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Time to re-evaluate your background screening process

Although pre-employment screening is a valuable way to vet candidates, it also increases time to hire — and that’s often a big “no-no” in 2018.

Recruiters who don’t understand the screening process often underestimate the required timetable. An extended screening process not only frustrates a recruiter’s employer, but also the candidate being screened.

The good news? The process can be sped up through avoiding common screening pitfalls that recruiters fall into.

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How AI is Driving the Future of Candidate Engagement

The current tech hiring market (as well as other industries) is increasingly complex. You are seeing more open roles — companies are hiring more, which is great — but there’s also more candidates on the market (often times as many as four-five generations). Candidate engagement, or the process of communicating effectively with and ultimately wooing the best candidates possible, has become increasingly important. For a long time, it felt like that term was lip-service — but now employers are increasingly conscious of their employer brand within the marketplace (i.e. do people actively want to work for you?) and their candidate engagement process (i.e. are people so frustrated with how you moved them through a hiring process that they’re actively trashing you to others?).

Tech hiring in urban areas is often a bubble. The best talent is coveted by multiple organizations to finish road map-tied projects in a timely manner. If your candidate engagement is poor, others will know — and quickly. The talent talks to each other. They share experiences. You won’t be able to get the people you need if everyone knows you’re a terrible, time-consuming, low-context hiring process. It’s time to fix this. It was actually time a while ago.

How AI can help

Lots of discussion and fuss about AI in the talent acquisition space these days, and with good reason. In terms of candidate engagement, it helps a great deal. Some of the bigger ways:

Automation of repetitive tasks: These take up to 20% — and in some studies as high as 60% — of a recruiter’s time. You know the drill: screening, interview scheduling, conference room booking, and other logistical tasks. These are no doubt important, but they don’t need to be consuming human time. Machines can do these jobs. This frees up the actual human recruiters to work on uniquely human aspects of candidate engagement, i.e. explaining the role, meeting for coffee, going to networking events and finding proactive candidates to slot in when headcount is approved, etc.

Accuracy and consistency: Humans make mistakes. They just do. Some situations with rescheduling and multi-day interviews can become complicated, and balls can get dropped. Candidates or hiring managers may show up to the wrong place at the wrong time, and frustrations rise pretty fast. When you use AI for the scheduling-driven tasks, you ensure accuracy and consistency. You’re reducing human error. You’re thus removing the potential emotions of frustration and annoyance from the process, which ultimately benefits the recruiter-hiring manager relationship and the recruiter-candidate relationship.

Communication: You can automate early-stage (top of hiring funnel) communication and even introduce chatbots and similar tools to respond to FAQ-style questions from candidates. On virtually every survey about candidate experience conducted in the past half-decade, one of the three largest complaints from candidates is about poor — or completely non-existent — communication. That’s easier than we believe it is to fix. And if you’re automating a lot of the scheduling tasks as noted above, your recruiters should have more time to over-communicate the progress of a search to different candidates.

Screening/candidate evaluations: AI/machine learning programs can help with screening and, gradually, come to understand what makes a quality hire within your organization. This reduces time-in-pipeline. While time-in-pipeline isn’t always explicitly tracked on balance sheets, it’s a big cost. Most work projects these days are based on road maps, which means “A” needs to occur before “B” and “C” can, and so on. If you have a long time-in-pipeline, “A” is starting later, which means every following road map project has to be pushed back, and now budgets are affected.

Overall

From a metric standpoint, companies that have begun embracing AI at the top of the hiring funnel are seeing reductions both in time-to-hire (noted above) but also cost-per-hire, and the latter is a data point often tracked by the executive team. HR and TA are powerful forces in modern organizations, but to make sure you’re fully respected by those with the most authority, you absolutely need to be hitting your cost numbers. Without that, executives can simply dismiss you as a cost center. With AI in place, though, you can make your numbers and dedicate some of that scheduling/screening time back into true strategy for talent acquisition. In short: check less boxes and do more value-add work. A win-win, right?

How long until AI can process candidate emotion?

There’s been a literal ton of discussion in recruiting and talent acquisition circles in the past 18 months about AI. Most of these discussions take one of several forms:

How quickly will it get to scale?
Will it displace recruiters?
Is this the most disruptive tech ever to hit recruiting?
Will it increase or better manage biases?
Of all the products that claim to have AI, which really do?

Those are the big buckets. We’re going to take a slightly different approach here. We want to talk briefly about some of the limitations of AI in terms of what it can do now and how quickly it might be able to do some of the things recruiters are best at.

Candidate emotion

For better or worse, many recruiters do read candidate emotion throughout the hiring process, and it does impact the eventual hire.

In some ways, this is a major argument in favor of AI. Reading emotion can lead to bias, and bias can harm the hiring process. So if AI is completely unemotional and strictly objective, wouldn’t that be better?

Not necessarily. Because how a person reacts emotionally to situations, and what’s important to them, also shows how they’d fit/not fit in your culture. Think of a place like Amazon. You can’t say “Amazon has a bad culture” or “Amazon has a good culture.” It has a very specific culture to them, driven by product-obsessed workaholics based on most reports. An AI might look at someone’s objective background and say “Yes to Amazon,” whereas a human recruiter might screen them as too laid back and emotionally disinvested from great work, which would be a strong “No to Amazon.”

There’s nuance there, but the ability to read emotion and what humans deem important is crucial in recruiting — and AI is not yet there.

There’s a lot AI can do with facial features, including correctly identifying criminals in China, but despite the rise of so-called “affective computing,” AI’s ability to understand emotion is a long way off — if ever. Emotions vary so much in humans that AI getting an objective data set it can work from is one base challenge. There are also controversial discussions currently about whether AI will ever be able to feel human emotion. We’ll gloss that one over for now, as it’s probably not a concern for 30+ years.

The bottom line

AI is still very much a top-of-funnel recruiting technology right now. What it does well is help automate basic, repetitive tasks — resume screening and interview scheduling, predominantly — to free up some recruiter time for more proactive relationship-building and role development. In terms of more nuanced aspects of the hiring process, AI’s lack of explicit logic or ability to process the emotions of humanity are still pretty far off.

The awesome contents of this article are sponsored by TextRecruit.

The white network problem of tech hiring

This issue we’re about to discuss came up at a few HRTX events this winter and spring, always on the diversity and inclusion education track that we offer. Here’s the basic quandary, which has been an issue in recruiting seemingly forever: how do we get more diverse candidates and, eventually, employees? There are entire books written on this topic, and a blog post will not fully solve it. But, we need to obviously pay attention to the problem, and it’s severe.

HackerRank recently released a 2018 Tech Recruiting Report. (There’s a press release too, largely about the disconnect between recruiters and hiring managers, which is another all-time recruiting issue.)

While there’s a lot of interesting data in the HackerRank set, this might pop out the most:

Recruiters report that internal referrals is their top sourcing method (59%). This is problematic, considering that on average, 75% of white Americans have entirely white networks without any minority presence.

Not good.

So, what do we do?

Continue reading “The white network problem of tech hiring”

HOLA Connect & HOLA Connect Chrome Extension

HOLA CONNECT Chrome Extension

The HOLA Connect Chrome extension allows you to find contact information for free. In the video, the HOLA Connect Chrome extension is downloaded quickly and easily, and pulled up in a drop down box from the browser in the top right hand side of the page. You are then taken through a very quick process where you access LinkedIn. Once the contact comes up, profile information pops up in the HOLA Connect box at the top right hand side of the page. This tool has been out for a very short time and the site promises that it is completely free (for life). It works with sites other than LinkedIn. It is quick, simple and easy. “No fuse, no muse” as Dean says.

Inside look with Dean Da Costa:

Search email, phone, and social at HOLAConnect.com

HOLA Connect the website allows you to access people’s e-mail addresses, phone numbers and social media profiles. You can search by location, designation or company. In this video we start with entering the name of a company, this time Amazon. A long list of Amazon employees appears and you can further refine it by doing an advanced search for a location and then job title. The video search goes to Seattle where a host of names pop up, not all employees from Amazon, so Dean takes you back to the top to find the employees of the original Amazon search. You can view the contact’s profile and get their information. HOLA allows you to access 50 contacts a month for free, but Dean, suggests just scraping the information and using any other tool so you don’t use your 50 free all at once. You can also access the CSV for each contact and then download all the contacts by going to the dropdown at the top right of the page as illustrated in the video.

Inside look with Dean Da Costa:

Succession planning can’t be about process, because it’s about psychology

I’ve never written about succession planning before, so today seemed to be as good a time as any to get that going. If you’ve never heard the term before, “succession planning” is an element of (buzzword boulevard coming) “talent management strategy” whereby you try to figure out who’s the “next (wo)man up” for a series of leadership slots. Basically, it’s building a pipeline of people. Most companies are really good (or somewhat good) at building funnels and pipelines around products and financials, but most are terrible at anything to do with people. A big example of that? Companies get FOMO, go chase an executive from a rival, and whiff on internal recruitment.

What happens in a situation like that? The new executive takes 9-16 months to get up to speed. If you had used succession planning and promoted internally in a logical way, that internally-promoted executive would be doing a lot more in those 9-16 months. He/she already knows the processes and people. I love the concept of “fresh blood” like anyone, but there’s basic math and logic to this whole deal.

Continue reading “Succession planning can’t be about process, because it’s about psychology”

It’s not summer 2001 anymore, but we recruit like it is

Summer, 2001. Do you remember it?

2001 was the year that the first Harry Potter movie came out and delighted audiences watched Harry as he realized he’d been admitted to Hogwarts. And Legally Blonde’s Elle Woods used a homemade VHS tape to get into Harvard. Train’s Drops of Jupiter blasted through the airwaves, and orange-tan teens bounced around America’s then-bustling shopping malls in matching terry cloth track suits.

It was an innocent time–before 9/11, the mortgage crisis and the Great Recession. It was also the last time that America’s real unemployment rate (the number some economists use that includes discouraged and some part-time workers) was as low as it is now.

For me, it’s easy to think of the job market like the real estate market. Sometimes it’s a buyer’s market (lots of inventory, few buyers) and sometimes it’s a seller’s market (low inventory, lots of buyers).

Today we are firmly planted in a seller’s market. Companies (the buyers) have the opportunities: salaries, benefits, perks, and candidates (the sellers) have the product: their skill set.

Continue reading “It’s not summer 2001 anymore, but we recruit like it is”

How HR Leaders Can Future-Proof Their Teams

Thanks to a complex hiring environment, increasingly strategic responsibilities, new technologies, and a greater focus on metrics, HR is changing quickly. To stay competitive, HR teams must be forward-thinking and strategize ways to adjust.

We’ve assembled a checklist of things you and your team can do to successfully navigate these changes.

Hold Your Team Accountable With Metrics

One big problem that HR teams are facing is demonstrating how they contribute to the bottom line of a company. Thanks to metrics — which are easier to track with today’s business intelligence solutions — this is now possible. But it also means that HR teams can now be measured for productivity over time. Strive to reduce your time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, and time-in-pipeline metrics as much as you can. That will give your team and your company a competitive advantage in the marketplace and justify your team’s contributions to the company. You need that seat at the table, right?

Focus on Giving a Great Candidate Experience

The core objective for any recruiting team is to find the best candidate for the job, but the hiring environment keeps getting more complex. There are many roles available, but the number of people entering the job market are also increasing quickly thanks to the size of Generation Z. To keep top candidates from jumping before they are hired, HR teams must create strong candidate experiences.

The best way to do this is to reduce time-in-pipeline, ensure consistent communication with candidates, and have an organized and clear hiring process so recruiters can immediately answer questions from candidates. But that’s easier said than done! Luckily, recruiters are getting some new tools that can help.

Use Technology to Your Advantage

The teams that embrace new hiring technologies will have the highest chances of surviving. All of the new automation and AI technologies are aimed at increasing hiring efficiencies. In order for management to fulfill their objectives, they must have enough workers to do the job. Thus, HR teams who can leverage technology to reduce the amount of time candidates spend in the pipeline will be able to prove their worth more easily.

HR leaders need to examine their current workflows to learn where bottlenecks are, then use these new tools to eliminate them. For example, artificial intelligence recruiting tools can improve your team’s processes by taking on tedious, repetitive tasks — like interview scheduling. The sooner you and your team can find solutions like this, the faster you’ll get ahead of teams that don’t.

Create a Great Employer Brand

Future-proofing an HR team doesn’t stop after the hire. Teams should also concentrate on creating a strong employer brand and improving company morale to retain the talent that is brought in. A strong employer brand gives employees a feeling of status and pride for working at the company. Happy employees want to stay around, and a reputation as a happy and fulfilling workplace will automatically draw higher quality talent. HR should strive to push the company’s vision and values to all employees and look for ways to positively reinforce the employees who follow them.

In addition, happy employees can be a great resource for internal and external candidate recommendations. You might not have to work nearly as hard to find a qualified candidate if employees feel that their workplace is awesome enough to want to bring in people they know who will thrive there.

Make Diversity and Inclusion a Priority

Finally, employees are carefully examining potential employees for their diversity and inclusion policies. In fact, recent studies show that 36% of Gen Z workers want to see their employers support equality. They won’t want to work for a company that isn’t striving to create fair opportunities for everyone.

This needs to be a priority, and the best way to see where you are in this process is to ask current employees through surveys how they perceive your current diversity and inclusion efforts. For example, LinkedIn does annual surveys to ensure they are meeting the needs of employees, specifically when it comes to diversity and inclusion.

HR teams have run surveys like this to root out unconscious bias during hiring. While this is important, teams that can look for ways to improve equality in the workplace before it becomes a liability will strengthen their perception among younger workers while simultaneously improving their companies.

These are some of the important changes that HR teams will have to grapple with to stay ahead of the curve. Did you already have a strategy in place for these? If not, now is the time to tackle these issues before they become competitive disadvantages for your team and for your company.

Unleash 2018: Understand the massive disconnect of the hiring process

Start with this tweet from Unleash 2018:

Is your employee experience as good as your customer experience asks @jasonaverbook? Good question, which probably won't see many hands raised #UNLEASH18 pic.twitter.com/aSNen2wTNn

— David Green (@david_green_uk) May 16, 2018

I had a bunch of experience with the hiring process of all-sized companies between about October 2013 and July 2014. I blogged about it a bunch of times: there was the moment I got rejected from a job ostensibly because of how my hair looked in negative-12 degree weather, and a couple of months after that, I think I started to realize the entire hiring process was a sale. (That’s not necessarily a bad thing: in reality, most everything is a sale at some level, including your relationships with your family.) Over time, I started to think about this concept: for years, the fear in hiring was that the job-seeker was lying. What if the real problem is that the hiring manager is lying?

Continue reading “Unleash 2018: Understand the massive disconnect of the hiring process”

Unleash 2018: Innovation comes from the bottom, guys (or should)

The above quote is from Greg Linden of Amazon — if you don’t know him, he’s one of the early Amazon engineers responsible for the recommendation engine — and was used by Gary Hamel in the Unleash 2018 opening session he gave.

While this idea is often not understood by executives, who often feel true change and innovation only occurs at their level, in fact it’s very true. Let’s explain with some deeper examples.

Continue reading “Unleash 2018: Innovation comes from the bottom, guys (or should)”

Headreach: Inside Look

HeadReach is a people finder that helps you find decision makers easily. You can search for people by name, website or company. This video with Dean DaCosta takes you through the process of searching by going to a particular company, in this case, Amazon. You can perform an advanced search and refine it further by job description, industry, key words, country, location or university. Once in the Amazon site, Dean searches for a few job descriptions such as game developer and software developer and comes up with several names that list the individual’s profile and e-mail address. You can also customize and export entire lists. HeadReach bills itself as the “fastest way to targeted leads with real e-mails and social profiles”.

See inside with Dean Da Costa:

What’s holding chatbots back?

We recently came across a company in the cloud security space that had developed their own chatbot internally. They wanted it to save time both in customer success and talent acquisition (external and internal), so it became an internal priority and was completed pretty fast.

The problem: “pretty fast” is not always good on new tech projects, and the tech on this chatbot was shoddy. It alienated both customers (bad) and candidates (also bad). After about three weeks, including one lost account, the company blew up the chatbot and vowed to return when they could do it right.

This is somewhat normative, actually. Consider this paragraph from Business Insider:

Chatbots and voice assistants have the potential to become an indispensable part of the workplace, but the technology will need to advance, and new and compelling use cases will need to come to light. Fifty-nine percent of respondents said the tech misunderstands requests and the nuances of human dialogue, while 30% find that the technology executes inaccurate commands. Meanwhile, among businesses that have yet to tap into AI-powered chatbots and voice assistants, 50% say it’s because of the lack of use cases.

That points to a number of issues with the rise of chatbots, namely:

Misunderstanding requests (there’s any number of parodies online about tech misunderstanding you, including that annoying “Calling Jim now” ad)
Nuances of human dialogue (imagine a chatbot trying to process sarcasm; ideally sarcasm is lacking in hiring processes, but there are no guarantees in this crazy world)
Inaccurate commands
Use cases

The “use cases” argument seems a little far-fetched — the most logical use case would be “This will save our recruiters time in terms of candidate communication until they’re further along in the process.” That said, many companies operate by needing to see best practices and use cases on everything, so it’s understandable.

This is how chatbots are going to get to scale in TA

Simple and straightforward is the play. That’s what we did with Ari, a chatbot that can:

Announce jobs
Screen applicants
Schedule interviews
Answer FAQ

You need to crawl before you walk, then walk before you run. (More on this in a second.)

When you first use a chatbot as an organization or a recruiting team, your goals should be simple:

Reduce the “candidate black hole” issue
Save your recruiters time

That’s it. Focus on those two things first.

What will reduce the candidate black hole issue? Have FAQ around timelines and process and next steps. Then when a candidate asks, the chatbot can respond and it won’t — to quote Business Insider — respond with some “inaccurate commands.” This is what candidates care about, especially if they’re on the open market and recently laid-off, etc. They want to know how quickly they might be in a new role. It’s incredibly important to them, and when you say nothing back, that’s demoralizing, and it hurts your brand in their eyes. We tend to only have discussions in TA articles about “the A-Players,” but the fact is every type of candidate interacts with your brand as a candidate. And because they’re all human, they want context and communication. Chatbots help there.

What saves your recruiters time? Take away scheduling and hand that to the bots. Scheduling sucks up recruiters’ time like a Hoover — and that’s time they could be using to build better pipelines so that, ironically, they’d barely need to schedule in the future. They’d already have a list of excellent candidates and could just start bringing ‘em in! Take away posting and screening to an extent too. Let the bots do that, top-of-funnel.

Save time, make candidates happier. A nice 1-2 punch.

Oh, and remember about the crawl-walk-run? Well, we actually put together a resource for recruiters about using chatbots on their teams. It’s available for you right here:

https://info.textrecruit.com/recruiters-guide-to-chatbots-and-ai

The awesome contents of this article are sponsored by TextRecruit.

The ghost of employees past (and why it matters for new searches)

Recruiters are searching in every nook and cranny for new talent pools this year.

In fact, 67 percent of rapidly growing companies listed finding new talent pools as their highest priority in the recent 2018 Growth Hiring Trends in the United States report from my team here at Spark Hire.

But this talent acquisition search has major roadblocks. Even with a strong focus on talent pools, respondents also identified a lack of qualified candidates as the biggest rapid-growth obstacle.

When you’re trying to quickly and successfully grow your company, the need for new candidates in a depleted talent pool leaves you susceptible to poor retention and costly workplace errors. To prevent these errors, you need first to understand what’s going on internally and determine the type of candidates who will excel on your team.

The search for answers begins with previous employees and knowing why they didn’t stick it out.

You’re not focused on belonging

Belonging is a state where employees feel free to be themselves at work. A new LinkedIn report, Inside the Mind of Today’s Candidate, found over half of companies (57 percent) are focused on ensuring employees feel this comfort in their workplaces.

Focusing on belonging means looking at the whole employee experience. If you’ve provided former employees with a diverse, fun, and engaging environment but failed to ensure they consistently feel welcome and accepted, that’s a clear reason they would move on.

Issues with belonging frequently occur during the talent acquisition process. When you focus on hiring with one specific goal in mind, like hiring for experience, but don’t identify the type of support they need to open up and be themselves, a crack in the foundation of their employment satisfaction will form.

Use personality assessments to understand what candidates need to be their best selves at work. Once you’ve identified their needs, take a critical look at your working environment, managers, and how your team works together. Then, narrow down quality talent based on your team’s ability to make new hires feel a strong sense of belonging.

They don’t really understand your mission

Your mission isn’t just a few well-worded sentences on your webpage and business cards. It’s the lifeblood of your company. Misunderstanding or a lack of passion surrounding your mission is a major reason employee’s disengage from their roles.

You’ll see this in employees who were immediately excited to jump in and start working, but that enthusiasm rapidly declined. Their excitement could have been based on a partial understanding of your mission or even the adrenaline rush of landing a new job. But when the new and shiny feeling wears off, you’re left with someone who isn’t invested in the organization’s growth.

When looking to open up new talent pools and find quality talent, you need candidates who are enraptured by your mission and passionate about its future. During talent acquisition, crack open talent pools that are right in front of you — your social media followers.

Following you on social media is a choice. This means these people are already invested in the future your product or service is creating. Post job opening announcements and speak directly to your followers. Explain why, as an already critical member of your team, they’d be a successful fit in driving your growth forward.

Their role responsibilities weren’t clear

Role responsibilities are one of the top reasons a candidate will accept or reject a job. The proof is in LinkedIn’s new Global Recruiting Trends 2018 report where 70 percent of candidates say it’s most useful to hear their role responsibilities from recruiters.

Disgruntled employees who are particularly confused or upset about their daily tasks likely weren’t clear on their responsibilities from the start. Even if they were silent, you could spot issues after they’ve gone by how many tasks were left unattended or were done incorrectly.

When you’re trying to promote growth, uncovering these missed or erroneous tasks may make you panic. But don’t make another hiring error by quickly filling the spot.

Successful talent acquisition starts with candidates understanding every task and goal. Make sure they are on the same page by implementing online or in-person skills assessments. By performing tasks they’ll be in charge of if hired, candidates get a more thorough understanding of the role. Additionally, you and managers will see their level of capability first-hand.

Email Outreach: You aren’t selling the job, you’re selling the conversation

Hi. My name is Mike Wolford and I’m a sourcer for an amazing company. I think you have great experience and I have a great job for you. We are looking for someone excellent to join our team. Please find the job description below.

Does that sound familiar? I’ve been fortunate to have had the opportunity to train a number of recruiters over my career and I’ve seen variations of this email in my career.

So why do emails like this get a 20% response rate on average?

Continue reading “Email Outreach: You aren’t selling the job, you’re selling the conversation”

Time to re-evaluate your background screening process