recruiters and corporate hiring teams working together to build workforces that adapt quickly to evolving talent needs. Offering solutions to both in-house recruiters and staffing agencies, Zoho Recruit is a part of Zoho’s one-stop stop of business tech solutions including email, project management, budgeting and other needs.

BreezyHR

Florida-based BreezyHR offers an affordable, pared-down solution for companies just starting out. It promotes job openings on job boards, enables its users to organize existing applicants via drag-and-drop, and pulls hiring teams together into a streamlined communications channel that also includes the candidate.

Recruitee

Founded in Amsterdam, Recruitee is one of the newer kids on the block, having launched in 2015. It’s growing rapidly as a presence in the ATS market, with a user-friendly system that enables drag-and-drop options to move candidates through a customized hiring pipeline. It’s tailored primarily to SMBs with <100 employees.

Time to make a decision

Need help making a decision on the best applicant tracking system for your business? Hop into a no-obligation call with one of our product experts for an in-depth discussion on your hiring needs and pain points, and we’ll help you decide. Alternatively, try out our recruitment software for 15 days – for free – and see how it goes from there.

The post The 12 best applicant tracking systems 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.

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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.

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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

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The post COVID-19 and gender equality: The conversation needs to keep going appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

Subscribe to the podcast for more ways to move your hiring forward.

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7 stats on gender and COVID-19

Here are seven eye-opening stats for you on how women have are uniquely affected, shedding light on COVID-19 and its impact on gender equality.

Jump to the full infographic – or download it for yourself here.

1. Unbalanced scales

4.5% of women’s employment is at risk, compared with 3.8% of men’s employment according to McKinsey – as women work more in industries affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

2. A mother’s burden

Mothers are more likely than fathers to scale back or consider leaving their job during the pandemic, the World Economic Forum reports. They found that 17% of mothers reported a reduction in their work hours, compared with just 9% of fathers who reported the same.

3. Where’s the support?

More black women report that they don’t feel supported by their manager, compared with women and men of other races. According to a report collaboration from McKinsey and LeanIn.org, 15% of black women reported that they don’t feel supported by their manager at work.

4. Burning the candle at both ends

Women in senior-level positions report higher levels of exhaustion and burnout than men, with 54% vs. 41% citing exhaustion and 39% vs. 29% citing burnout according to the World Economic Forum. This is likely due to a greater stress at both ends of the work-life balance as a consequence of the pandemic.

5. A matter of importance

According to Workable’s survey on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the workplace, 96.6% of women state that DEI in the workplace is important to them.

6. Strong leadership

The Harvard Business Review reported that women are rated as being more effective leaders than men during the COVID-19 crisis, with 57.2% of respondents in a survey saying women ranked positively in overall leadership effectiveness ratings, compared with 51.5% for men.

7. … and maybe this is why

Senior-level women are more likely than men to practice allyship at work, including active listening and mentorship according to McKinsey and LeanIn.org.

Important reminder: the pandemic isn’t solely to blame for the gender imbalance. It simply exposed the imbalances that have existed in the system for a long time, and we need to continue the conversation even after the pandemic is over.

We’ve got a lot of work to do yet to bridge the chasm – and it goes far beyond gender and COVID.

Progress depends on persistence – let’s keep at it.

PDF

Related content:

Gender inequality in the workplace: A lack of women in leadership

Gender inclusion in the workplace: Going beyond diversity

Why should employers care about the gender pay gap?

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Jump to the full infographic – or download it for yourself here. For a deep dive, check out our full report on DEI at work.

We found eight major highlights for you on how UK&I compares with non-UK&I when it comes to DEI at work. Here they are:

1. 2020 was a bigger influence on DEI awareness

The growth of personal interest in DEI in 2020 was higher for UK&I than for other respondents, with 33% of UK&I respondents saying DEI became more important this year compared with 22% of non-UK&I responses. The opposite was true for respondents who answered that it always has been important to them, with 58% of UK&I respondents and 71% of non-UK&I saying it has always been important to them.

2. The will is stronger – but what’s the way?

UK&I respondents are more likely to say they’re interested but just don’t know how to go about it. When asked about the current state of DEI in their company, 15.5% of UK&I say they’re interested but don’t know where to start, compared with just 9% of non-UK&I.

When it comes to top challenges in meeting DEI targets in recruiting and hiring, 11.5% of UK&I respondents said they didn’t know how to do it, compared with just 2.4% of non-UK&I respondents. We saw similar differences when it comes to challenges in meeting overall DEI targets, with 17.3% of UK&I vs. 10.6% of non-UK&I saying they don’t know how to do it.

3. Progress? Not so much here

UK&I respondents are much more pessimistic in how they perceive DEI progress in their own company. Close to half (44.2%) of UK&I respondents said they don’t feel like their company is making meaningful progress in DEI, compared with one quarter (25.2%) of non-UK&I respondents.

4. A more prominent voice and ownership

UK&I respondents are more involved in sparking the conversation on DEI – and they’re also in charge of it now. Same goes for HR. A full 69.2% of UK&I respondents said they themselves were directly involved in that initial conversation, compared with 48.6% of non-UK&I.

Even more (76.9% vs. 60.4%) said they are tasked with executing on DEI initiatives in their work, and 25% vs. 15.8% said HR had initiated that conversation in their business.

5. It is the way – and it’s good business sense too

The moral imperative for DEI is stronger in UK&I, and so is the business case. External influences and brand reputation? Not so much. We learned that 57.7% of UK&I respondents said DEI is the right thing to do, compared with exactly half of non-UK&I respondents – and more cited the business benefits as a motivator (30.8% vs. 21%).

When it comes to social expectations (13.5% vs. 20%), company/brand reputation (13.5% vs. 21.6%), and current events and trends (5.8% vs. 14%), UK&I respondents are less likely to choose those as factors in DEI motivation.

6. Total diversity > leadership diversity

For UK&I respondents, leadership diversity is much less important – it’s more about overall company representation. Equal opportunity? Much, much less than others.

A full three quarters of UK&I (75%) picked “diversity throughout entire company” compared with 64% of non-UK&I, and fewer UK&I respondents (21.2% vs. 25.3%) picked “diversity at executive level” as a priority area in their DEI strategy.

Strikingly, when it comes to measurable DEI data points, just 11.5% of UK&I chose that as a target metric for progress compared with 24.6% of non-UK&I, and just 5% vs. 31.2% chose “promotion / advancement” as a metric. The latter is interesting, as it’s an indicator of equal opportunity in a company.

7. Talent availability is an even bigger challenge

In recruiting and hiring for DEI, the available talent pool is one of the top limiters for UK&I respondents. UK&I respondents said the talent pool in their industry (34.6%) and in their location (21.2%) were major limiters, compared with 11.5% and 8.8% of non-UK&I respondents respectively.

8. Not as much buy-in at the top – but does it matter?

Executives aren’t as interested, say UK&I respondents. But that’s fine, because the responsibility for DEI falls on everyone – or no one. One quarter of UK&I respondents cite executive buy-in as a major challenge to DEI targets, compared with 18% of non-UK&I.

And far more of UK&I (51.7% vs. 37.6%) say everyone should be responsible – and far less (13.8% vs. 27.3%) say executives / management should be responsible.

What do you think? Let’s have a conversation about this, as we’re all learning together. Ping us on LinkedIn or email us at content@workable.com.

Source for all data: All roads lead to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in the workplace. But which one do you take?, published by Workable in January 2021

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While there is overwhelming support for DEI, and “everyone” is responsible in some shape or form, executives clearly bear the brunt of individual responsibility in DEI leadership – especially according to those in entry-level or individual contributor positions. The burden of DEI work also seems to fall disproportionately on women and minorities.

In this chapter, we address the following questions:

• Who is responsible for DEI leadership in the workplace?
• Who started the conversation on DEI at work?
• Who is actually doing the work in DEI?

So… who should be responsible for DEI?

Those at the executive or director / manager level are less likely to say that those at their own job level should take on DEI leadership at 22%, compared with 28.8% of those in entry-level or individual contributor positions.

Those in higher-level positions (18.9%) are also more likely than those in entry-level or individual contributor positions (14.3%) to say that a dedicated DEI manager / committee / task force should be responsible for general DEI leadership in their company.

When looking at overall responses, while two out of five respondents (38.6%) say that everyone is responsible for seeing increased diversity, equity and inclusion in their organization, 26.3% say that executives and management should be responsible. Another 15.9% say it should be led by a dedicated DEI committee, DEI task force or DEI manager.

There are two ways to look at this: first, it could be the tendency to say, yes, it needs to happen, but the actual work should be owned by someone else, or it could be that employees are looking to their leaders to set direction and define the culture of the company.

Ultimately, though, when looking at the very low numbers of those who say no one should be responsible, it’s safe to suggest that our respondents wholly believe we’re in it together and that someone should absolutely take ownership of initiatives to ensure DEI progress. However, we shouldn’t ignore that striking discrepancy between higher-level responses and staff-level responses in terms of DEI leadership.

Who started the conversation on DEI?

Our data clearly shows that the call for greater DEI throughout an organization is being acknowledged at the decision-making level, with formal action items being established in many cases. As for who started that conversation on DEI in the first place, 47.4% of respondents say executives and management initiated it, compared with 15.5% who say it was non-HR employees who prompted that conversation.

When breaking down the numbers by industry, there are differences. We found that 58.5% of those in Manufacturing and 61.3% of those in HR / Recruiting say executives and management ultimately started that conversation – significantly higher than the 47.4% of all respondents who responded the same as stated above.

Of those in IT / Technology / SaaS, 25% say HR representatives initiated the conversation, compared with 16.5% overall, while one quarter (24.5%) of those in Healthcare say they didn’t know, compared with 17.9% overall. Education (7.1%) and Manufacturing (7.5%) are more likely to say their customers initiated the conversation, compared with just 2.7% overall.

That is, of course, not to say that customer opinion isn’t important – it is. It’s possible that DEI is viewed through an internal lens (DEI in the employee base) as opposed to a customer-facing lens (DEI in product / service). There are, however, overlaps – the customer-facing component of your workforce can influence buying habits in both positive and negative ways.

Male versus female answers also turn up interesting findings in terms of DEI leadership. Those who identify as male are more likely to say executives and management started the conversation (46% vs. 40%). Those who identify as female are more likely to say that HR representatives (17.1% vs. 16.7% overall) or that non-HR employees (16.7% vs. 9.6% overall) started that conversation.

Who’s actually doing the work in DEI?

Ultimately, when asked who is actually tasked with executing on DEI initiatives, nearly one quarter (23.9%) say Human Resources owns that area – compared with 11.6% who say HR should be responsible (as indicated above).

“Our HR [department] drives initiatives, supported by the executive team. [At] the same time, we have an employee resource group that serves as a I&D [inclusion and diversity] committee, which brainstorms / discusses / evaluates ideas monthly. We are also training our managers and relying on them to act upon our goals during hires, promotion cycles, etc.”

We also asked respondents directly if they are tasked with executing on DEI initiatives in their own work capacity. Overall, 61.6% say yes. Again, the numbers differ when breaking that down by gender identity, with 66% of females answering “Yes” compared with 57.4% of males.

Those who identify as a minority in both their work and local communities also disproportionally answered “Yes” at 65.6%, compared with 61.6% overall.

This indicates that the work of informing and educating others on DEI is disproportionately borne by females and minorities.

We hope you find our survey results on DEI at work to be helpful to you both professionally and personally. Any thoughts or questions, please feel free to share them with us via Twitter, LinkedIn, or direct email (with “DEI report” in the subject heading). We want to hear from you!

Check out the other excerpts from our survey report on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion:

1. DEI at work: It’s time to take a deep dive
2. What does DEI mean for you and your business?
3. Is there meaningful progress in DEI? Depends on who you ask
5. Your DEI strategic plan: The road is fraught with hurdles
6. What are your top DEI initiatives for the workplace?
7. Your DEI recruitment strategy: What are your action items?
8. Time for a DEI action plan: We’ll help you get there

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In turn, mindful leadership is a mindfulness-based management approach that enables someone to focus their full attention on each project at a given time. Plus, mindful leadership does not only benefit the manager, but their team and business as a whole.

What are the benefits of mindful leadership?

As already mentioned, team leaders like Sarah handle various tasks on a daily basis. At the same time they must cater to their teammates in the best possible way. However, distractions and uneasiness can interfere with their thinking process and make them lose sight of the task or goal at hand. That’s why mindfulness can be a huge asset and enable team leaders to quickly regain their focus.

Besides that, mindfulness has been linked with many other benefits related to leadership style and overall performance. Here are the major ones:

1. Reduced stress: People usually get stressed not because of things that happen in the moment, but by overthinking past or upcoming events. By staying in the present, you surpass these stressors and overcome all challenges when and if they happen.
2. Increased attention: When you practice mindfulness, you focus your full attention on the current task in the moment. This doesn’t mean that you’re blocking other stimuli around you. You continue to receive and evaluate it, but you’re less likely to be lured to it.
3. Improved relationships: As a mindful leader, you can form more constructive relationships with co-workers. Your enhanced listening skills, combined with increased focus, helps you connect on a deeper level and empathize with your teammates.
4. Boosted creativity: Mindfulness is also linked with higher creativity. It strengthens your cognitive functions that lead to creative output, such as brainstorming.

How can you become a mindful leader?

So if you’re in a similar position as Sarah, and you wish to practice mindful leadership at work, you can start with related training. First off, know the assets of mindfulness and its positive impact not only for your work and leadership style, but for your overall quality of life as well. Then, follow these common practices:

• Perform mindfulness exercises: Search mindfulness exercises online and choose those that appeal to you the most. Whether that’s through a 20-minute mindful walk or a body scan meditation, train your brain to sync in the moment you’re in. Remember, mindfulness is a skill to be practiced consistently.
• Disconnect regularly: How well do you manage your time? Do you take time-outs during your workday or in between tasks? If not, then it’s time to start. You can begin with the Pomodoro technique, which will help you narrow down your focus on a given task and disconnect systematically.
• Relabel stress: With all the tasks you handle per day, it’s normal to feel stressed at times. To manage workplace stress, all you need to do is start looking at it as a sign that you should pull yourself back into the moment again.

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If you’re wondering what DEI means to you and others, Fadjanie’s insight is the answer. DEI means a lot to people right now.

In this chapter, we address the following questions:

• What does DEI mean to businesses right now?
• When did DEI become important for businesses?
• Why is DEI important to businesses?
• How much progress has been made in DEI at work?
• How important is DEI to people on a personal level?

What DEI means to you: The moral imperative

When asked about the current state of DEI in their company, the vast majority of those in our survey cited an active level of interest in DEI, with nearly two-third of respondents (63% combined) saying they have some initiatives in place or that DEI is a permanent part of their company’s overall mission / vision / values. An additional 17.6% say there is interest in their company, and that it’s just a matter of when or how to do it.

In terms of DEI strategy planning, two-thirds of respondents (64.1%) say the DEI strategy in their company either started before 2020 or had always been a part of their company strategy.

But is DEI becoming more important in the workplace? Yes, it is. DEI means more now to businesses than before. An additional 18.3% say they started considering DEI in 2020, and 5.3% say DEI will be a consideration going forward – meaning nearly one quarter of respondents in total (23.6%) are now taking note of DEI where they weren’t prior to 2020.

“We had DEI as a consideration […] years ago, however, this did not extend beyond hiring. Starting [in 2020], we have made top executive changes and are putting in significant effort to make sure that DEI is not only in numbers but that all employees will have an equitable experience at the company.”

We found that the number-one motivator in considering DEI as part of a company’s overall strategy is – as Fadjanie suggests – moral obligation, with 50.6% of all respondents picking that as one of their company’s top three reasons for considering DEI.

Closely following are employee expectations at 47.6% and talent attraction, engagement and retention (also 47.6%). What does DEI mean in the workplace right now? With the “right thing to do” and employee / talent opinions driving change and progress, it means a groundswell of support for having a DEI strategy in your business.

“We have just put some initiatives in place, specifically around racial diversity in response to the [Black Lives Matter] movement.”

Just one in 10 respondents ticked the “compliance” box (10.1%), and one in five selected the “business benefits” box (21.7%). This suggests that many companies have progressed far beyond both as a motivator for having a DEI strategy – and far more now because ‘it’s the right thing to do’ in response to an amplified call for progress in DEI.

Moreover, DEI is no longer simply an initiative – it is now becoming a permanent strategy for many businesses.

“This started with a walk-out of the company that was organized by an anonymous group of employees, but included a large group of employees.”

Personal motivation

Our survey dataset also confirms a significant personal interest in diversity, equity and inclusion. When we asked respondents if DEI means a lot to them personally, 69.9% answered “Yes, and it always has been”. An additional 23.1% answered “Yes, and it became more important to me [in 2020]”. This means a combined 93% of respondents say it’s now important at a personal level.

The responses differ significantly by gender, however. A combined 96.6% of those who identify as female say it has always been personally important to them or became more important this year, compared with 87.7% of those who identify as male and 93%% of all respondents.

While only eight out of 788 respondents in our survey identified as “Other” – two as gender-fluid and four as non-binary – seven did say it has always been important, with just one “No” answer.

The discrepancy in gender is even more striking when looking at non-prioritization of DEI: A full 12.3% of males say it isn’t personally important to them, compared with just 3.3% of females.

The numbers also differ when breaking down answers by whether a respondent identifies as a minority or not. Three quarters (74%) of those who identify as a minority in any category say DEI has always been a personally important topic for them, compared with 69.9% overall, while 8.6% of non-minorities say it isn’t personally important to them, compared with 7% overall.

Progress depends on who you ask

DEI means something to employers too – but that’s a matter of perspective. When we asked respondents if they feel their company is making meaningful progress in DEI – a clear majority (73.4%) answered “Yes”.

However, again, there are significant differences when breaking down the respondents across specific demographics. First, 71.4% of females think their company is making meaningful progress, compared with 77% of males who feel the same way.

The dataset also finds 71.1% of those who identify as a minority in both their work and home communities think their company is making meaningful progress, compared with 74.6% of those who didn’t identify as a minority.

We also identified differences in answers when breaking responses down by industry. Those in Accounting / Finance are much more likely to answer “Yes” at 85.2%, while those in Business / Consulting Services (67.9%) and HR / Recruiting (67.7%) are less likely to answer “Yes” than overall.

Despite all these discrepancies, there’s a majority of support for DEI in the workplace and that holds significant weight for companies in considering DEI as a priority. DEI means something. This signals an organic amplification in the voice supporting DEI initiatives – in other words, it’s a democratically driven decision led by people.

“DEI helps people to be themselves in the workplace and truly is important for overall productivity outcomes. People can perform better when they can be themselves.”

We hope you find our survey results on DEI at work to be helpful to you both professionally and personally. Any thoughts or questions, please feel free to share them with us via Twitter, LinkedIn, or direct email (with “DEI report” in the subject heading). We want to hear from you!

Check out the other excerpts from our survey report on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion:

1. DEI at work: It’s time to take a deep dive
3. Is there meaningful progress in DEI? Depends on who you ask
4. DEI leadership – and who’s actually doing the work?
5. Your DEI strategic plan: The road is fraught with hurdles
6. What are your top DEI initiatives for the workplace?
7. Your DEI recruitment strategy: What are your action items?
8. Time for a DEI action plan: We’ll help you get there

The post What does DEI mean to you and your business? 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.

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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.

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What is inclusion in the workplace?

Inclusion at work refers to an organization’s intended effort and actions to integrate everyone equally in the workplace, no matter their differences. Inclusion initiatives aim to increase psychological safety and the feeling of belonging, and allow everyone to feel accepted and valued.

According to ZeShaan, fostering inclusivity in business is not just the right thing to do – it offers a competitive advantage compared to organizations that don’t have an inclusion plan.

“Inclusivity leads to diversity, leads to innovation, leads to success,” says ZeShaan. “The inclusivity leads to diversity of perspective, which by proxy means you limit your blind spots, which therefore mean that you are able to innovate further, which gives you a competitive advantage.”

He’s quick to point to the positive impact this can have on the bottom line of a business.

“If you have that competitive advantage, you are going to succeed by whatever metric of success your company chooses, whether it’s revenue, whether it’s market share, whatever it might be. Ergo, inclusivity leads to success as well.”

In brief, inclusion of diverse perspectives and characteristics leads to higher performance and innovation, and benefits both organizations and employees. This has been widely documented.

It’s up to business leaders

ZeShaan believes that decision makers play a key role in promoting inclusivity, as they can carry the message across different company levels. In ZeShaan’s own words:

“It’s all well and good having a diverse workforce and having representation and while representation is important, if you’re not actually at the table when decisions are being made and you’re able to not just be at the table – but also articulate and be comfortable sharing that perspective without fear, without retribution, without any negative connotations – then that means that you’re not actually being truly inclusive of diverse perspectives.”

As a team or business leader, you should remember that not all people have access to the same resources. Be aware of this, and explore your own blind spots and unconscious biases, through self-education and reflection.

For example, ZeShaan acknowledges the burden a typical business hierarchy draws to employees from underprivileged backgrounds to climb the business ladder.

“All of the systems that we have in our society from government to education to policing is built on a structure of hierarchy and certain people at the top have that privilege and certain people lower down have to fight tooth and nail, just to make that step up,” ZeShaan says.

“That’s what needs to be dismantled. And that is inclusivity. You’re dismantling that system of hierarchy and actually all things are equal, all people are equal.”

Take real action

Once business and HR leaders define what measures they want to take to foster inclusion while taking organizational needs and characteristics into account, they should communicate the action plan with managers and employees in a simple and digestible way.

“You don’t need to overcomplicate it,” says ZeShaan.

But what you definitely should do is to ensure that your actions are proactive, not just performative.

“Make sure that their [leaders’] actions don’t just support, but supersede their words because it’s incredibly easy to talk the talk right now, because it’s in the current zeitgeist and en vogue to do so,” adds ZeShaan. “Deeds, not words. That’s the important thing. And hold people, hold leaders particularly accountable.”

One way to get closer to your goals is to create a culture of communication. If employees feel psychologically safe and valued, they’ll be more likely to discuss their needs and sort out potential problems with their managers and teammates going forward.

“You’re creating a culture of proactive communication,” adds ZeShaan. “And that’s essentially what it boils down to: People having the environment where they can speak openly, but with tact. Understanding and having empathy and compassion, but then also being tolerant of other perspectives.”

To help employees from underrepresented groups to feel they belong, encourage them to form diversity groups where they can discuss their concerns openly in a safe space. Then, invite the rest of employees to those discussions:

The “remote” challenges to inclusion

When asked how easy it is to promote inclusion in remote workplaces, ZeShaan was a bit skeptical. He believes that as humans we are not built to be remote and isolated. He explains:

“We are made to connect and interact and not primarily through video. But all of those other visual or other senses in terms of body language – even though we don’t notice it, smell and all of these other aspects, these non-verbal cues – we’re missing out on [those]. And actually, this is why it’s been so hard for people because we are fundamentally built to be interconnected social beings, right?”

In a remote workplace, we’re missing out on little moments that create human connection. This makes it harder to detect who might feel left out or disconnected from their team. Not everything is readily visible in a remote setup, including cases of discrimination or employee burnout. That’s why you have to ensure that you can replicate organic interactions and check-ins virtually.

“My role is not just as a leader for you to be able to speak to me but to speak to each other,” says ZeShaan. “To create that platform. Now it might be a weekly stand-up, a Monday morning. It might be on Friday afternoon. We get together for half an hour to check in as a team.”

It’s also worth finding ways to encourage employees to connect with different teams in the workplace. They might find people with characteristics or personalities they identify more with to nurture that feeling of belonging. ZeShaan explains:

“What a lot of people have said is they’re only really spending time with their teams, which is great. But if you have no real interactions with other teams or departments, but when you were in the office you would occasionally have a coffee or you’d go for lunch with some of the team or you’d be in the same place so you have those interactions, you’re becoming more and more isolated even within your company.”

Be flexible and open-minded

Remote work can be very beneficial for employers who want to increase diversity in their business, as they can expand their talent pool across common borders. But will they still be able to ensure inclusion for people from different backgrounds and locations? And can anyone thrive in a remote setting?

To overcome this challenge, ZeShaan suggests that businesses should offer flexible arrangements around remote working. For example, if somebody wants to work hundred percent remotely, you can allow them to and suggest some amendments, such as visiting the office once per quarter, to sync with the team if needed.

“Companies will need to be, again, inclusive of people with diverse perspectives and requirements,” concludes ZeShaan.

Inclusion in the workplace: the road ahead

More and more leaders are starting to realize the significance of inclusivity in our society and workplaces, so it’s best to act now – if you haven’t done so yet. Take ZeShaan’s insights for starters and see how you can tailor them to your own business needs, especially if you’re transitioning to a remote workplace.

As for business leaders, remember how impactful your voice is for employees and set the right tone. You might be surprised at the benefits this brings to your business and bottom line.

The post How leadership and remote work can impact inclusion in the workplace 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.

Stop us if this sounds familiar. At this stage your company doesn’t have a dedicated recruiting team. Hiring tends to come in waves, so everyone just pitches in. The tools you use weren’t designed for recruiting. Spreadsheets are great for accounting, they kind of suck at hiring. And you have been amazed at how much a single open position can clog your inbox.

You don’t have much that amounts to a recruiting strategy. Every time you’re hiring the way you go about it changes and no one is entirely sure why. Resumes are shared in different ways, feedback on candidates gets misplaced and the questions that get asked at interviews are sometimes made up on the fly.

Far too many of us are hiring with borrowed tools, no recruiting strategies and the nagging feeling that we’re losing time that would be better spent on our main job. Happily, there is a better way.

This guide was created so as to give you a quick overview of the main elements of a failsafe recruiting strategy and help you bring those star candidates into your company. If you get the basics, you can jump to the topics you’re interested in:

1. A hiring process that works
2. Effective employer branding
3. How to make a great careers page
4. Find employees: social recruiting and job boards
5. Find employees: sourcing and headhunting
6. Importance of candidate experience
7. Taking control of the process
8. Managing the hiring pipeline with online recruitment software
9. Recruitment analytics: how to measure the recruiting process
10. Interview techniques to hire the right employees
11. Closing the deal: making a job offer and hiring employees

1. A hiring process that works

There has never been a better time for businesses of all sizes to get strategic with their hiring. The tools needed to attract the right candidates and get from application to hire are both more affordable and more effective than before. All that’s needed to get started is a recruiting strategy that works.

The cloud is all silver

The advent of cloud computing has been a massive boon for small business. It has spurred a revolution in affordable business software that is no longer tied to your desktop. This has put tools that were previously the domain of large corporations into the hands of ambitious companies, regardless of their size. Until recently though, recruiting software lagged behind.

Recruitment software used to be something that was first installed and later resented. Often known to users as “the system” it was bought by people who didn’t have to use it day-to-day. The result was that, in addition to being expensive, it was as ugly as it was hard to use. Worse still it was designed to replicate the kind of complex procedures in place at large organizations.

The new generation of hiring tools, available on the cloud, avoid this legacy. One of the nice things about being small is being nimble. The right recruitment process is streamlined enough not to waste your time, but inclusive enough to let you hire ambitiously.

Process is your friend

Process is not a sexy word but there is nothing duller than working without one. It makes sense to have a standardized series of steps that have been chosen because they maximize the likelihood of a good outcome.

It’s worth understanding what makes a good job ad, how to get an attractive careers page, where to post jobs, how to manage applicants, gather and share feedback on candidates and schedule interviews with them. Proven ideas in recruiting strategies such as sourcing (looking for talented people who aren’t actively looking for a job) and employer branding are now within reach of any smart, small business.

The role of software in recruiting isn’t about replacing human judgement or putting human resources hurdles between you and your eventual hire. It’s about removing data entry, curing the admin headache and leaving more time for people to make good choices in their recruiting strategy.

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2. Effective employer branding

Employer brands are one of those things that you don’t have to believe in for them to exist. If you think that you don’t have an employer brand you would be wrong. And it is likely to mean that there’s room to improve the one you’ve got.

Employer branding as a concept has gained currency in recent years but really it’s just another word for reputation. The main difference is that it’s easier than ever for prospective hires to get an advance idea of what it’s like to work for your company.

More than Tweeting jobs

Wherever you, your colleagues or employees appear online whether it’s your company Facebook page, a Twitter conversation, or a Linkedin profile, you’re talking to two audiences: customers and talent. While this makes some small businesses nervous, it’s actually a huge opportunity.

You don’t have to have the big bucks of corporations like Heineken or General Electric to market your employer brand (which they do very nicely). Hiring is marketing but it doesn’t have to be done on prime time television. Digital platforms offer an affordable and potentially enormous reach.

Here are three things to keep in mind to ensure a successful recruiting strategy:

Show, don’t tell: use platforms like Instagram to show your team and your workplace

Involve your team: they are your best advocates

Be nimble: you don’t have lumbering corporate brand guidelines to navigate, try new things and be responsive!

In many ways the traditional strengths of smaller businesses such as personal relationships, approachability and smaller teams are well suited to social media, which rewards authenticity and responsiveness.

Feeling unsure what your employer brand is? Give yourself one minute to describe it on a piece of paper or a whiteboard. Stuck? Get some of your core team together and brainstorm on what is unique or special about working for your company as opposed to other similar companies? Is it the people, the mission?

From award-winning recruiter Mervyn Dinnen: “The differentiators for job seekers will usually be culture and reputation, and social platforms offer a great opportunity for businesses to bring these to life. As long as you understand why you need to hire, what your new hire will be doing and how their skills and capabilities may develop, and how their role fits in with the overall values and purpose of the business, then recruitment is about having the right conversations with the right people at the right time. 

“And there is no better way to achieve that than through the effective use of social media channels.” Tweet this

Don’t neglect the offline world. Whether it’s campus recruiting fairs, events for your industry, professional meetups or local community, be there. You want to hire people and they don’t just gather online – even as the work world increasingly goes remote. A coffee, a chat or a business card can go a long way.

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3. How to make a great careers page

It may sound obvious but your careers page is your shop window. While there are plenty of ways to advertise the fact that you’re hiring, the starting point is an eye-catching, informative careers page.

Whether candidates spot that you’re hiring on a job board, or hear about it through word-of-mouth or social media, they will usually head to your careers page to find out more and to apply. So there needs to be something worth visiting when they get there.

Beyond listing jobs

The most powerful employer brands in the world, like Google or Amazon, work a bit harder than simply hanging up a “we’re hiring” sign. Candidates want to see more than job listings; they want to look inside the company.

Attract the right ones by providing a real sense of the environment they would be coming to work in and the team they would be working with. Ditch the stock photos and show pictures of your actual team and your workplace. Add videos to create a sense of personality. Include testimonials from would-be team members, the hiring manager, and even those in the C-suite.

It doesn’t have to have the production value of this Wegmans video but it should offer an authentic peek behind the curtain of their recruiting strategy.

There is more to company culture than a pinball machine

After a period in which company culture got conflated with facilities or game rooms, some sense is prevailing. Most smart people want to know why yours is an interesting or important place to work. As Workable CEO Nikos Moraitakis once said: “No one ever came to work because of the ping pong tables. Even less so, stayed for them.”

If you have a mission or a set of values explain them on your careers page. People like to be inspired. Getting it right might seem straightforward but there are five common mistakes we keep encountering when analyzing recruiting strategies:

1. You don’t have a careers page
2. Your careers page is hidden
3. It’s not up to date
4. Your job ads look dull
5. Applications disappear into a mountain of unread email

Make it simple to find your job openings with a “we’re hiring” link on your homepage. Most of the time this lives on the footer, but if you’re doing a wave of hiring you might want to find room for it on the header at the top of the page. The best candidates are busy – and in some cases, are just poking around to see what’s out there. Make it easy for them to learn about you and your opportunities, and they will appreciate the effort.

There is no excuse for not having current listings. Why litter your shop window with broken goods or items that have already been sold? There are affordable tools, including Workable, that take the hassle out of updating your careers page.

Job descriptions and their shorter relative, the job ad, have long been seen as a chore. The downside of this is that most of them are deathly dull. The upside is that with a little time and nous you can write great ones which will stand out from the vanilla fare on offer elsewhere. For inspiration, take a look at our list of best job ads from the Workable job board.

The most common frustration among job seekers is not hearing back from employers after applying. Don’t let your applications disappear into a dark and unloved corner of a shared email address.

Gregory Ciotti at Shopify: “My favorite first approach for better job descriptions comes from Charlie Munger: ‘Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.’ Make a list of the language you’ve seen that sounds lazy, selfish, overused, or out-of-touch. Then avoid it. Describe the opportunity in sincere language. ‘A great opportunity’ is so often regurgitated on job descriptions it’s become meaningless.

Real opportunity is defined by what this person will contribute and why it matters. Attracting talented people starts with communicating that there is meaningful work to be done. Extraordinary people won’t take ordinary jobs.”  Tweet this

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4. Find employees: social recruiting and job boards

Now that the careers page is in place, it’s time to go out and find employees. First things first: Does everyone on staff know you have just listed a new job? Share it across your company. And encourage your employees to share with their networks on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Every scrap of research keeps telling us that referrals are the number one source of great hires.

What is social recruiting? Is it for real?

Social recruiting has sometimes been hyped beyond its capacity to deliver but it does help in recruiting strategies. You need to create buzz around the jobs on your careers page. LinkedIn has scores of groups you can join, mention jobs in or initiate general discussions around a role, a company or an industry.

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. Your biggest fans are a good place to look when you’re hiring. Add as many touch points as possible between you and prospective candidates.

Social media has a role but you cannot afford to ignore job boards. Depending on the nature of the role being hired, free job boards should be the first port of call.

Job boards still essential

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).

Beware! Don’t post your jobs on Friday evening. By Monday, they’ll be last week’s news. Wait until Sunday evening or Monday morning and advertise your roles when the candidates are most active. Most job boards use freshness as a factor in ranking job search results.

From Jeff Dickey-Chasins, @jobboarddoctor: “Job boards should be a part (but not all) of any hiring program. In particular, niche sites like HigherEdJobs, CollegeRecruiter, and BrokerHunter can put you in touch with targeted groups of candidates. The result can be higher quality candidates and lower hiring costs – because you’re only reaching the people you want to reach.

In general, paid sites produce a more focused audience, because these sites spend money attracting and nurturing their candidates. Be sure to ask these sites for additional ways to reach their audience – beyond job postings.” Tweet this

Why pay for job boards when there are free ones?

When volume of candidates is the priority, LinkedIn, Indeed, and Craigslist are the top sites for posting paid job listings on account of their popularity, functionality and reach. These provide the maximum return on investment (ROI).

Are paid job boards always the way to go? No. There are many jobs where the free job boards can perform adequately. 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. The decision on which job boards are best for you needs to happen on a role-by-role basis. You want the best candidates – so you want to target them where they live.

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5. Find employees: sourcing and headhunting

Advertising has its limits and referrals are great but sometimes they won’t provide you with enough leads to be confident that you’re making the right decisions when planning recruiting strategies for your business. Which leaves you looking for those “passive candidates”, the ones who aren’t actively seeking a new job.

This used to be known as headhunting although these days there’s also sourcing (think of it as headhunting prior to the kill). The key to this is to know as much about your prey as possible. The necessary steps should already be familiar from your hiring plan and job descriptions.

Picture your ideal candidate and ask these three questions to begin building a profile:

1. What experience would they have?
2. What kind of job are they doing now?
3. Which companies have good people doing this job?

Once you have a profile the sourcing begins. The good news is that there are more sourcing tools than ever and everyone will already have some kind of digital footprint. Github is strong on programmers, TalentBin is a good all-arounder, and then there’s LinkedIn, the biggest professional network. Browse profiles and make a long-list of prospects.

Now begins the courtship. You need to put your research to work in framing an approach. Start with prospects whom you can reach out to using your existing network. Utilize the hard-won experience of recruiters when it comes to cold-calling (usually via email) prospects outside your network.

Warming up the cold call

With a bit of research and a concise, personalized message, you’ll improve your chances of getting a response from the passive candidates you approach.

From Workable’s VP EMEA Rob Long: “When I worked as a recruiter I learned that it was worth the time to look at candidates’ public LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and other social accounts where they’re more likely to have a public following. It’s not snooping, this is where you can gauge an individual’s voice, their interests and even their wants and needs.” Tweet this

What about recruiters?

Hiring a recruiter isn’t essential but it can be a great shortcut to find the right employees. When doing so look for recruiters who have hired for businesses like your own. And who have hired for similar roles.

Contingent recruiters, who get based on the results they deliver, 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 but the recruiter just needs you to hire someone.

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6. Importance of candidate experience

Much of the emphasis in recruiting strategies is rightly placed on finding the best candidates. Considerably less thought is given to what it’s actually like applying for a job at your company. This disconnect is talked about in recruiting circles as “candidate experience” and all too often it’s not great.

There are compelling reasons for fixing this and they stretch beyond good manners. Firstly the majority of unhappy candidates won’t try again once they’ve had a bad experience. A significant minority of them tell their friends to not bother either.

Every hiring process turns up near misses. And no sensible company can afford to lose these talented people from their pool of potential future hires.

Measuring discontent

• 75 percent of candidates never hear back from a company after sending in an application
• 60 percent of candidates say they’ve gone for interviews and never heard back from the company
• 42 percent of disgruntled candidates will not apply for a position at the company again.
• 22 percent will tell others not to apply to the company and nine percent will ask others to boycott products

The commodity that’s too often missing is respect for the applicants’ time. There is a strong link between time-to-respond to an application and the final outcome. The overwhelming majority of candidates who end up accepting interviews and jobs are those who had a response from the employer within two days of applying. We call it The Two-Day Rule.

Employers who respond to incoming applications quickly, tend to be the same ones who swiftly schedule interviews, gather feedback and move through the hiring process in a timely fashion. Being disciplined and responsive from the get go is a habit that sets the tone for the entire process.

Don’t forget our Two-Day Rule

Get it right and you have begun a relationship with tomorrow’s talent. Burn bridges and your candidates’ frustration will contaminate your employer brand. With the likes of Glassdoor and Indeed, it’s never been easier to research a company’s reputation – and see them be hurt by a few negative reviews.

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7. Taking control of the process

For both the legacy HR software users and the newcomers, the promise of modern recruiting software is the same: it will let you take control of the process and your recruiting strategy will flourish.

From Fistful of Talent blogger Tim Sackett: “Recruiting technology has never been so affordable, meaning organizations no longer have an excuse not to have it. Great tech is so cheap now that if you don’t have it, you’re making a personal choice to stay in the dark ages of recruiting! For SMBs this has never been more real. SMBs can now have even better recruiting technology than their enterprise peers.

“While enterprise folks get big, vanilla-style recruiting technology, SMB shops can move faster to integrate the latest and greatest tech on the market. It’s such an exciting time to be in talent acquisition.”  Tweet this

At the heart of this is the applicant tracking system (ATS). At its simplest and most powerful it brings together job posting and sharing in all forms with the ability to track candidates, build a shortlist, schedule interviews and make new hires.

An effective ATS should enable you to browse rich profiles of your candidates and work effectively with your hiring team on a platform that keeps your notes, communication, schedule, comments and analytics in one place.

An ATS like Workable removes data entry from the hiring process by allowing employers to accept applications in the form of LinkedIn profiles or resumes and parsing them. Instead of jumbled data, candidates are then viewable in a database where it’s easier to make decisions.

The essence of an effective process is efficiency and repeatability. The secret to making a process stick is to get your team to buy into it. A tool that your team likes using will foster teamwork. This in turn will translate into better hiring – which should be the core focus of any recruiting strategy.

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8. Managing the hiring pipeline with online recruitment software

Everyone who has tried to grow a business knows that hiring the right people is the hardest part. Getting this right doesn’t deliver success on its own but getting it wrong pretty much guarantees failure. So it would be reasonable to expect that most companies would use a specialist tool to hire. As the working world moves increasingly online, recruiting strategies are more reliant on technology than ever before.

There is Asana or Trello for managing projects, Constant Contact or Mailchimp for email marketing, and Hubspot or Marketo for marketing automation, as well as Xero for accounting, surely hiring is seen as a specialist job? Not so much.

Beyond email and spreadsheets

Too many businesses try to run their recruitment strategies out of their inbox and when that gets overwhelmed (soon after) they turn to Excel or Google Sheets. Spreadsheets are great for many jobs, but they suck at hiring.

Jot down the basic stages of your current hiring process. Starting from the point where applications come in, it might vary a bit but it probably looks something like this:

1. Applied
2. Promising
3. Phone/video screen
4. On-site interview
5. Final interview
6. Offer

For anyone who has worked a sales job, this is recognizable as a pipeline. The hiring pipeline (e.g. this sales recruitment process) is a useful device because it offers a high-level view of where everyone is in the process. Recruiting software takes the influx of applications that come with effective job ads and sourcing and funnels them into a streamlined process.

Rather than floundering with an inbox full of resumes and a thicket of spreadsheets tracking candidates’ progress, the recruiting pipeline tracks and manages multiple candidates from application through to interview and an offer.

In the case of Workable, the recruiting pipeline enables hiring teams to work together collecting all comments, feedback, notes, social media profiles or assignment results on the same page. It removes the need for endless email threads and avoids the possibility of misplacing vital feedback or conversations with candidates.

When choosing a software that works best for you, this list of 12 best applicant tracking systems can help you.

Judgement not drudgery

The point of online recruiting software is not to eliminate human judgement, it’s to get rid of the drudgery in the hiring process. Saving time on data entry, coordination and administration liberates the people doing the hiring to concentrate on the people they would like to hire. There are hard people decisions to make in recruitment strategies, for everything else there is software.

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9. Recruitment analytics: how to measure the recruiting process

One of the biggest drawbacks of recruiting without the right tools is that when all’s hired and done, there’s no record to learn from. It has been a disposable experience. To extract full value from any recruitment strategy, the steps taken need to remain visible and repeatable.

Anyone who has undertaken hiring on any scale will have come across promising candidates who, while they weren’t the right choice at this stage or for this role, are worth noting for the future. It’s too easy to lose track of them with email and spreadsheets.

Actionable insights

Every hire is an opportunity to broaden your network, build new relationships and talent spot for the future. Recruiting professionals refer to this as creating a “talent pool”. Recruiting software gives you a permanent record of every hire and a head start on filling that talent pool.

It also unlocks the chance to learn and improve from the process itself using reports and analytics. When there is a record of where candidates come from (which job boards, social media or referral routes), how long it took your eventual hire to move from applied to promising, to interview and offer, it’s possible to unlock valuable lessons.

When there is more than one open position, recruitment analytics become essential because they offer a high level view of your whole hiring effort. And with it answers to these questions:

• Where are your hiring bottlenecks?
• Which hiring managers need help?
• Which positions need urgent attention?
• Which are your best sources for hires?

Too much of recruiting analytics has been about calculating the cost per hire. Cost per hire is calculated by adding up all of your recruitment costs from ads to external recruiters, referral bonuses, plus your own hiring team’s compensation and benefits costs, and dividing it by the total number of new hires for the calendar year.

As well as being tough to meaningfully calculate, for smart companies it may be the wrong place to look. The point is not to hire more cheaply; it’s to get better results from hiring. With this in mind here are a trio of hiring metrics worth considering:

• Time to start: Duration from ad to on-boarding
• Effectiveness ratio: How many openings you have versus how many you’re filling.
• Sourcing: Measuring not just the what but the why of your best talent pools

A lot of talk in the talent industry focuses on quality of hire. But this is a super metric that assumes you’re already got performance metrics, measurable core competencies, retention records and a host of others. Not having these is not a good reason to ignore recruiting metrics but it does mean the Quality of Hire looks more like the finish line than the start.

From Talent Culture CEO Meghan Biro: “I’ve seen recruiting organizations spend all their time in the metrics-gathering phase, and never get around to acting on the results — in industry parlance, ‘boiling the ocean.’ You’re far better off gathering a limited number of metrics that you actually analyze and then act upon.” Tweet this

Complying with the thicket of US equal opportunities employment laws can consume your time and fray your nerves. This process cries out for automation so opt for an ATS with an EEO Survey and Reporting feature.

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10. Interview techniques to hire the right employees

Interviews are the most human, the most interesting and the least automated part of the hiring process. They are also the hardest, which is why they need planning and forethought.

How to conduct an interview

The first thing to acknowledge with interviews is that they don’t begin on the day someone walks into your office. Done properly the hiring process has worked like a funnel — you got a lot of applicants, you spoke to some of them, you met a handful, now you want to work out which is the best of them to hire.

This all starts with the pre-interview questions. These are the questions you ask a candidate when they apply that will help you decide whether to take them to the next stage. Make sure they offer something where candidates can sensibly weigh their response. Do you know anyone who will say “no” to the requirement: “must be hardworking”? Neither do we.

Ever walked into an interview and known within 30 seconds that the candidate you’re meeting is never going to work out? It’s a waste of your time and theirs. One-way video interviews can give you the double benefit of a phone screen combined with a somewhat “in-person” interview that will help prevent this situation from happening – giving a company a leg up when planning recruitment strategies.

The value of assignments

Next up should be a practical test or assignment related to the job. Hiring for a customer support associate? Why not test candidates by getting them to answer some hypothetical customer queries. If you’re hiring developers there are online tools which can put developers through their paces so you can see exactly how they code.

Have a plan; don’t just ask the same interview questions every time. Always prep. Go beyond the candidate’s name and the job they’re interviewing for. Get to know them a little, check their resume, look at your team’s comments and note some questions in advance.

While there are some standard questions, such as whether someone is eligible to work in your territory, these are just hygiene questions. Ask open questions that encourage discussion. Engage with their responses and follow up. If it’s boring it’s not working. No one gets much out of the going-through-the-motions interview.

Depending on the position you’re hiring for there are a number of effective interview techniques but none of them should be used exclusively:

• Technical: To evaluate a candidate’s ability to do the job. To fill a software engineering position it might mean a whiteboard coding test.
• Behavioral: This type assumes past behavior will be a predictor of future performance: “What were the steps you took to accomplish such and such task?”
• Situational: The hypothetical (the ones politicians refuse to answer) throws it forward: “What would you do if the work of a teammate was not up to expectations?”
• Case questions (brainteasers): Used to be popular with Google, this type includes problem-solving questions that tease out how someone would work and think through a particular case: “how many traffic lights are there in LA?”
• Dumb questions: Meant to test someone’s ability to think on their feet. They often just test people’s patience and good humor: “What kind of animal would you like to be?”

From @interviewingio founder Aline Lerner: “How well a candidate thinks they did significantly impacts their desire to work with you. This means that in every interview cycle, some portion of interviewees are losing interest in joining your company just because they don’t think they did well, despite the fact that they actually did. To mitigate these losses, it’s important to give positive, actionable feedback to good candidates immediately.

“This way they don’t have time to go through the self-flagellation gauntlet that happens after a perceived poor performance, followed by the inevitable rationalization that they totally didn’t want to work there anyway.” Tweet this

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11. Closing the deal: making a job offer and hiring employees

There are some common and damaging misconceptions about process. You cannot be too small to need a recruiting strategy. It is not going to slow you down.

Eight steps to better hiring

1. Define your employer brand and craft a reputation as a good place to work.
2. Make sure you have a functioning, updated careers page with job descriptions that sell your open positions.
3. Use the right mix of channels from free and paid job boards to referrals, social and professional networks to get the word out
4. Respect your candidates’ time.
5. Be ambitious. The best hires may need sourcing and headhunting as well as advertising.
6. Take control of your hiring process with recruiting software, don’t rely on spreadsheets and email.
7. Take advantage of phone screens and assignments to arrive at a shortlist. Have an interview plan.
8. Use the analytics and reports provided by recruitment software to learn and improve.

If you’ve followed these steps then everyone you meet should be a genuine contender for a job. With this in mind remember that interviews work both ways. They are also a sales pitch. Unless you sell your company, your vision and the opportunities of the role, when you’re making a job offer you’re counting on paying more. The research suggests that good people are more concerned with career advancement than plain compensation.

Rigor is also on your side. Don’t be afraid of challenging interviews, they’re a signal of your ambition and direction of travel. When it comes to making a job offer you’re no longer in the dark. Resources like Glassdoor can give you an accurate estimate of market rates for most common positions. Make sure you compare yourself to similar companies and similar roles.

Make a point of references

There is always a temptation to go with gut feeling when you come to make a job offer and cut corners on references. Resist the temptation. You must assume that a smart person will already have at least a couple of good references in their pocket. Most people don’t like to speak ill of former employees or colleagues. Dig a little deeper.

If the reference is less than glowing, ask why. Nearly half of U.S. companies say they’ve experienced a bad hire in the last year, costing them an average of $25,000. Don’t join them.

Further insurance against a bad hire comes in the form of background checks. They can be appear tough to navigate, especially for business owners without a dedicated HR team, but a small investment could save hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages down the line. This is the primary reason that seven out of ten U.S. employers said they conducted at least a criminal check prior to making a job offer.

Once everything is in place don’t get stumped by offer and rejection letters. Use customizable job offer and rejection letter templates that include common clauses to save you and your employee from disputes related to compensation, benefits and special agreements.

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More reading:

Best recruitment strategies to attract top talent

What is recruiting software?

The post Recruiting strategies: a comprehensive guide for small business appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.

“I think a lot of organizations are now realizing, they have missed out a whole, big chunk of diversity and inclusion,” says Chikere. “And when they look into their businesses, there is a blatant lack of representation at all levels but especially at mid to senior level – C Suite. So organizations are really sitting up and saying, we need to really address this.”

Data seems to confirm this observation. According to a workplace discrimination survey from by EEOC, 1,889,631 discrimination complaints were filed in the US from 1997 to 2018, and 34% of were related to race, based on an additional report from 2017.

Would those numbers be the same if we educated ourselves more on racial discrimination, diversity and inclusion? How different workplaces would be if we stood up for minorities when needed? Chikere explains how we can become a part of the anti-racism solution, by becoming true allies.

The definition of allies at work

What does being an ally in the workplace mean? Chikere starts with a quick but comprehensive definition:

“An ally is someone who uses their power and privilege to advocate for others. Allies are not members of marginalized groups. Allies support Black, Brown and minority employees, colleagues and friends by understanding what they go through. Allies educate themselves on issues that affect Black, Brown and minority people, speaking out on injustices, educating colleagues, friends and family about being an ally and acknowledging their privilege and being actively anti-racist.”

So how can White employees turn into allies for racial and ethnic minority colleagues? It all starts by acknowledging their heavy loads:

“Allies support and make an effort to better understand the struggle,” Chikere notes. “Allies are powerful voices amongst marginalized ones. And the reason why I say that is more than likely, an ally would have friends and family who look like them, that they can go and talk to about being an ally. And obviously, the key thing is, we need more people to take action and stand up.”

A privileged employee who wishes to make an impact should find the right way to advocate for marginalized groups. Chikere says that the conversation about allyship in the workplace in most cases starts with human resources, team managers or external DEI partners and needs the buy-in of senior leaders. It’s not always easy at first, but this discussion should start as soon as possible. Chikere reminds us:

“If you have minority employees within your organization, talk to them. What do they want? But I think the thing is, not to leave it on the minority employee to lead these initiatives. That is not their job. Their job is not to educate people or lead the initiative.”

The sensitivity of this matter can make those conversations uncomfortable for many, but this is not a sufficient reason to avoid them. We should remember that change happens at the edge of our comfort zones.

How to foster allyship in the workplace

According to Chikere, allyship should start with self-education. Before forming allyship groups, learn what type of struggles and injustices minority groups face at work. This will help you understand their needs and start constructive conversations with them. Chikere explains:

“To be an ally you have to educate yourselves. Listen to Black, Brown and minority colleagues, employees, friends, and voices. Listen to what they have to say. Have conversations with other White people, family, friends, employees, about being an ally and help educate them.”

She also states that to become a good ally you must acknowledge your privilege and be “color brave rather than color blind”. When you realize how privileged you are compared to other people, you’ll feel more obliged to contribute to the change.

It’s also critical to learn other mechanisms that might block the progress, for example, the “bystander effect”, a phenomenon during which people are less likely to address a negative incident, such as an act of racial injustice, if many people witness it at the same time.

One possible explanation on an organizational level is that observers may leave it up to employees of greater authority, with stronger bonds with management to act, and avoid potential conflict. This is an implication that might distract us from being allies and to prevent it, we ought to acknowledge it. Same goes with unconscious biases we might hold against people who look different to us.

Once you accept the blessings of your own privilege and the duty that comes with it to support marginalized groups, it’s time for action. Start by using your exact position to amplify discrimination and make sure to promote racial representantion and inclusion in the organization. For example, if you’re a recruiter, you can start by diversifying your talent pipeline:

“What is stopping you as a recruiter from diversifying your pipeline?” wonders Chikere. “Getting more diverse candidates? Why is it the case that we are hiring the same type of people? That really has got to stop. So I think the key thing is, as an ally, you really have to go out there and educate yourself.”

One way to diversify your talent pool, according to Chikere, is to search for diverse candidates in different places to avoid getting the same type of people. Advertise your jobs through diverse channels, highlight diversity on your website, and teach your hiring team how to avoid biases. These will be proactive approaches to diversity and inclusion.

The difference between performative vs. proactive action

With this suggestion, Chikere makes it clear that being proactive when it comes to allyship and inclusivity is far more beneficial than sticking to performative actions. For example, joining the Blackout Tuesday initiative on social media without introducing any other organizational changes – also known as slacktivism – is performative and not useful in the long run. Chikere clarifies:

“During George Floyd’s murder and the BLM protests, a lot of organizations put out solidarity statements and took to putting up black squares on social media. Great. Amazing. But it’s the case of, what are you doing after that?”

But many businesses decided to go to the proactive direction by introducing drastic changes, such as increasing Black managerial representation or creating DEI advisory boards. These efforts will hopefully serve a long-lasting effect going forward.

Apparently, a leader’s role is crucial in promoting allyship in the workplace. When C-suite level and managers build a psychologically safe environment, minority groups find it easier to express their needs and feel more accepted.

In a nutshell, if you want to become a true ally at work, start by educating yourself more on diversity, equity and inclusion. Learn about racism and injustice and try to empathize with underprivileged groups more. If you are in a leadership position, remember that your responsibility is bigger; as a role model in business, you need to embrace the anti-racism and allyship conversations and solutions at their core.

Below, you’ll find some book suggestions from Allyship BookClub that’ll help you start this meaningful journey:

1. Subtle Acts of Exclusion: How to Understand, Identify, and Stop Microaggressions by Tiffany Jana and Michael Baran.
2. Why I’m No longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge.
3. The Purpose of Power: How we come together when we fall apart by Alicia Garza.
4. White Fragility: Why it’s Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo.
5. How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi.

The post Allyship in the workplace: Be color brave, not color blind appeared first on Recruiting Resources: How to Recruit and Hire Better.