Back at HR Tech I got the chance to speak with the CEO of HireVue, which is a bad-ass-enough video hiring tool that we’ve heard other suites who have video components tell their customers, “No, go use HireVue if video interviewing is your play.”
That begs the question: is it your play?
Continue reading “Will video interviews keep scaling, or do we need to worry about bias?”
Follow along on RecruitingBlogs, RecruitingDaily, and Ryan Leary’s Facebook for more context on the event during the day (runs about 8am – 2pm ET). We’ll have updates tomorrow and beyond on this site right here.
Candidate sourcing platform SeekOut, while a boon to any U.S. or Canadian recruiter in any industry, is especially advantageous for those hiring for technology positions. A fast, organized AI-driven aggregation of online communities and social places where both active and passive candidates profile themselves, SeekOut’s primary appeal might well be in its robust help diversifying your workforce. Its reach is massive: 105 million candidate profiles; 13 million GitHub profiles; and a search and sort of 37 social and professional networks. We have been inside SeekOut before with some RecruitingTools inside looks. More recently we had an interview with the founder.
SeekOut co-founder and CEO Anoop Gupta, whose impressive background includes Stanford associate professorship and Microsoft Research Distinguished Scientist, showed us around the platform.
“SeekOut’s candidate sourcing and engagement is focused on passive candidates and people happy in their jobs,” Gupta told RecruitingDaily. “While it supports all roles, it’s primarily focused on diversity and on developers and the tech industry.”
Essentially, SeekOut is a search engine with a wide variety of controls and filters, as well as candidate recommendations enabled by artificial intelligence. To these are added outreach tools that include candidate email and social contacts. Its rich database enables direct email campaigns with customized and automated scheduling of personalized, engaging messages.
In sourcing passive technology candidates, the SeekOut folks have translated their deep understanding of online tech community GitHub into a revealing and detailed look at relevant passive candidates. This is GitHub on steroids, a highly efficient one-stop-shop that translates this tech community’s cumbersome and time-consuming bit-by-bit search of members’ skills, education, accomplishments and online engagement into a fast one-page display.
“On GitHub, it’s very hard for recruiters to source and search because it was designed as a collaboration rather than sourcing platform,” Gupta said.
Just tell SeekOut what you’re looking for – the skills, experience, location, diversity parameters, and so forth – and it will deliver a very detailed profile of qualified candidates within seconds.
If you don’t want to surmise race or ethnicity by way of picture or name, its blind hiring radio button removes the photo and converts the name to mere initials. It even alters the email address to further disguise the candidate’s name.
It’s a good bias resolution, though not a perfect one. Hovering over a candidate’s social network icons can still display name. Additionally, much has been written about unconscious bias and recruiters’ tendency to be swayed by immaterial information such as Ivy League alma maters. I would have liked to see the blind hiring mode include an option to retain education level while removing alma mater.
I had a concern as well about the diversity filters, narrowing the candidate search to only females, only Hispanics, only veterans, or any combination of the three. I wondered aloud if it might exacerbate recruiter bias.
Gupta explained how an HR manager, for instance, might enable the diverse search and still keep the recruiter in the dark about these search parameters.
“You could do a Boolean search in the keywords section: diversity:(Female OR Hispanic OR Veteran OR “African American”); It would give you results for all four diversity categories we support,” he said. “Alternatively, you could choose one category at a time and then add those results to a project, e.g. ‘Diverse Data Scientists’.”
Then, Gupta said, you could share the project with the recruiter in blind hiring mode.
I test drove the recruiter platform. SeekOut immediately recognized I was on Chrome and offered me a Chrome extension for my toolbar, which I added. Then I got the message that “When you’re browsing LinkedIn you can save candidates to a SeekOut project or get contact info by clicking the SeekOut icon in the Chrome toolbar.” A very nice feature, which directed me to its Sourcing Assistant.
Anyone can sign up for this, free of charge, without subscribing to SeekOut. You can search an unlimited number of profiles, save and organize candidate information, find their verified email addresses and social network links, export your data to a spreadsheet, and get AI-powered recommendations for new candidates, based on their similarity to ones you’ve chosen. However, you can only retrieve contact information for 10 candidates each month, unless you purchase more credits, or subscribe to SeekOut.
Unlike SeekOut, you can’t search public profiles, GitHub and many other social networks. There are several other features in the paid version that are vital as well, such as talent pool insights, diverse search and more.
The SeekOut landing page gave me three tabbed search options – Public Profiles, GitHub, and Social Networks. There’s also a radio button for blind hiring mode. Below that are displayed the first (unfiltered) of 10 of the 117.9 million profiles. The left sidebar enables keyword search and other filtering options that include location by radius, diversity search options, and country of origin. I was able to filter based on the current company. That’s a great tool if, for instance, you know a firm is being downsized, and want to get the jump on its employees. Additional filters include current and past titles and company, skills, years of experience, schooling, languages, awards and more.
I really liked the Position Magnet tool. SeekOut has analyzed the skills and backgrounds of people in millions of positions, and from that has determined commonalities, and allows a search specific to the employer. Do you admire what Google engineers have designed? Would you like engineers who can produce comparable products for your firm? In the Position Magnet filter enter Google and engineer. Similar great candidates will display shortly, and you can see what part of their background makes them a good match for your position. You can still use filters to narrow Magnet results, so, for example, you only see these great comparable candidates if they live in Los Angeles.
I began my candidate hunt by keyword searching for a software developer, choosing both the security clearance and U.S. work authorization requirements and filtering within 500 miles of San Diego, Calif. I asked for females with two to five years’ experience, an Associate degree, and who were fluent in both English and Spanish. I considered specifying their alma mater but could readily see that this narrowed results too far. The highest attendance, for example, was Cal Poly, delivering only 26 candidates. Results: 60 candidates. I had the option of adding each to my project list, tag her as priority or Rockstar, ignore her, or decide not to contact her. For those who had no email address, if I found one elsewhere I could add it to the profile. When I added one of the candidates to my Software Developer project, a notice of such appeared at the top of her profile.
I tested the Public Profiles’ People Insights tab about a company – where they hire from, employee titles, diversity information, education and more. I studied Twitter and found that three-fourths of its staff is from the Bay area, one of every four employees is a software engineer, many of whom had worked previously for Google, Microsoft or Yahoo. Java and social media were their top two skills, and more than 40 percent had over 10 years of experience.
By way of People Insights, I also homed in on position and a particular role in a particular area. Searching Business Analyst at Microsoft, for example, I found that the most prominent former employer was Boeing and that the most prevalent past title was financial analyst. Only three of these folks began as interns, and 39 percent had been in their role less than two years.
I then studied the 3,100 software engineers working in Phoenix, Ariz. I saw that they primarily worked for Intel, GM, Amazon, American Express and GoDaddy. Their top skills were Java, JavaScript and C++. The bulk of them had graduated from ASU, U of AZ and Northern Arizona University. No Ivy Leaguers here. A real eye opener for this heavily-Hispanic area was the paucity of Hispanic hires.
Moving to the GitHub tab, I observed that there were 13.1 million candidates in its database. The filters are massive and show an amazing understanding of the skills involved in technology positions. A few examples: application development, graphics and gaming, and mobile. Within the server and cloud category, for example, are numerous sub categories such as API, Back End, and Google Cloud.
I wanted to find a developer that could help gamify our skills assessment platform and create a mobile app for it. I chose mobile skills including both IOS and Android, as well as Java, game development and graphics skills. I looked in the Phoenix area and since SeekOut had alerted me that the largest local IT companies are not hiring Hispanics or women, I searched specifically to those two groups.
The SeekOut-enhanced GitHub profile is expansive. First up is title and employer, followed by Coder Score, and the list of candidate repositories. For the first candidate, with a 16-repository collection, SeekOut narrowed those down for me, displaying only the three relevant to my hiring needs, which I opened via hyperlink to study the candidate’s coding work.
I moved on to the Social Networks tab, where I had 37 options such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Meetup. These were divided up into 16 general, and others specific to developers, healthcare workers, researches, designers, freelancers, and architects. Since there were 7 networks where developers hang out, I was disappointed that I had to choose and search each of them separately. This seemed needlessly time consuming and left me wary of duplicates. I much preferred the GitHub search.
In Conclusion
While SeekOut’s most obvious appeal is the way it enables a recruiter to quickly and efficiently home in on the perfect passive candidate, that’s not what makes it a top-notch sourcing tool. In a recruiting world of four percent unemployment, and even far more competition in the technology industry, passive candidates are inundated with unsolicited employer contacts. A recruiter who has the reams of personal information on their chosen candidates that SeekOut provides is far more able to engage on a greater personal level, and far more likely to have the candidate respond.
“Everyone engages when the other party has done their homework, when you know their background, and know who they are,” Gupta said. “Everyone has their little bit of ego. If you reach out to them by acknowledging their contributions, they’ll reach back.”
Gupta’s claim that SeekOut empowers recruiters to engage in a more meaningful way is clearly accurate. That’s its top differentiator.
Editor’s Note: We were in no way compensated for this article.
Mail Dump is a Chrome Extension created by Devro Labs that easily pulls any email addresses from websites. It can work on any site, including search results, creating a list of email addresses that you can then export.
This feature allows you to easily build up a number of contacts within minutes.
Perhaps the most unique feature of Mail Dump, however, is the “Auto Crawl” feature. This allows you to input websites’ URLs into the extension. Mail Dump will then search through the linked sites, as well as any sites linked from there, for email addresses. This allows you to easily gather contacts from a specific project or company.
Mail Dump only pulls email addresses, without any additional information. However, exporting the addresses allows you to easily pull them into other apps, which can then help to enhance your candidate profiles.
Mail Dump is free, powerful, and very easy to use, making it a great tool for anyone’s recruiting process. ~ Noel Cocca
See inside with Dean Da Costa:
Everyone in the HR Tech space is chasing AI these days; it was a normative theme at HR Tech in the desert in mid-September. Obviously all the “big boys” in the space have it, or claim to have it, even though in many cases right now “AI” just means “scheduling features.” And look, I’m not knocking scheduling features — recruiters spend a lot of time on scheduling and freeing up even 60% of that time would be a huge value-add. Well, OK, I need to rephrase that. It would be a huge value-add if the recruiters go and do something valuable, like building proactive talent pipelines in their community. If they just hop on the cross and bitch about how slammed they are, AI means nothing. We forget that.
One of the more intriguing entrants in this world is Rocketmat, which — and I quote — “uses Machine Learning to enable Human Resources and Talent Management teams to do more for your company. Our proprietary algorithm automates candidate-job matching, predicting cultural fit, future tenure and performance of candidates – internal and external – while eliminating adverse impact risk.”
That’s a mouthful, but their product was strong and their tech is good.
Continue reading “What do you need to know about Rocketmat?”
While finding your firm’s new IT Director wouldn’t require a volume approach, volume recruiting is crucial to efficiently filling high-turnover positions, and those roles for which you need to hire multiple employees.
Recruiting in bulk might seem like an impersonally automated approach to filling positions, but that need not be the case. There are numerous ways to personalize the experience, engage persuasively with each candidate, and hire qualified, productive workers. Continue reading “Understanding Volume Hiring”
Adorito is a Chrome Extension that works with LinkedIn to gather contact information for potential candidates. It does a great job gathering as much information as possible and is also reasonably priced.
Like many other similar tools, Adorito works within LinkedIn, appearing on the side of the screen.
While the tool does offer features that are common with many other extensions, Adorito is a great choice due to its speed and high success rate in finding info.
Additionally, Adorito offers very reasonable pricing packages. First, you get a number of credits free. Then, instead of charging a monthly or annual fee, Adorito charges for individual credits. One hundred credits, for example, cost just four dollars.
Adorito’s ease of use and reasonable pricing make it well worth a try. It could be just right for your recruiting needs! ~ Noel Cocca
See inside with Dean Da Costa:
One other crew we met at HR Tech in Vegas was Gr8 People, including two superstars over there in Megan and Chris. The latter gave us a demo of the suite. Before we get into the tech and what they do — their branding is around a one-experience talent platform — let’s talk briefly about the conventional approach to “candidate experience” in the modern business ecosystem.
Continue reading “Make “candidate experience” less of a buzzword with Gr8 People”
UpLead is a unique tool that has a variety of features, all tailored to improve your sales or recruiting process. It combines a powerful search feature with options to store and enrich lists.
The interface of UpLead makes it simple and easy to navigate between these features and helps you enhance your sales or recruiting process.
UpLead is a great option for the sales process, but can also very useful for recruiting. In particular, UpLead can be a powerful tool when targeting your recruitment on a specific company. ~ Noel Cocca
See inside with Dean DaCosta :
After years of talk, automating the recruiting process is finally a reality, thanks to significant advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. New technologies and solutions are making it possible to automate previously manual tasks, helping speed up processes and improve hiring outcomes. This is good news for recruiters, even those worried that automation could somehow replace them. Instead, what we’re seeing is the automation of tasks, not jobs – and as it turns out, automation is a natural complement to our efforts, proving to be particularly useful at the top of the recruiting funnel.
Funnels vary, some have four stages, others have six, but almost all begin with attraction. Given that no recruiter has time to search candidate by candidate on LinkedIn, the top of the funnel is one of the most critical stages in the process. Roughly translated, this means programmatic job advertising, recruitment marketing, employer branding and sourcing to start because as the name indicates, top of funnel casts a wide net. With the aid of automation, these tasks fill the funnel, generate momentum and move leads to the next step. Just last year, McKinsey estimated that automation could raise productivity growth on a global basis by as much as 0.8 to 1.4 percent annually, based on scenario modeling. That’s huge.
The top of the funnel workflow can be divvied up, with automation taking on the lion’s share of the work. For instance, once you reach an agreement with the hiring manager, develop the job description and put the req on your careers site, let programmatic job advertising handle the next several steps. Using data and analytics, there are solutions designed to control planning and budget, job targeting and distribution. Combine this with an automation software to scan resumes and pre-screen potential candidates, automatically sorting their information by experience, skills and other qualifications. And that’s just scratching the surface.
With the average vacancy lasting more than 31 working days, automation is becoming an essential step in attracting and sourcing candidates – and the tech industry knows it. The call to action is expedient and advancing quickly.
In just a few short years, we’ve witnessed the rise of the chatbot, going from a simple website add-on to full-fledged recruiting assistant, with natural language processing and a direct link to your CRM or ATS. There are also tools that can hold conversations via text and others that analyze language patterns and automatically offer suggestions that augment job descriptions. Some apply modern marketing tactics to recruiting campaigns, building relationships by providing potential candidates with personalized content and recommendations. You can also employ automation for interview scheduling, with technology that identifies the best time for everyone involved, sends reminders and reschedules if needed. Collectively, these types of solutions work to learn about the candidates, the jobs they’re looking for, where they’re searching and what skills they bring to the table. Data in hand, recruiters can target their search and automate candidate outreach – active and passive – without so much as a phone call or InMail.
As automation advances, so will the benefits, with one vendor exec predicting it will be the standard practice within the next five years.
As is the nature of the funnel, what happens at the top directly influences the eventual outcome. As a result, the more you automate, the smarter your process becomes. In turn, this saves hundreds, nay, thousands of hours every year, just on talent attraction and sourcing – and think about what you could do with that free time.
But the benefits don’t stop there. By empowering your top of funnel activities, you’re likely to see improvements in time to hire and quality of hire as well as candidate experience. Potential applicants will engage more quickly and get the answers their looking for, all while providing you with valuable information to tuck away in your database. With both parties better informed, the hiring process moves ahead and your best candidates go onto interviewing, sliding right into that middle of the funnel.
Wait, there’s more. Beyond saving your recruiters time, speeding up time to hire, enhancing the quality of hire and candidate experience and streamlining the process, automation can help identify and eliminate bias. Solutions including those mentioned for resume screening and augmenting job descriptions can conduct sentiment analysis and pick up on any included biases. This is tremendous, especially at a time when pay equity and diversity and inclusion are seriously hot topics.
So take it from the top and start automating from the outset, because in the long run, recruiting isn’t a numbers game. It’s about hiring the best candidates, and with the technologies available today, there’s no reason to do the work all on your own.
Little backstory on our history with Brazen at RD:
Now let’s get into product. Brazen bills itself as “a conversational recruiting platform,” and/or “all-in-one chat software for recruiters.” This is important for two major reasons. Ready?
Continue reading “Brazen doubling down on those chat features (and just in time)”
People Camp is an automated tool that quickly sorts through social profiles to gather information and contacts. It then imports this information into your own personal database.
Most of the heavy lifting with People Camp is done through its Chrome Extension. Unlike many recruiting extensions, People Camp does not make you separately add each desired candidate to your list. Instead, the extension serves as a robot that you set to sort through candidates and download the relevant information automatically.
Once you’ve completed a search and download, you can view all of your imported profiles from the People Camp App. You can search through these according to which pool they are in, any tags you have added, or through a search.
People Camp is an interesting and useful tool and allows you to maximize your time. ~Noel Cocca
See inside with Dean Da Costa:
This article was contributed by the good people at PeopleHR.
Before you invest too much time into a candidate for consideration, there’s a lot you can learn by reviewing their application. But while Simon Kilpatrick, lecturer at Leeds Becket University, and founder of Intrinsic Links, tells me that you can learn a lot by reading CVs, he reminds me that it really helps to have an objective way of scoring your candidates.
“Psychometric testing can give you excellent insight into a person’s abilities” he explains, “and it’s a very objective measure – the end score isn’t influenced by your opinion of a person.”
There are a range of psychometric tests available, but Simon recommends using a test that scores a candidate’s cognitive abilities, in areas such as:
One obvious benefit of adding psychometric testing into your recruitment process, Simon says, is that it allows you to conduct a large-scale assessments, in a relatively short space of time. And there is scientific evidence that suggests that it is one of the best predictors of job performance (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). However, there are also a few pitfalls to consider.
While Simon does overall recommend psychometric testing as a positive selection and assessment technique, he is keen to point out some of its pitfalls.
“Not everybody thinks psychometric testing is fair” he tells me. “For example, if you are asking candidates to complete this test remotely, via the internet, then it’s difficult to make sure they’re not cheating. Plus, there is some evidence that the results might be influenced the candidate’s ethnic group (Ones et al, 2007).”
Some companies use psychometric testing to help them decide who to interview. But Simon advocates testing potential employees on the day of the interview, as this helps prevent cheating – such as asking somebody to complete the test on their behalf.
The job interview itself is not only a great time to administer an objective psychometric test, but it is also the first opportunity you’ll have to meet your candidate face-to-face, which is important for making an assessment of their skills, their character, and how well they will fit in with your team.
But beyond sitting down for a chat with the potential new employee, Simon says there are plenty of other things you should do to assess a candidate’s abilities while you have them with you. In particular, he recommends you consider one – or even both – of the following:
Other techniques include presenting the candidate with a scenario that they might face during their new role, such as resolving a difficult customer complaint. Simon says you can’t realistically expect them to understand the inner workings of your company’s processes at this stage – but you can assess how they think through the problem, and it gives them a chance to demonstrate their problem-solving skills.
If the new role is going to be heavily reliant on teamwork, you might want to consider assessing candidates in groups. This could be a group of potential new employees, but you could also bring in some volunteers from your existing workforce. But it’s also a great way of looking for other skills.
“Asking candidates to participate in a group project can assess a whole range of skills, and not just teamworking skills” says Simon. “It can help you to assess creativity, IT competencies, leadership, and more.”
Finding a cultural fit for your organisation is also very important. And this is where group activities can also really help you, because you’ll get a snapshot of each candidate’s style of interaction, and you can decide whether or not they’ll fit in well with your existing employees.
I asked Simon to list what he felt were some of the most useful tips for companies to consider during recruitment. Here’s what he told me:
Perhaps the biggest mistake employers make in their recruitment process, according to Simon, is sticking to the “Application + Interview” approach. In other word, checking applications, and then holding a sit-down interview. This will rarely give you the right data you need to make an informed decision.
“Your recruitment process must be rigorous, and multi-faceted” he tells me, “otherwise you could be missing some really damaging weaknesses – or, on the flip side, some really hidden strengths. This is why it is important to introduce other factors like psychometric testing, group work and assignments. It helps you probe into the true depths of a person’s abilities.”
Something is wrong with your hiring process. Perhaps you’re not attracting the right candidates, or many of those to whom you offer positions accept jobs elsewhere. Maybe too many new hires leave your firm before the end of their first year.
The starting point to a resolution is tracking, in three key areas:
Continue reading “Hire better: Take off the blinders and start tracking”
This article was contributed to RecruitingDaily from Yello, who hosted the event this September in downtown Chicago.
How do you attract candidates to a workplace that’s not in a major metro area? Is investing in radio ads really a forward-thinking move? And on campus, why is it so difficult to get interviews scheduled?
Last week, talent leaders discussed these questions and more as they explored recruitment technology and its future at Recruiting Daily’s #HRTX Chicago 2018 event.
Check out the top takeaways:
Continue reading “Yello’s observations from HRTX Chicago 2018”
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