Employment/employer branding is a hot topic in HR and Marketing circles — but when it comes to branding awareness in the executive suite, there is much more work to do.
Continue reading “Employer branding won’t work unless the C-Suite cares (like most things)”
Per a recent Gallup survey, 7 in 10 Americans believe AI tech will eliminate more jobs than it creates. The numbers are all over the map based on different research, but many land within the 47-54% range of all current jobs being automated out.
What does that mean for a recruiter? Is this the beginning of the end? Will a machine be filling open roles automatically? Will recruiters themselves be entering the job search market?
Or, the flip side: will AI be a welcome enhancement to the recruiting role, making the recruiter’s day-in-the-life more fulfilling?
Continue reading “Thinking on AI: What do truck drivers and recruiters have in common?”
Automation and artificial intelligence, diversity, and inclusion, and Millennials and Generation Z were three of the hottest topics discussed at RecruitingDaily’s #HRTX Boston 2018 last week.
Hosted at staffing and recruiting technology provider Bullhorn’s global headquarters in Boston on April 12th, #HRTX Boston 2018 brought together more than 50 local TA, HR, staffing and recruiting professionals to examine the industry’s biggest challenges and opportunities.
The casual unconference event began with a live presentation by Raytheon’s Holly Mallowes. Holly opened her laptop showing real time how to recruit and source using the latest tools in today’s digital age before attendees broke into four discussion groups for the rest of the day.
Keeping the conversations going guests rotate between four stations, the groups along with track leaders openly chat about some of the biggest obstacles they’re facing in recruiting and discussed how technology can increase their productivity, efficiency, and operations.
As an employee of Bullhorn, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to participate in the conversation for the second year in a row. My biggest takeaways from #HRTX Boston 2018 were that…
We constantly hear that robots will decimate our jobs, but is there any validity to that statement?
We all can imagine robots overtaking humanity, courtesy of Hollywood, but in recruiting, automation and artificial intelligence will actually help recruiting professionals to become more efficient at their jobs. Automation and artificial intelligence will aid firms through process improvements – like undertaking lower-level initiatives such as scheduling, screening, following up, and data entry. (Top of funnel, in other words.)
According to Bullhorn’s “2018 North American Staffing & Recruiting Trends Report: The Industry’s Outlook for 2018,” 40 percent of staffing and recruiting firms attribute automation’s greatest value to increased efficiencies. Recruiting professionals will then have more time to focus on higher-level initiatives such as deepening their candidate and client relationships. Proactive recruiting — where you have people ready when the salary band is there to open the position — might become more normative.
There’s no sweat about automation and artificial intelligence replacing human recruiters – it could never happen because automation and artificial intelligence can’t convey the same emotional intelligence that humans can to advance conversations forward.
Without a diverse and inclusive workforce, our creativity and innovation stifles; therefore, it’s incredibly important to remain focused on increasing efforts around diversity and inclusion.
But how should recruiters navigate these tricky waters, and what are some strategies that they can use to generate better results for diversity and inclusion?
According to some #HRTX attendees, diversity and inclusion need to be a top-down approach – CEOs need to be completely supportive of it and must champion it throughout their workplace. #HRTX attendees believe that companies need to ensure that unconscious bias doesn’t occur in their workplaces, so it’s imperative to train – and then retrain – managers on it.
They also say that establishing employee referral groups can further help recruit more diverse and inclusive talent.
Recruiting the next-generation of talent is both exciting and challenging.
Exciting because this talent pool represents new ideas that can grow businesses to never-before-seen levels.
Challenging because this group demands new recruiting strategies to reach them, including communication.
Text messaging is the fastest-growing communication channel in 2018 for staffing and recruiting professionals, with 69 percent of firms expecting their usage to increase – especially in communicating with Millennial and Generation Z candidates, according to Bullhorn. Text messaging allows recruiting professionals to develop strong relationships with candidates because they’re connecting with them on their most personal devices – their mobile phones.
Recruiting on college campuses can also present challenges because there’s a greater pool of candidates immediately available. To hire the best talent from this pool, #HRTX attendees believe that sourcing talent based on the greatest skills needed for specific jobs is the fastest way to do so.
If you’re a recruiting professional who’s looking to shape the future of the industry, #HRTX is the venue for you. Bullhorn is proud to have hosted #HRTX Boston for the second year in a row, and we’re looking forward to continuing the conversation with the greater recruiting community at future #HRTX events. It’s certainly an exciting, yet challenging, time in recruiting.
For those of you not in Boston, there’s an #HRTX event coming to a city near you.
Enjoy the conversation!
The rise of AI in various industries is an interesting, far-reaching discussion. We’ve written about its applications in the recruiting space, and so have dozens of others. It’s definitely a hot topic out there.
Some (a very small percentage) are at the forefront of actually working with the technologies involved, most are aware of the potential ramifications for almost every business — and look, admittedly some just have their head buried in the sand about it.
It’s not quite at scale yet, as former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka admitted recently to UPenn’s Wharton Business School, and it might take another decade or more to fully arrive at scale. AI was actually initially developed at a 1956 conference at Dartmouth University — so yes, less than a decade after WW2 ended, AI was on the scene.
Why isn’t it dominating business yet? That’s a complicated topic for another post, but Sikka has noted a wave of different “hype cycles.”
This one isn’t necessarily a “hype cycle:” it’s likely AI will take more jobs than it creates, although by no means will it take all jobs. The number most reported by reputable sources seems to be somewhere between 35-47% of jobs could be automated away in the next 25 years, with a ceiling of possibly 800M jobs globally.
Most recruiters we talk to like to actually build relationships and pipelines of interested candidates. They like to see what makes candidates tick and where they want to go in their careers.
That’s only logical, right? Why else would you get into recruiting if you didn’t enjoy those aspects?
That’s what they like to do. No one ever promised you that your job would be more about what you like to do, but that would be awesome.
So now think about how recruiters often spend their time:
In some studies, recruiters self-identify that 65-75% of their time is going to these tasks.
3 in every 4 minutes of your workday, then, could be going to logistical tasks.
That’s taking away from what you really want to do — and how you could be of higher value to your company or firm.
This is the great promise of AI.
The rote tasks — the ones more susceptible to human error when conducted by humans anyway — can be done by AI.
The human beings can focus more on relationships and having those career development conversations. Maybe they can even focus on broader three- to five-year strategy for headcount need, backfill, turnover reduction, etc.
AI takes away the 65% of time you’re running in circles on task work and gives you that back.
That’s the great promise. And that’s most of what you will see from AI in the next half-decade as the technology continues to evolve.
For most organizations, it’s “How can I get the best people?” or “How can I most accurately predict performance?”
All recruiters and hiring managers can easily leverage AI to help solve this question:
Clara Labs’ approach is interesting. Recruiters have been using Clara (which you can name anything you want) to handle schedule coordination at the top of their candidate funnel. Clara books intakes and phone screens by getting candidate availability, knowing the recruiter’s scheduling preferences, and sending out calendar invitations. The recruiter doesn’t get bogged down in logistics.
Clara is oddly both “human” and “bot.” Clara Labs actually calls their approach “human-in-the-loop” which means they use both machine learning and a team of human experts to handle scheduling requests:
Today, Clara Labs announced the launch of coordination for others so recruiters can use Clara at the top of the candidate funnel and when it’s time for a candidate to connect with an interviewer.
With this launch, recruiters using Clara can send an email introducing an interviewer to a candidate, pop Clara in the Cc line, and ask Clara to find time for the two to talk. Clara works directly from email, using natural language, and interviewers don’t have to have a Clara account to use it.
Clara will get the interviewer and candidate’s availability, find a time that works, and send them both calendar invitations. Recruiters can track the whole process, and jump in with that helpful nudge if the interviewer isn’t responsive.
As more and more tech companies come onto the scene to serve recruiting teams, the growing world of recruiting operations becomes increasingly important. Recruiters need efficient, data-rich workflows, but they also want control.
You can’t necessarily solve a people issue — and talent acquisition is a people issue — with software. You can more effectively approach people issues with software, which is what Clara Labs (and others) are doing. But you still need that human touch, because the idea of an entire process end-to-end being managed by a bot/robot/etc. still would confound many job-seekers. The human element needs to be there. It can be more effectively there and some of the admittedly-BS task work can go away — thanks, AI! — but this “human-in-the-loop” approach is interesting. It seems that could get to scale faster than simply automating the heck out of everything.
Finally, you always want to make sure whatever platform you’re using, the focus needs to be on candidate experience. That’s what will get you a bad name out on the market — if you mess that up. Don’t buy the shiniest AI suite because some sales guy worked his nurture campaign on you. Buy the thing that’s going to work with your pre-existing systems and make candidates feel better about your process. Buy that suite.
Full disclosure: I’m a marketer, not a recruiter. But we all know that the overlap between marketer and recruiter is significant. The area in the center of a marketer/recruiter Venn Diagram looks more like a football than the profile of a frisbee. And one of the many areas that overlap is career site optimization.
For marketers, the optimization is all about how to convert as many website visitors into leads and customers. For recruiters, the optimization is all about how to convert those interested in a job or organization into a candidate and hire.
And like not all website visitors are ready to buy now, not every career site or job site visitor is ready to apply now.
For most organizations, the conversion rate is not very good. Jobvite analyzed millions of career site visitors and their actions and found that only 8.6% of visitors turn into applicants. That means that almost 95% aren’t entering your pipeline!
It’s much the same for marketers.
So what do you do?
In short? Remove the barriers, wipe away the friction, improve the experience, and give your visitors options to connect and engage.
In long, read on for four ways you can stop candidates from leaving your career site and add more to your pipeline. (I also encourage you to check out our previous article on how some of the best recruiting organizations in the world, like Facebook and Google, are doing recruitment marketing and building their career sites).
The first step is to understand why the heck people come and leave your site in the first place. You could do this one of two ways. The first way would be to conduct a survey and ask your visitors why they are coming and leaving. But this is complicated and time-consuming. Let me save you the trouble. The majority of your visitors are leaving for a few reasons:
I think this list can be boiled down even further:
Address these and you’ll improve conversions. But how?
Assuming you aren’t going to shorten the length of your application (but you really should), you need to start at least giving your visitors information about what they are signing up for before they start the application process.
How much time will it take?
What information will they need to provide?
When will they expect to hear back from you once they finally complete the application?
Without these answers, your visitors are paralyzed by fear and the only way they know how to escape that fear is by reclaiming control. This materializes into the one thing you don’t want them to do: leave your career site.
In contrast, answering all these questions will reduce the fear that inherently comes with the word ‘application’ and put candidates at ease as they enter the application process.
Sounds like a tall order, doesn’t it? I mean, you try to answer the most frequently asked questions in the aptly named Frequently Asked Questions section. But is this enough? And is it the best experience?
Let me set up my response with an example. This past weekend I was buying groceries online and I came across some unfamiliar protein bars. They looked interesting but before I purchased I had questions. So I clicked into the details and was rewarded with nutritional information. But I couldn’t find the flavors, so I kept clicking. I made a few wrong turns before I found the flavors (do people really want Apple Pie in their protein bars?). Once I found the flavors, I wanted to read reviews so I had to click some more. Again, more wrong turns before I found what I wanted.
Now unlike U2, I did find what I was looking for but by the time I had all my questions answered, I’d done a lot of clicking. And that’s when it clicked. There had to be an easier way.
And there is. It’s good to have those FAQs and the other content on your site like employee testimonials and culture videos. But even so, not everyone is going to find that content, or at least not right away. And just like your website visitors, your career site visitors don’t want to jump through hoops to get answers to their questions. That’s where live chat comes in.
Chat software for recruiting allows your recruiters to be available to candidates to answer their questions before they leave your site. Our clients are using our chat software to engage with visitors right on their job sites and helping them increase that conversion rate by up to 50%.
But wait, there’s more!
Last but not least, you have to make sure that your site is optimized for mobile. (It’s amazing how this still isn’t completely normative for companies in 2018.) This means that the site loads fast. This means that the site is responsive. This means that the text is big enough to read on mobile and that the left-right scroll is minimized. It means that if you have an Apply Now or Chat Now button on the site that these are easy to click on from a phone or tablet (hey, some people have big fingers).
Here’s that paragraph in list form for easy readability:
This should give you a good start.
Now take a second to actually go load your career site on your phone. I’ll wait.
What did you find? I bet there is something to improve. Now go do it.
If you’ve made it this far, I’m guessing there was at least one thing that stood out as an area of improvement for your career site. That’s okay. No better time than now to make that change.
Write down the one area you want to improve. Not two or three. Just one. Any more than one and you’ll experience paralysis by analysis.
Now put together a plan to get it done so you can stop your site from leaking qualified candidates.
We won’t delay the suspense — it’s San Jose, California. In fact, here’s the entirety of the top 12:
Now let’s talk a bit more broadly about some trend lines associated with this.
Continue reading “What Are Indeed’s Best City For Job Seekers 2018?”
Short post, but wanted to alert you to two things going on today:
Check those out today. We’ll be back tomorrow with some new content for y’all.
Inspired by fellow blogger Mike Wolford’s post I decided to share my recruitment tech dream come true. What if I was the Head of Talent Acquisition at a major company like Amazon, Google or any big corporate? What recruiting tools would I want at my disposal?
First of all, I’d need a good ATS that allows for integration with everything I’m going to be mentioning here. It must have great UI so the line managers will work with it and keep the data up-to-date. To make sure the candidates in my ATS are up-to-date I would choose Robo Recruiter, with permissions, of course, to have a chat every now and again with my database to keep them interested and then Candidate.ID to let me know who’s most interested in changing jobs.
The recruitment process starts with an in-depth interview with a hiring manager whenever there is an opening for a job we haven’t sourced for in the past year. This interview would include questions like ‘what would this job look like in five years?’ and ‘where do you read up on market developments specific to this job?’
Based on this I’d use Textio to write a great job ad. Not just in content, but also making sure I use the right, gender neutral, wording and tone-of-voice. No vacancy below a score of 85 would be allowed in my company.
I would use this vacancy to search my own ATS database with the help of either Pocket Recruiter or Textkernel Search & Match. For many types of jobs, this should bring up candidates and the likelihood they are open to moving to our organization since we’re using technology to keep them interested. The recruiter would directly contact them and fill the easy to fill jobs quickly.
If no suited candidates are in the ATS, we will publish the vacancy on our corporate recruitment website. This, of course, is an A+ site with a vacancy and conversion focus. What I mean is that the website adjusts depending on previous behavior (like Amazon does) and has a strong focus on the vacancies. Employer branding is done in and around the vacancy since most visitors never see anything else. The website would have an excellent look and feel and would have video but also a lot of visual communication on it. I would also use persuasion techniques that we are well researched to work such as those at e-commerce sites.
I would use a company like OnRecruit or Wonderkind to automatically promote all the vacancies that come online on the website on a CPC base in Google, Facebook and everywhere else. Of course, remarketing is already set as well, vacancy specific for the first week and after about a month a reminder with the general work at our company trigger.
Naturally, there would be a fantastic and rewarding referral program which kicks in the minute a vacancy is published on the website. Working like a job alert, employees can subscribe to these vacancies. The referral program would have a progressive payment system. For every other hire during the same year, the employee would earn an additional bonus. So next to the money bonus the employee would earn a weekend away somewhere nice. And if the employee can provide even more referrals the locations for the weekend will get even sweeter.
Depending on the data gathered from previous hires I would now decide if advertising sourcing for this specific job is the best way. If it’s advertising, I will use data from previous hires to determine where to advertise. To make sure I don’t get caught in a catch22 within my data I would tag 10% of advertising funds for ‘experimenting.’ This money needs to be used to buy media not used to that specific type of vacancy before. If it’s sourcing, I would decide where best to source based on the data. The hiring manager question of “what do you read?” would be used for both advertisings as well as sourcing strategies.
Depending on the type and volume of jobs the company needs to recruit every year I would consider building a talent community like the Specsavers Green Club. This community offers news and free online training to all opticians to get them involved with the brand. And of course, using Candidate.ID I would be able to know who’s most likely to be open to an offer to change jobs. This is only an option if there are no communities like this with a significant population yet.
The application process would adjust to the type of job. If I was hiring retail sales or contact center staff, I’d be using Harver to assess their qualities, no resume needed. If I were recruiting for traineeships, I would either be using a psychometric assessment tool like Pymetrics or Arctic Shores or a cognitive tool like Brainsfirst, depending on what turns out to be the most critical performance metric for the job. With IT professionals I’d use a tool like Codility, Hackerrank or Skillvalue and with many other jobs, I’d use a test like Virtub.io, HR Avatar or Gapjumpers. I’d always want to see what someone can do, rather than how well someone can write a resume.
Of course for sourced candidates, we might need to change the assessment procedure. It might be possible to skip it altogether until the data starts telling us there are too many underperforming hires. At that point, we might need to see if it’s possible to do either a ‘light version’ of the test or have a test later in the process, so the candidate is already committed.
Although I’m not a big fan of interviews, I wouldn’t expect to be able to do away with them. Since research shows that interviews are used only to confirm our bias, and with the assessment data we now have a bias that has predictive value, the damage the interviews can do isn’t so significant anymore. It would have to be a structured interview which needs to be fed back into the ATS so if the candidate turns out to be a silver medallist we are ready to move if a job like this opens again.
Although past traditional recruitment phase, the candidate would receive an invite to a pre-boarding app like Appical. This would keep them engaged until the actual start of the job. Then the new hire can begin to complete some of the paperwork that comes with switching positions and receive the online “getting to know” you and onboarding.
The GDPR deadline looms large, but many recruitment organizations are far from ready. The new directive brings about numerous changes and all organizations handling personal data of EU citizens have no choice but become compliant or face severe financial consequences. In this article, I look at the ways the new regulation affects recruitment and present some of the key 2018 GDPR data you must know in a handy infographic.
The General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) comes into force on May 25, 2018. It was designed to give individuals more control over their personal data, as well as simplify the data protection environment. As stated in the European Parliament press release, personal data now denotes any information which is related to private, professional or public life. It includes names and surnames, photos, email addresses, bank details, social media posts, medical information, IP addresses, and so forth.
Based on the new regulation, candidates (referred to as “data subjects”) are now granted more rights, including the right to have their information erased (the right to be forgotten) from all systems, having inaccuracies corrected or being able to withdraw consent at any time. The directive puts the responsibility to comply with candidates’ requests on the entity storing or processing their personal data, and those who don’t treat it seriously could face high fines.
There are a number of things you have to do to ensure compliance with the GDPR as a recruitment organization:
Collecting, processing, and storing data:
Contacting candidates:
Policies:
Third party services:
Security measures:
Penalties for non-compliance are severe and reach up to 4% of the global annual turnover of the organization. Depending on the gravity of non-compliance, you may be forced to pay:
Interestingly, the GDPR applies to data controllers, processors, and subjects based in the EU. Additionally, unlike the current directive, it also applies to organizations outside the EU who process personal data of EU residents.
To help you get ready for the GDPR, at Devskiller, we’ve created a GDPR infographic presenting vital GDPR facts:
Because it relies so heavily on personal data, HR is one of the main industries to be affected by the new directive. The new law goes into effect on May 25th, 2018, and if you want to be ready, you have to start auditing your recruitment process and making the changes necessary to comply now or face severe penalties.
Offering remote-work options to current and prospective employees hugely increase your firm’s chances of beating out the employer competition to that perfect candidate, and of retaining your valued employees. It assists with ADA compliance and gender parity in hiring and promotion.
Telework or “remote work” can also save your firm thousands, if not millions, of dollars each year.
37 percent of employees would leave their current job for one that allowed them to work wherever they wanted at least part of their work week
According to 2017 research by Global Workplace Analytics, nearly nine out of every ten employees and job candidates want to work remotely, at least part-time. In the 2017 Hiring Sentiment Study by Management Recruiters International, 22 percent of the 265 recruiters surveyed said that job candidates requested a telework option very often, while another 46 percent said the candidates wanted to work remotely somewhat often. Only 3 percent said the subject never came up. Of the 263 candidates surveyed, 55 percent considered remote work important.
Scarier still, for companies that resist telework but need to retain valued employees, is Gallup’s latest State of the Workplace report. The analysis giant’s researchers found that 37 percent of employees would leave their current job for one that allowed them to work wherever they wanted at least part of their work week.
While United States telecommuter numbers have more than doubled since 2005, with over 32 million US employees now telecommuting at least part-time, that’s still only one in every four workers.
Why the discrepancy between those that want to work remotely and those that actually do?
The first two reasons might seem obvious:
We asked Kate Lister, president of the workplace strategy consultancy Global Workplace Analytics, why some employers resisted implementation of remote-work.
“They’re counting butts in seats instead of studying how [workers] perform,” she told RecruitingDaily.
Lister confirmed that 70 percent of U.S. employers offer some type of telecommute option, but that fewer than 30 percent of them make it available, or even known, to all or most of their employees.
“It’s what we refer to as the five-percent privilege,” she said. “At many firms, working remotely is only offered to older, more tenured employees. There’s no documentation and no formal program. They want to be able to choose [who gets to telework]; to make sure it’s seen as a privilege, not a right.”
Professional services giant Ernst & Young first introduced remote-work opportunities to its staff in 1998, primarily to combat turnover problems among its female employees who were parents, and for whom work/life balance was crucial. Prior to telework’s implementation, hiring at E&Y was evenly divided between the genders, though most women weren’t sticking around. This turnover meant that 80 percent of supervisory and management positions were going to men.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Work/Life Roundtable, for its Proving Leo Durocher Wrong: Driving Work/Life Change at Ernst & Young report, talked with an Ernst and Young senior manager, prior to the telecommute pilot. The executive said that most workers leaving the company were doing so because they had children. The departing women made that reason clear. The men not so much.
“Men are leaving for that reason, too, but they don’t say it,” the manager said. “When they leave, they don’t say: ‘I just want to spend more time with my kids.’ What they say is: ‘I’ve got this great opportunity where I will be able to make more money without these horrendous hours.’”
Ernst & Young, with more than half of its nearly 42,000 employees now working remotely, is number three on Working Mothers Magazine’s 2017 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers list. Women now make up 45 percent of its workforce, and 43 percent of its senior management.
Beyond offering what candidates want, and what the hiring competition doesn’t offer, telework provides employers with several financial benefits. These often help reduce and defray the cost per hire.
Consider the following:
Real Estate, Utility Costs, and Constraints – Have you failed to hire because you’ve outgrown your current office or parking space? Are you in an area where real estate is expensive, or hard to come by? Sending folks home or elsewhere to work can solve this problem.
Costly Job Vacancies – Vacant positions cost your firm productivity and money. The ability to reach beyond your own geographic area, especially to places where the cost of living and wage expectation are less, can expand your search for the ideal candidate while reducing the cost per hire.
The tech-career gurus at Dice talked with industry experts, who painted a financially dim picture of job vacancies.
“CEB (formerly Corporate Executive Board) estimates the cost of an open position at $500 per day,” Dice Insights reported. “Recruiting guru Dr. John Sullivan places the loss from missing out on a single game-changer, purple squirrel or innovator at over $1 million each.”
Nortel has estimated a savings of $100,000 for each non-local employee that it doesn’t have to relocate.
Productivity – Is productivity lagging in your firm due to disengagement, absenteeism, and tardiness? Numerous are the ways that telecommuting can curtail the problem:
Starting In 2010, Stanford University Economics professor Nicholas Bloom led a nine-month study of teleworking employees at China-based travel service giant Ctrip. The study, reported by WorkFlexibility.org, found home workers 13 percent more productive than their non-teleworking colleagues.
Gallup’s State of the Workplace study discussed employee disengagement, and its effect on productivity and other byproducts of disengagement, such as company theft, negative influence on co-workers, poor attendance, and negative interactions with customers.
Gallup estimated such disengagement as a whopping annual nationwide cost of between $483 billion and $605 billion in lost productivity.
The researchers found that employees who worked remotely between 60 percent and 80 percent of their work week were far more engaged, and thus 31 percent more productive, than their commuting co-workers.
Health Insurance Costs – Remote workers often lead less stressful lives than their commuting co-workers. This tends to stave off illness, with the added benefit of curtailing absenteeism.
Telecommuting is not for everyone or every position.
But, setting aside for a moment the myriad benefits and cost savings to your firm, here’s the number one reason you must consider remote work options: Employees and job candidates want it; and they’re looking elsewhere if your firm doesn’t offer it.
As one long-time telework manager told us, “If you’re not offering telework, you’re losing candidates to me.”
I have been fortunate to work with the Hiretual team for the last couple of years. I was introduced to the founders on Recruiters Online. At that time, I started to become heavily involved in HR tech. I was looking for new sourcing tools to enhance my performance. The platform has helped me transform and improve my sourcing skills.
I started to think outside of just sourcing on LinkedIn or Google Search when I started using their tool.
Fast forward two years and while other tools have come and gone I am still using Hiretual as my main go-to tool. The founders are heavily involved in improving the tool. They constantly ask for feedback and they do their best to implement any changes and/or improvements you ask for. They are also extremely active in giving back to the recruitment community.
If you are a small recruiting agency or a startup, Hiretual may eliminate your need for an sourcing and CRM system.
The first thing I noticed when I started working with Hiretual 3.0 was the improved dashboard. The user interface has received a major upgrade. They have added some enhanced sourcing and engagement features. To some, it may even resemble applicant tracking system. If you are a small recruiting agency or a startup, Hiretual may eliminate your need for an applicant tracking system. You can import candidates you find outside of Hiretual. In a few months, additional upgrades will be made where can create custom Zaps using Zapier to automatically import candidates from job boards. There is a lot of potential with the product.
A new feature has been added called the “Nurture track” which allows you to create email marketing automation and also track your response rate.
I’m excited to see the continuation of the Hiretual journey and further advancements of the product. The chrome extension is still available for use. If you don’t use the chrome browser or cannot download extensions in your office, the stand-alone portal works great. I highly recommend doing a demo of the tool.
Check out this tutorial on the product:
https://youtu.be/qUbAe9vVJnk
Editor’s note: RecruitingDaily and RecruitingTools were not paid for this post. We did some popular inside looks HERE and HERE. We also really like the product. – Noel
If you’ve never heard of ‘people analytics,’ essentially it’s a concept that takes Big Data and applies it to HR and management. Since I often write about Big Data, HR, and management, this seemed like a natural extension that I could also write about. I touched on the concept of people analytics in a post over a year ago (here) and I might return to some of those arguments later.
Alright, so now we have a vague understanding of what people analytics is: a data-driven approach to hiring and management. On the surface, this seems pretty logical. Companies create brand-new jobs sometimes, yes, but in general, a lot of jobs have been around for a few years, been held by 2+ people, and we might have some data on who does well and who does less well. That could influence hiring. Right? And management! Well, we’ve had managers in companies for decades. Centuries in some cases! And we know who tends to be more effective and how they tend to work, no? So we could make some decisions around promotions and team alignment that way.
People analytics! Yea! Let’s do it!
It’s not nearly that simple. It’s gonna take a while.
If you click that link above, you’ll see the title of that post I wrote is about “gut feel vs. use analytics” and, in reality, that’s the central drawback of any strategy tied to people analytics. Even though there’s legitimate psychological research that most idiots think they’re geniuses, most people assume they know best. That goes for executives in companies perhaps more than anyone in business, because those guys — predominantly males, yes — have been told for decades how great, smart, and cunning they are. They eat what they kill, baby! Revenue warriors!
In reality, most executives are terrified of incompetence, have no idea how to align strategy and execution, and are completely unclear how to use data to drive decision-making. Many are very smart and capable about their industry or the specific silo they came from, but often they’re not very equipped to manage dozens of other silos — and digitally made that even harder relative to age. Many executives thus tend to focus on what they already know and chase the perks as hard as they can until their time at the top of the hierarchy is done. I’ve worked in dozens of companies around 6-8 industries and I’ve seen this each time.
So you have these powerful guys who everyone has to kiss the ass of — because that’s essentially how the hierarchy works — and as a result, generally, they have a big ego in between weeping over potentially being seen as incompetent. You think some Type-A hard-charger is gonna be told by a subordinate “Hey, we’ve got this People Analytics idea…” and not spit in their face?
“People analytics?!?! We don’t need that, Tom! I trust my gut!”
That’s the fatal flaw of people analytics. See, executives will trust an analytics program as relates to finance — because they legitimately care about finance. More money! Executives by and large do not care about talent strategy, and let’s be totally honest: if they did? It wouldn’t be in HR. Human Resources is a cover your ass department at most companies. It’s not a “strategic” department. Executives house “strategy” out of departments they want to interact with and bring to the table. HR isn’t that.
This new article on Harvard Business Review about using simulations and competitions in hiring is pretty good, and it even makes this point about People Analytics
Second, recognize there is hard work to be done in breaking orthodoxies: just as most people rate themselves, above-average drivers, most managers think they are above-average judges of talent—and won’t initially trust an algorithm or competition to identify better candidates than they will.
“Screw you, Tom! I trust my gut!”
That’s Issue 1 with People Analytics.
Not sure I could possibly state this more clearly, but the hiring process is completely broken start to finish. It just makes absolutely no sense. It’s based on what you’ve already done, even though executives yelp every meeting about needing “fresh thinkers” and “innovators.” So to get that, we hire only people who have checked seven boxes before? That’s dumb. Don’t get me started on Applicant Tracking Systems, where qualified people with real productivity have to fill in 27 screens of information only to get an error message from Screen 6. And despite companies wanting to cling to every last dime they have, they essentially spend half their money going out on a process not rooted at all in science or data. It’s amazing to think about.
The problem is, the hiring process of the digital age is very ingrained. Everyone knows the dance. A hiring manager gets a headcount, rushes to HR, bellows at them about what they need, and we dive right into the process. Poorly-contextualized applicants begin rolling in. The hiring manager shrieks about busy he is. HR claims they’re drowning. We rush the process because someone somewhere keeps saying “the empty chair is money we’re losing!” and finally we make the hire. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief. 11 months later, the hiring manager goes back to HR trying to get the new hire on a PIP. “Gotta get this kid out the door, he’s not pulling weight…” It’s a great dance.
The whole dance is rooted at The Temple of Busy. No one has time for anything. No one can be bothered. It’s all so hard as it is!
Where are we going to insert People Analytics into this process? Are we going to tell HR to do it? They’re drowning in other tasks, like compliance and trying to ignore how many executives have sent dong pictures to cute marketing girls in the past year. Are we going to tell a hiring manager to do it? No time! 10:30 stand-up on Q2 advertorial deliverables, baby!
Who’s going to own and run People Analytics? Who’s going to make sure it becomes baked into every process or at least more functional hires? And who determines what’s a functional hire? Because if you’re hiring a new exec, you can be damn sure it’s based off a couple of cocktails at the local swank hotel … no exec is gonna let People Analytics select a guy he has to meet with daily and travel with. That’s not how it is done.
People analytics: The “How far is too far?” issue
This was actually recently discussed in Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends Report (2018 edition), where they noted that People Analytics is increasingly being attempted in organizations (not always successfully) and that creates a host of “ethical questions about data security, transparency, and the need to ask permission.”
At the same time that report was being written, what did All-Time Disruptor Amazon go and do? Oh, they just got two patents wristbands that monitor warehouse workers’ exact location and track their hand movements in real time. The technology will allow the company to gauge their employees’ productivity and accuracy.
Could the notion of “Big Brother” in the workplace also be something that derails the rise of People Analytics?
Data analysis is a legitimate skill set. Now, we screw this up all the time too — we think we need “crack data guys,” i.e. Excel-and-bigger-program-loving nerds. Naw. That’s not actually what we need. You need people at all these steps or 1-2 people who can combine on them:
That last step is huge. Data is worthless unless it drives decisions in some way. Otherwise, what the shit did you collect it for? To have it? Good luck with that.
Most executives don’t have the time, or the foundations, to look at huge data sets and know what’s going on. So, you gotta have people that can contextualize and explain data. Most “data scientists” aren’t as good at that part, because they respect the purity of the data and the process, so they emphasize that. Executives could give two craps. They wanna know:
It’s that simple.
The problem is … HR people tend to not have a huge background in data. That’s a generalization and might change over time, but I went to an HRIR Masters program and out of 73 students, I’d say maybe 5-6 could analyze data, and maybe 2-3 of those could present well on it. (I might be in the second category, but not the first.)
I had a job a few years back where I had to send out these Google Analytics reports every Friday. Went well for a while, then my style started to crash and burn (jokes in the reports, etc.) But people generally liked them and knew what was going on at the company, etc. Google Analytics is probably the easiest form of data a regular rank-and-file can undertake and explore, so it was fun.
Here’s the punchline: I get fired and weeks later, some other kid is tasked with doing it. This kid is viewed as a “data whiz” inside the company. What does he do? He downloads some GA data as an XLS with about 85 rows and sends that out to a bunch of people, including execs. People are yelping and bellowing and screeching. “What’s this? I don’t have time for this! Tell me what this means!”
The funniest part of that is that most of those people could have just deleted the email and it didn’t affect their workflow at all, but … people love to complain about something making them busier if they have a chance to do so.
My point with all these stories is that most organizations don’t really have the skill sets to do People Analytics properly. They don’t have someone to make a business case for it, they don’t have someone to own the process, they don’t have someone to explain what it means to HR and middle managers and executives, etc.
It’s going to take a long time for those parts to fall into place. People Analytics is a long way off.
The hiring process is subjective. It always has been and honestly, I feel that people are comfortable with that. They like it that way. There’s something soothing about completely generic interview questions like “What’s your greatest strength, Andrew?” This makes people feel like they know what’s happening, and that’s comforting.
Who wants to think they’re part of some People Analytics process designed to actually find the best fit for the role? And who needs that anyway? 50 percent of people at jobs have no clue what they even do. We’re going to use People Analytics to find awesome hires for a job that probably doesn’t need to exist?
Any other thoughts or theories you have on People Analytics?
The healthcare staffing industry is poised with opportunity, but amidst the acute talent shortage, healthcare staffing firms are also facing increasing operational challenges that are generating inefficiencies in their processes and inhibiting their overall business growth.
According to Bullhorn’s “2018 North American Staffing & Recruiting Trends Report: The Industry’s Outlook for 2018,” the North American healthcare staffing segment is on par or slightly ahead of industry expectations for billable hours, bill rates, margins, and temporary placements. Seventy-one percent of healthcare staffing firms anticipate an increase in total billable hours, 64 percent are eyeing a jump in bill rates, 59 percent are seeing a gain in margins, and 56 percent are anticipating a rise in temporary placements.
However, there are some critical business challenges that healthcare staffing firms need to overcome so they can more effectively find talent, grow their businesses, and win against the competition. What are some of those inefficiencies, and how should firms look to the future? And how should they adopt technology to help them more efficiently find and screen talent, make faster placements, and create stronger relationships?
Here are four major obstacles that healthcare staffing firms are facing, along with some ways that they can solve these challenges:
By 2030, there will be a deficit of nearly 105,000 doctors in the U.S., according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Two-thirds of executives at hospitals with more than 1,000 employees are currently facing a nursing shortage or expect one within three years, according to research from The Economist Intelligence Unit commissioned by Prudential Retirement. With the healthcare sector expecting to add some 2.3 million jobs through 2024, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there, unfortunately, isn’t enough talent to fill these roles. In order to do so, healthcare staffing professionals will need to rely on technology – whether for advancing options for searching and shortlisting candidates, better identifying open roles for workers coming off assignments, or personalizing communications with the smartphone-enabled workforce.
Fifty-one percent of staffing and recruiting firms cite credential management as one of their biggest challenges for 2018, according to Bullhorn’s Staffing and Recruiting Trends Report. This is because many healthcare staffing professionals still rely on spreadsheets or manual processes to collect and keep track of a multitude of current or expiring credentials. However, if they can use technology to digitize and streamline the entire credentialing process, they can get candidates credentialed much faster, reduce the drop-off rates of candidates in the credentialing process, stay on top of expiring credentials, and have ease of mind – especially for audits.
Healthcare staffing firms that work large volumes of VMS jobs are often not realizing the full potential from their VMSes because of a lack of automation in key processes. According to research from Fyre (part of Bullhorn), only 23 percent of businesses are leveraging automation to enter and update VMS jobs to their applicant tracking system (ATS). Another 42 percent of firms are using manual entry for their ATS updates, and 25 percent of firms are having their recruiters work with spreadsheets, which are outside of the ATS, pulled together irregularly, and often contain outdated information. This points to a critical inefficiency challenge that is slowing firms down from filling the best jobs with the best talent. By eliminating manual processes and using technology to filter and prioritize the jobs that management wants to see filled by recruiters, healthcare staffing firms will maximize their productivity so they can quickly put the best talent to work.
Ninety-six percent of healthcare staffing firms say they want to leverage new technology for a better future rather than staying with their current processes, according to Bullhorn’s research. That is because many healthcare staffing professionals use systems designed mainly for hospital recruiting and not staffing, or they use a different system for every key task such as managing candidate engagement, managing client engagement, collecting credentials, managing expiring credentials, scheduling, and back office. This results in labor-intensive and error-prone processes, double entry of data in multiple systems, and disconnected candidate and client experiences, essentially creating costly inefficiencies in how recruiting professionals complete their work. Using recruitment technology specifically designed for healthcare staffing that brings together an ATS and CRM, predictive intelligence about candidates and clients, credentialing, document management, scheduling, back office, and management reporting will ultimately help firms better run their businesses.
If healthcare staffing firms can overcome these challenges, they’ll be the ones that will have the most significant competitive advantage. But if they stick to their current ways and not allow any room to innovate, they’ll miss out on the best talent, the best opportunities, and the best growth rates.
“There’s a saying that you can’t put a price on a human life, but that saying is a lie because we have. We have, and it’s so much lower than you would think. Yes, human life has its price like anything else, and will continue to do so for as long as it doubles as a commodity.”
― Nenia Campbell
I think some of the best stories I have are from my days toiling behind a computer, a fan, and a phone while working at an agency for just about minimum wage with a hope of a great commission, a good night’s sleep, and to continue adulting on. I have learned that I sometimes go, shall we say, too far when I am aggressively looking for candidates; even to this day. That being said ANYTIME I see a leg up or an angle that would allow me to grab good candidates and this little ditty is about just that. As a sidebar, I think it ironic that this going up on the very site that was sued by RHI after my investigative post of poor business practices that RHI seemingly did not know about.
Agency recruiting is a great deal different than being in-house and I think everyone in the industry would agree that from compensation to candidate/manager experience we have different roles to play. We are the font line sourcing and recruiting the best candidates we can find at the budget we can pay. Differentially though its often rare that an FTE in-house recruiter would bring on a contract employee that is normally done by agencies, less hassle as 1099 work can get sticky with taxes etc. and that is what this little ditty is about, contractors, lawsuits, and me.
Way back in the day I had a pretty sweet set up as an agency recruiter when it came to compensation on multiple fronts. All I had to do was get three hires in a month and I would get 1% of the monthly gross from the previous month and that check was, on a low month 5K to a really good month could be close to 10k on top of a decent salary. It was a team effort and we all tried to help each close deals because that meant more money for the monthly billing. It was a great system and one I would like to see more of but hey that’s a different story. Ah, the 90’s at the height of the .com boom money money everywhere! What every agency recruiter loves is contractors, well the ones that want a steady stream of cash in their pockets. I was no different and I was going to find myself with a plethora of them working for us in a very short period of time.
American Express was one of our biggest clients and they did a ton of contracting or contract to hire work with us. We at one point had up to 70+ contractors working there at the height of 1997. They worked with a number of agencies just like us and competition was always stiff since it was a lucrative contract but everyone played nice in the sandbox, well, not everyone. I had one of my people who I had placed on contract call me, yeah, call me, we used phones more frequently back then, to tell me that a certain national agency was being sued by Amex and the managers were told that they needed to cut the contractors loose under that particular agency. It was a very problematic for a number of managers as they had projects to complete and deadlines to accomplish. This was notable as they seemed to always be behind and seemingly always hiring in order to catch up. I have to say it was a bold move on their part. I looked up information through public records and found that there was indeed a lawsuit filed in NYC and the agency was given a letter to remove its people from off-site as they were not going to pay them for them.
I made a few calls to some of my other contractors to triple verify this was happening and boy was it ever. Everyone was freaking out. My account manager and I started calling the managers we had been supporting and asked if the people they had to let go and of course the answer was YES! So, I went to my boss with an idea. I said what if we just transfer their payroll to us, we could fill the roles with new people but why do that? You had a fiduciary problem, not a bad employee! I went into referral mode calling all of my people and told them for every person that transferred over we would give them $500. As a side note, yes I was smart enough this time to get permission to offer this from my boss, not like the Lily Bartender story.
It just blew up; I was getting daily calls and emails from not only my people but the people that were being referred to me. Managers who we had never worked with were calling me and my account manager. We looked to be on point to double our number of contractors in less than a month and all I could see was that bonus check and the adulation from the team for my brilliant idea. That would have been nice, like really nice. I really do not like idolization as I feel that I am a pretty humble person but a nice “well done” is always appreciated. That, however, was not exactly the plan that the universe had for me, as I was soon to find out.
I came into the office like always ready to hit it hard and see how many new referrals had come in and excited about the seriously easy money were making until I saw the email. The one marked urgent.
The one from a VP from Minnesota, of American Express.
It was an email demanding a cease and desist from contacting and or converting anyone from the agency that they were suing. It made very little sense to me as one, I am not a lawyer, and two, they needed these contractors, why cut off your nose to spite your face? Yeah, this was not good. I rang my boss and said I was sending this email to him and heading to his office so we can chat about next steps. The owner just smiled and shrugged his shoulders, and then he called the attorneys to find out what rights we had. This was huge for us and a great cash cow but not worth getting fined or going to jail. Neither of these things is on my bucket list, believe me. We were nervous and we did not know that this agency had a clause restricting contractors from going back to a client with another agency. We were in violation and they were using it to countersue AMEX.
My head was spinning at the total concept as AMEX had torn up the contract and released its own contractors. These contractors effectively could not return to any function. You seriously cannot make this stuff up. We retained the people that had come on board with us but under the direction of the attorneys, we stopped bringing on any new contractors. Eventually, the agency caved and paid AMEX back, we got to keep the contractors that made the switch and I did not go to jail. All and all it was a freaky scare but a profitable one. The lesson is when dealing with the contract space, or any space, ask about non-competes in order to protect yourself, your company, and the actual contractor. #truestory
New technology, increased pressure to prove business impact, and a complex hiring landscape are just a few factors behind the rapid evolution of HR.
To meet business demands for strategic initiatives like employee retention, employee engagement, and employer branding, today’s HR leaders have an increasingly broad set of responsibilities. Even with these new responsibilities, talent acquisition remains a top priority.
HR has a unique position in shaping the overall organizational strategy by fulfilling the talent needs of the business plan. While talent is critical to any organization’s success, recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics illustrates why talent acquisition is so tough in today’s job market.
Thanks in part to the economy’s post-recession comeback, there’s been a 141% increase in the number of job openings from 2009-2018. However, the increase in hiring has only been 37%.
Source: Data for Job Openings vs Hires – U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Meanwhile, another study from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that the overall number of people quitting their jobs has increased by 47% from 2009 to 2018 — leading to more people in the market.
Source: Data for Total Quits and Monthly Change – U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
The data shows that hiring volume is increasing. Although this creates more demand for talent, the talent pool is also expanding. These trends reveal just how crowded the job market is today, and why recruiters’ roles in finding the right candidate for every open position is trickier, yet more important, than ever.
To meet this mounting pressure, we would imagine that the size of recruiting teams would increase — but that is generally not the case. Despite the pressure and focus on recruiting the right talent, research from Linkedin “Global Recruiting Trends 2017” shows that 61% of HR leaders foresee that their recruiting team size won’t change.
Given the challenge of “doing more with less,” HR teams need to be efficient. They must embrace new ways of thinking about their companies, talent, and processes. To achieve efficiency and help focus their teams on mission-critical projects, many HR leaders are automating manual tasks through Artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence (AI) may just seem like the business world’s latest buzzword, but the impact it will have on HR is significant. Artificial intelligence is about giving machines the ability to perform “human-like” tasks. In the case of HR, AI can be used to automate repetitive and high-volume tasks like interview scheduling — which take up to 20% of a recruiter’s time. It can bring efficiency to the talent acquisition process, improving productivity as well as the candidate experience.
For example, an AI-powered assistant like Alex, My Ally’s AI Recruiting Assistant, can seamlessly manage all interview coordination activities. The assistant schedules interviews, taking into account the time zone difference and the time preference of the interviewer. It can even book a conference room.
While the idea of a bot communicating with your candidates can seem odd at first, the tone your AI assistant uses and even its name can be customized so it feels like a natural extension of your company’s culture, team, and brand.
Alex can improve time to hire by up to 56%
As the entire business world shifts to greater accountability through metrics, HR is also becoming more data-oriented. Cost per hire, time to hire (which has increased by 26 days since 2010 due to the crowded job market and inefficient processes) and time in the pipeline are common recruiting benchmarks. All of these can be improved by using an AI recruiting assistant. For example, Alex can improve time to hire by up to 56%.
In addition, automated recruiting coordination helps you hire better talent. When your recruiters are freed up from manual, time-consuming tasks, they have more bandwidth to focus on strategic activities where they can really add value — such as sourcing qualified candidates.
We are at the beginning of a fourth industrial revolution, which will change the way we work for good. Automation and AI will perform more tasks and result in a massive disruption of jobs. Despite the common belief that automation will replace jobs, in the case of HR, it will only improve them. By alleviating recruiters of time-consuming manual tasks, AI gives recruiters the bandwidth to navigate today’s difficult hiring environment with a strategic mindset and focus — leading to better outcomes for both companies and candidates.
About Alex, An AI-Powered Assistant
Alex, My Ally’s AI Recruiting Assistant, ensures that candidates have the best interview experience possible by automatically scheduling interviews and moving them through the pipeline with minimal delay. Want to learn more? Request a demo today.
This post was sponsored by MyAlly
Loading...
