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Three Ways to Use Talent Intelligence to Become a Strategic Talent Advisor

Talent intelligence platforms are quickly becoming essential for organizations looking to reinvent and optimize their recruitment process. As the labor market heats up, employers can no longer afford to be reactive when it comes to sourcing and interacting with talent. They must step up their game to connect with interested candidates who will work well with their teams and make a meaningful contribution to the organization’s growth. 

Talent intelligence provides a competitive advantage to organizations that use it to refine their hiring process. It brings the most passionate and qualified people to the organization in the shortest amount of time.

Talent intelligence is particularly important for talent acquisition (TA) leaders and CHROs when approaching strategic discussions with business leaders on talent strategy. 

Let’s look at how TA leaders can use talent intelligence to become strategic talent advisors to the organization.

Becoming a Strategic Talent Advisor: The Role of Talent Intelligence

Given the current state of the labor market, it is not uncommon for TA leaders to be asked how they will source developers or engineers from a local market that’s already exhausted. Or how to fix attrition when salaries are at an all-time high. 

Some solutions take the guesswork out of answering such questions. They provide insights based on thousands of data-points captured throughout the candidate and employee journey that inform TA leaders’ decisions and recommendations for meeting critical business goals.

3 Ways Talent Intelligence Fuels Strategic Decision Making in HR 

By unlocking the full potential of talent intelligence platforms, TA leaders can diagnose and address talent issues that require accurate and real-time data. This way, they can get ahead of the curve to predict future talent needs and make strategic decisions. Here’s how:

  • Gather Richer Insights from AI-Powered Intelligent Search

Traditional sourcing relies heavily on job titles and keywords – limiting the scope of profiles that match. For instance, a search term such as “Java Developer” will miss candidates who do not have the exact same keyword in their resume. It can also turn up bad matches where the keywords exist, but the candidate doesn’t have the required skills or aptitude for the role. 

Capabilities like AI talent matching go beyond keyword and job titles to offer a more holistic view of candidates’ skills and experience. This is because AI has a much wider “understanding” of the search context. 

A crucial advantage of AI-based intelligent search is that it flips the traditional talent sourcing model on its head. Instead of encouraging candidates to comply with ATS-targeted keyword optimization, it promotes a candidate-driven job marketplace where job-seekers feel empowered to show their authentic selves to recruiters. 

The result:  The quality of recruiter-candidate interactions improve significantly, leading to shorter times to fill and more hires per post.. 

  • Supercharge Candidate Rediscovery

Intelligent filters in talent platforms like those available in GEM, JobVite and iCIMS enable recruiters to re-engage with candidates who applied in the past. A major pitfall of traditional sourcing platforms is past resumes and candidate profiles are often overlooked. Over the years, organizations amass thousands of resumes but they get lost once a role is filled.

When the position opens up again in the future, recruiters start the process all over again. Traditional platforms just aren’t designed to reassess past applicants. But talent intelligence platforms “learn” to discover qualified candidates from the pool of past applicants. 

With AI, modern talent platforms can not only surface relevant candidates who applied for a role in the past, but also provide their most updated profile to recruiters – shortening the hiring cycle and improving the candidate experience. 

  • Provide a Bird’s Eye View of Internal Talent

Smart talent platforms can also help recruiters and HR leaders optimize existing talent within the organization. They can help identify high-performers and at-risk employees to enable HR teams to promote, reward, recognize and retain people who have an outsized impact on the business. 

CHROs and talent leaders can further analyze this data to understand why employees may want to quit or the drivers of high-performance to mitigate attrition and build on growth. In addition to tactical intervention, internal talent data also informs more strategic decisions – are underrepresented employees being provided enough opportunities to grow? Is the executive team diverse enough? Is the organization supporting employees’ individual ambitions and needs?

What’s Next?

Talent intelligence can fundamentally transform how recruiting happens over the next few years. As talent leaders gain access to better reporting and recommendations, they can support strategic decision-making and become trusted talent advisors to executivesother business leaders. Talent intelligence will increasingly become an indispensable tool for talent advisors as candidate and employee needs evolve in response to micro- and macroeconomic factors. 

Understanding the Quality of Hire Metric in Tech, and 4 Ways of Improving It

Talented software engineers are in high demand. In their rush to hire technical talent faster than the competition, recruiters and hiring managers may make hires that end up being a poor fit for the company. As a result, the tech industry experiences higher turnover rates (13.2%) than other sectors (10.5% average). Forward-thinking companies are now using the Quality of Hire (QoH) metric to evaluate the effectiveness of their hires.

According to Jobvite’s survey, improving Quality of Hire over the next 12 months is the top priority of recruiters surveyed. 

In this article, we explore this crucial hiring metric, how it impacts your business, and what to do to improve it. 

What is Quality of Hire? 

Quality of Hire (QoH) is an important metric that indicates the value an employee adds to your organization. It also helps you examine the efficacy of your hiring process in finding, onboarding and retaining top talent. 

Companies typically measure a new hire’s performance during the first year to assess QoH. Measuring your new hire’s performance during the first year (or even earlier) provides insight into their contribution to your organization’s success.

Low QoH rates indicate low-quality hires with the potential to cost your organization a significant amount of money in the long run. On the other hand, a higher QoH leads to better performance, increased revenue and higher retention rates over time. 

Since various factors impact employee performance, companies use a combination of pre-hire and post-hire data and metrics like performance indicators, employee engagement and turnover to assess QoH.

Analyzing employee performance and engagement can help predict turnover, so you can proactively develop retention tactics for employees at the risk of quitting. You can also identify employees with higher engagement levels and productivity who are more likely to stay on. 

But measuring the quality of hire has its own set of complexities. 

Challenges in Measuring the Quality of Hire 

While measuring QoH is becoming popular, it is a complex metric to track. Metrics like employee engagement and cultural fit, crucial to QoH, may be subjective, difficult to quantify and differ across organizations. 

Without a universal formula or approach to measuring QoH, talent acquisition leaders struggle with optimizing talent. 

So, how can you measure the quality of hire? 

How To Calculate Quality of Hire 

There is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to measuring the quality of hire. Quality and value are unique to all organizations, and they use a combination of different variables to determine value. The most common metrics organizations use include:

Pre-hire metrics include scores on skill assessments, time to hire, cost of hire and hiring budget and determine the candidate’s probability of being a quality hire. Tracking pre-hire metrics strengthens the hiring process to predict hiring quality precisely before onboarding a candidate. 

Performance Metrics – One of the most popular ways to measure QoH is via employee performance reviews, the success rate in achieving set goals or targets and assessing productivity and job fit. 

Employee Engagement and Satisfaction  – Employees who are satisfied and engaged with their work consistently perform better, resulting in improved business outcomes.  

Retention & Turnover –  Early turnover amongst new hires indicates that there are issues with your hiring process and organizational structure, leading to high turnover. Consequently, better QoH improves employee retention and vice versa – employees who stay long-term bring more value to the organization. 

A tried-and-tested formula is to quantify the variables and average them to get an average quality score for new hires. 

How to Improve Quality of Hire

Perfect Your Job Descriptions and Ads

A job ad is the candidate’s first interaction with your brand, and it is essential to get it right if you want to attract and retain talented candidates. Creating job ads with accurate and detailed job descriptions written by subject matter experts will provide a compelling overview of the job and increase your chances of reaching the right candidates. 

Unclear and vague job descriptions will confuse candidates, while on the other hand, job descriptions with unrealistic requirements may deter qualified candidates from applying.

Hiring managers will struggle to identify the candidates who fit the role, while candidates will fall short of your expectations without proper job role information. If you end up hiring an unsuitable candidate, it is an additional cost to your organization. 

Focus on listing specific objectives, tasks, duties and deliverables rather than simply stating required skills and qualifications. Providing candidates with a realistic picture of what the job will look like helps candidates feel prepared and motivated to pursue the role. 

This is especially true when hiring for technical positions where roles are distinctly defined. 

Validated Technical Screening and Assessments 

Skills-based assessments are fundamental to tech hiring as they offer insight into a candidate’s technical, programming and problem-solving skills. Technical screening and coding assessments have replaced traditional resume screenings, opening the recruitment funnel to diverse candidates and promoting skill-based hiring.

Assessing candidates for skill shifts the focus from pedigree to competency. With validated and research-backed screening tools, you can streamline the process, automate scoring and evaluation and ensure consistently higher performance from new employees.

These factors, including culture fit, personality and proficiency, impact the QoH of your candidates. 

Make Recruitment a Team Effort

Often recruiters have little information about the role they are hiring for. When hiring for technical positions, designing a specific job description and ads is crucial. Work with hiring managers, subject matter experts and Industrial-Organizational Psychologists trained in job analysis to define the job role and essential skills to look for. Then, craft a compelling job description to attract candidates. 

By collaborating with all stakeholders, you ensure that everyone understands the role and its demands. It also helps you define ‘quality’ and ‘value add’ for your candidates. Post-hire measuring performance and employee value will become easier with everyone on the same page about the hire. 

Assess Your Current QoH

Lastly, begin by first evaluating your current quality of hire. Use your organization recruiting data and employee performance to ascertain your current QoH. It will help you define important metrics for your organization and improve the process to ensure hiring quality.  

Conclusion 

Quality of Hire is an important and popular metric this year for organizations to assess the effectiveness of their new hires. But, it is a complex metric to track due to the subjective nature of the variables involved.

High QoH influences employee performance, retention and business revenue. You can improve your quality of hire by optimizing your job descriptions, using validated screening and assessments and collaborating with experts to understand hiring needs.

Recruitment CRM Software: Why You Need It

To state that the recruitment process has been more complex than ever would be an understatement. With every job posting, there is a large pool of candidates trying their finest to be selected as they put their best foot forward. Among all these candidates, the organization has to make sure that they choose the premier out of the applicants while also nurturing the relationship they share with the candidates to ensure that interested applicants will not hesitate before applying again.

However, to make sure that all these aforementioned goals are being met without overwhelming the staff, there is a need for the software to come in and cast its magic. That’s where the recruitment CRM software comes in handy. 

Is It Useful?

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools are used worldwide to take care of the relationship with the customers by combining all the information and communication in one place. There is no need of using various software and databases as all the clients’ data can be stored and accessed by every worker in the organization.

CRM tools are very popular in the client-based business sphere. The popularity of CRM gave rise to the question of how many tasks could be simplified with the help of it and that gave birth to recruitment CRM (Candidate Relationship Management) tools.

In a nutshell, recruitment CRM software ensures that no resume is missed and that no candidate feels ignored. The whole recruitment process from the beginning to the end is monitored by using the sourcing tools to find the talent, track the application process and make sure that no one is out of the loop.

Now that we have glossed over the terminology, we can discuss the reasons why CRM software should be adopted into work environments.

Resume Management system

There is no specific way to make a resume and even though that gives the freedom of creativity to the candidate, it can be a painstaking process to go through those resumes looking for the desired skills for any recruiter.

To save time on that, a good recruitment CRM can actually parse the resume, find the keywords and extract the important details of the candidate for further processing. The resume parsing process can be complicated but is very efficient in going through the resumes and saves tonnes of time for the employees.

In addition to that, all incoming emails can be sifted through by the software to find the ones with resumes attached so that they can be uploaded to the database.

Lachlan de Crespigny, co-founder and co-CEO of Revelo says, “A good CRM should be able to support different kinds of files and should have high accuracy to populate the recruitment database. It is also beneficial to find the one that is not very pricey or claims to have an accuracy of up to 100% as that is not possible with varying types of CVs.”

Collaborative Hiring

Every company is working hard to find the top talent while also reducing interviewer bias. Therefore, a recruitment process is not a one-person job and thus, needs streamlined communication. For this reason, a CRM can help with recruitment by posting the job openings, keeping a track of the applications, updating the status and sending the responses to the candidates.

It is easy to leave reviews after a candidate’s response, mention the colleagues and leave comments if there is something to add to the process. It allows you to have the perks of engagement like social media without the need to share your data with third parties.

All of these updates are available to all the recruiters which let everyone collaborate on the tasks. The result of collaboration ends with a transparent hiring process which ends with making informed decisions.

We interviewed Steve Elliott, franchise owner of Restoration1 via email for his expert insights. He said, “With recruitment CRM systems, you can take collaboration to a whole new level by improving both internal and external communication. It’s much easier for everyone on your team to accomplish their goals when all of your clients’ data is accessible from a single platform.”

Automated Tasks

There are monotonous tasks associated with hiring which can be fully automated as a workflow. For example, if the candidate is scheduled for an interview, every person involved in the interview can be alerted once the interview is set and can have the slot booked in their calendars.

In addition to that, a Chrome extension can be used to source the resumes that interest the employer. As a result, recruitment CRM reduces the workload of manual data entry and various recurring tasks by automating them.

Blueprint for Every Worker

The hiring process for different teams can be created into blueprints to help everyone know how the process works. For instance, some teams might have two interviews with the candidate while another team has a test followed by an interview and this can be confusing for different team members.

Joe Troyer, CEO & head of growth of Digital Triggers says, “To prevent confusion among the recruiters, it’s best to have a blueprint for each position in the hierarchy. The blueprints can be created by making hiring pipelines in the CRM which can be accessed by the interested departments.”

Improves the Reach

All organizations are always on the hunt to find the most suitable candidate for their work. It can be quite puzzling to post to every job board and track each one to make sure that the process is going smoothly. However, most CRM provides the option of posting to multiple job boards with a single click. They have integrated the LinkedIn application feature for postings.

Reduces Paperwork and Brings Better Results

Can you imagine having to search through a stack of resumes to find the right person for the job? There is a good chance that you will not be able to locate the best option. Recruitment CRM software uses Cloud computing storage to store tons of data and saves the talent hunting professionals the nightmare of having to look through stacks of papers for the right candidate.

On the other hand, it is also very time-saving. It reduces the need for data entry as there is a hiring pipeline that is being followed. The results are mostly very accurate and this makes the tasks quite efficient. 

Vincent Amodio, founder & CEO of Icon Medical Centers adds to the piece, “Administrative tasks are important, but they take too much time and effort. Recruitment CRM has the ability to automate recurring processes, freeing up your time to focus on the things that are most important to you.”

Builds a Better Applicant-Employer Relationship

As it has been criticized in the recent past, many candidates do not wish to be left in the dark once the interviews are conducted. Even in case of rejection, they believe that they should be informed and in a better case scenario, be given feedback as to why they were not chosen for the particular job.

On the flip side, it is also understandable that an employer does not have enough time to send the response to everyone who applied. This could be simplified with the use of recruitment CRM. As the name suggests, CRM improves the relationship between a candidate and an employer by automating the process.

In the case that every candidate receives a response, they will know that they can move on to the next opportunity while the employer would also not have to do extra work to have a good impression. 

Helps with Market Research

It is true that 73% of job-seekers are seeking jobs passively. That means that a good-reputed company would be able to attract these candidates. When we use different job boards, it helps us to see which postings have been successful and as a result, how many of these candidates applied to the positions. It helps us with using different strategies to see which campaigns are successful.

Saves Operational Costs

With recruitment CRMs, there is no need for physical locations anymore. With most work being virtualized, it was high time that the hiring process got automated as well. Before the virtual influx of tasks, all the hiring employees had to get together physically to have an interview with the candidate. This was a demanding experience for employers as well as employees.

Antoine Boquen, CEO and co-founder of Horizons says, “With a virtual setup, there are no costs related to operation as there is no physical space needed to get the tasks completed. This allows for more budget for other recruiting-related tasks as having a good CRM costs significantly less than renting a working space.”

Conclusion

As the pandemic engulfed the globe, we all realized how important it is to find virtual solutions to our problems. The hiring process had to be virtualized along with every other task within the company. Filling a job seemed harder than before as there was no way to know whether the candidate could be a good fit or not.

As a result of this, recruitment CRM software is the cutting-edge response to the issues that are faced by businesses while hiring new candidates. Investing resources into a good CRM system brings hiring processes into alignment, which makes the hunt for new employees much more effective. As a result, your company will be able to add qualified and enthusiastic newcomers.

The Beginners Guide to Talent Intelligence in 2022

A tight labor market, signs of economic volatility, and a persistent skills shortage mean employers must now get creative to hire and retain top talent. As HR moves from a transactional function to a more strategic role in business, data is the biggest ally for talent leaders globally. In light of the sweeping impacts of the Great Resignation – combined with the expansion of the hybrid workplace – how can employers revive their talent strategies to meet business goals?

Enter talent intelligence. 

What is Talent Intelligence?

Talent intelligence is the process of collecting, analyzing and operationalizing data on both your internal talent data, your talent pool as well as your competitors’ talent pools. Talent intelligence empowers talent leaders to make more data-driven decisions around hiring and retaining talent. Unlike people or workforce analytics, talent intelligence is laser-focused on providing competitive insights into the talent marketplace. 

It is critical data that leads employers to make talent decisions linked closely to business impact. 

So, how can business and talent leaders use this data to inform their talent strategy? 

How Do You Use Talent Intelligence?

Talent intelligence helps recruiters and talent acquisition leaders answer questions like:

    1. What roles are high-demand within the organization and at similar/competitor companies?
    2. What makes candidates choose or reject potential employers?
    3. What pay range and benefits are being offered for similar roles in the market?
    4. What role expectations do similar companies have from candidates?
    5. How are similar organizations approaching culture, social justice, equity and other intangible benefits?
    6. What are the role-specific and organization-wide benchmarks for metrics such as time to fill, cost-per-hire, turnover rates and time to productivity 
    7. What recruiting channels are best suited for each type of role in the industry? Where do the best candidates come from?
    8. Why do employees quit?
    9. What retention methods are the most effective in the industry?
    10. What sort of opportunities do employees look for after separation?

In addition to these questions, talent intelligence also provides powerful insights on wider organizational goals like DEI initiatives, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) efforts and climate change. 

What Data-Sources Feed into Talent Intelligence?

With increasing use of technology applications across business units, HR teams often have data flowing into their human capital management (HCM) from units like finance and IT in addition to HR-focused solutions like recruitment solutions. 

Let’s look at some of the specific data points that need to be captured across solutions to stitch together a 360-degree view of talent intelligence.

  • Data source #1: Recruitment platform

Candidates’ first interaction with potential employers is typically captured across recruitment solutions. AI-based talent acquisition solutions go one step further to analyze recruitment data captured through:

    • Candidate profiles on professional and social networks
    • Resumes
    • Interview data
    • Offer acceptance
    • Past interactions

  • Data source #2: Background Verification 

Background verification reports reports also offer rich data on candidates and their past employers. This is ideal for role-specific insights into past pay, responsibilities, and job expectations. 

  • Data source #3: Core HR Solutions

Core HR solutions or HCM platforms can be easily integrated with talent intelligence platforms and offer in-depth insights on an organization’s internal talent. Some of the key touchpoints for data include:

    • Payroll information
    • Date of last promotion
    • Time in role/organization
    • Performance metrics and impact
    • Exits and qualitative data around exit interviews
    • Absenteeism

  • Data source #4: Job Boards and Aggregation Sites

Talent intelligence platforms can also tap into industry-relevant job boards and aggregator sites like Glassdoor to help TA professionals establish benchmarks on:

    • Salary ranges
    • Job responsibilities
    • Number of openings/role
    • Competitor reviews
    • Job descriptions

In addition to quantifiable data, purpose-built platforms for DEI can also offer information on the type of candidates who typically apply for specific roles. Organizations can use this data to fine-tune their messaging and craft more inclusive job descriptions to attract more diverse candidates. 

  • Data source #5: ATS and Employee Networks

Platforms like SeekOut can also tap into ATS and employee networks to gather data around diverse candidates who already have a connection to the organization. This data can then be leveraged to expand the sourcing funnel and create more opportunities to diversify the talent pool. 

Talent intelligence marries processes and technologies to help organizations maximize the outcomes of their talent strategies. AI-powered solutions play a key role in facilitating this discovery into internal and external talent dynamics.

At a time when there’s a massive dearth of qualified candidates, TA leaders can no longer rely on traditional approaches to hiring and retaining talent. Intelligent talent solutions like iCIMS, Greenhouse, GEM, etc offer a path to leveraging talent intelligence like never before. As the role of talent acquisition evolves to address critical business challenges, the value of accurate data and insights cannot be overlooked.

From Zero to Hero: How to Improve Your Logistics Recruitment Strategy

Despite talk of a recession, the U.S. labor market remains tight, with the BLS reporting 11.3 million job openings in May 2022. Although a survey by the Institute of Supply Chain Management recently found that the number of jobs in the logistics sector contracted for the third time in the past five months, businesses still say they are “unable to fill positions with qualified applicants,” and that the “demand for talent is higher.” 

Adding to the situation, supply chain manager separation rates hit a high of 28% in 2020-2021 due to burnout and a desire for higher pay. In addition, legislation like the recently-signed Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), is expected to increase demand for supply chain professionals. Since the logistics and construction industries typically attract similar pools of labor, the impact of government spending on infrastructure and transport will likely translate to a higher demand for labor in the supply chain industry.

Here are our top strategies to improve your logistics recruitment efforts. 

 Three Tips to Overcoming the Talent Crunch

Expand Your Talent Pool

Sourcing the right talent is one of the most challenging tasks for logistics recruitment – especially for roles with a persistent skills gap. In fact, 60% of logistics recruiters surveyed said that candidates do not possess the required skills/knowledge, among other challenges. Interestingly, a separate survey by Manpower Group suggests that operations and logistics are among the five most sought-after jobs globally. 

The paradox of high demand and talent shortage requires recruiters to look beyond traditional sourcing channels. While the possibility of hybrid and remote roles means recruiters can cast a wider net, reaching the right candidates is challenging. 

This is where programmatic solutions come in.  

Programmatic logistics recruitment advertising uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to optimize ad spend, while targeting the most relevant candidates. Intelligent programmatic solutions enable automated bids and help achieve performance objectives.

Job ads can be published across global platforms and job sites, social media sites and niche or diversity job sites to boost application volume. With dedicated ad campaigns, both active and passive candidates are targeted. 

Here’s another tip: When possible, use applicant details from the logistics recruitment process to create a candidate pipeline. This can be nurtured and used when hiring for similar positions. 

Enhance the Candidate Experience

One way to improve the hiring process is by ensuring a smooth candidate journey. The experience, from application to onboarding, determines their perception of an organization. When candidates are spoiled for choices, even the slightest flaw is enough for them to abandon the process.

Also, needlessly complicated and long applications are a waste of the applicant’s time. Talent Board’s Candidate Experience Benchmark Report 2021 cited three main reasons why candidates in North America abandon applications: 

    • Their time was disrespected (especially during interviews and appointments)
    • The recruiting process took too long
    • Salary didn’t meet expectations

Keeping track of candidates throughout the hiring process helps talent acquisitions teams better understand job seeker behavior, explore the reasons for drop-offs and identify areas for improvement. A great candidate experience will impact conversion rates, leading to lower cost per hire and better ROI. 

Here are some ways to offer a positive hiring experience:

    • Streamline the process
    • Offer candidate support throughout
    • Optimize the application for mobile phones
    • Communicate frequently and honestly 
    • Ask relevant interview questions and keep it to-the-point 
    • Ask candidates for feedback (and implement it!) 

If possible, invest in the appropriate logistics recruitment tech solutions to strengthen the process. From resuming screening to onboarding and training, there are a variety of tools to help you hire better. 

Leverage Market Trends and Logistics Recruitment Data Insights

There’s no overstating the importance of information when designing a robust logistics recruitment strategy. Organizations may have access to data that can determine the success of the hiring strategy and business goals, but do they use it?

Supporting recruitment data with current market trends helps reorient and inform an organization’s needs (open roles, hard-to-fill roles, etc.), establish a target audience, and identify sourcing channels that yield results. It’s also possible to ascertain which sources lead to the most hires and other metrics, like time to hire, cost per hire, acceptance rates and more. 

Market research is crucial but easily overlooked. Basing a logistics recruitment plan on robust market research and insights helps teams develop a proactive talent acquisition strategy, including market and workforce dynamics, significant changes (e.g., the Great Resignation), and upcoming shifts.

Organizations can also gain insight about applicant needs and behavior, and develop an accurate understanding of their target group. Ideally, this information enables formulation of a targeted plan to attract prospective candidates. For programmatic campaigns, target audience insights are crucial and can help boost ROI.

Conclusion

The logistics industry is undergoing seismic changes, largely related to a critical labor shortage and a high demand for workers. While businesses are eager to hire, it is easier said than done. Using programmatic advertising to target a wider talent pool, ensure an outstanding candidate experience, and leverage market and hiring data can help you up your logistics recruitment game. 

11 Ways To Fast-Track Interview Scheduling

We asked CEOs and HR managers to share their thoughts on how you can speed up your interview scheduling.

We asked CEOs and HR managers to share their thoughts on how you can speed up your interview scheduling. From customizing your invitation templates to automating schedules, we uncovered these tips to help you streamline your work and free up time to focus on top candidates.

Here are 11 ways to fast-track interview scheduling:

Customize Your Interview Invitation Template

Using an email template to schedule candidates makes interview email correspondence faster than drafting each invitation from scratch. On top of that, a customized template can help cut down on much of the back-and-forth that leads up to the interview. Your template should answer all the FAQs you get from candidates, so you can send out your invitations and get back to work as you both await the interview.

James Diel, founder and CEO
Textel

Stay True To Recruitment Timeframes

To truly fast-track interview scheduling, you must firmly communicate the time that works best for hiring managers and executives. In today’s market, as much as you’d like to commend applicants for setting boundaries in their own schedules, recruitment processes simply can’t operate only when candidates feel like being interviewed. Over-accommodating applicants’ demands complicates the entire hiring process because of all the back and forth communication needed to secure schedules.

We stay true to our recruitment timeframes, utilizing automated interview schedulers to ensure total coordination with every party involved. If candidates disagree with our time availability, we can easily move on to other candidates. This produces more rapid and effective results for us, boosting our recruitment operations and inviting flexible and competitive talent into the organization.

Kris Lippi, owner
I Sold My House

Integrate an Applicant Tracking System

We’ve found that one way to fast-track interview scheduling is to use an applicant tracking system integrated with our HRIS. This way, if we find out a candidate has been hired elsewhere or is no longer interested in the position, we can mark their interview slot as canceled and immediately schedule someone else. This helps us avoid having to track down candidates who’ve moved on from consideration for a role they were never really interested in in the first place. That saves us time and money from having to fill those slots with other applicants.

Tom Leighton
Sofary Lighting

Use Doodle To Create Interview Schedules

As a remote business that hires all over the world, we find that creating schedules while considering different time zones can be challenging, and almost always involves collaboration with potential candidates. This can turn into a huge correspondence headache, which is why I started using Doodle. Doodle allows you to schedule a large number of one-on-one meetings with ease.

By creating a schedule with allotted interview times, you can leave it up to your candidates to choose the slots that are best for them. This reduces scheduling hiccups, and also keeps all scheduled interviews in one place. You can sync your own calendar to Doodle, so you never have to worry about double booking yourself. Giving candidates a chance to set up their own interview time also provides some insight into their professionalism and punctuality. Remember, the interview starts as soon as correspondence begins.

Nick Drewe
Wethrift

Clearly Define Job Requirements

If job requirements are loosely defined, the hiring process can be brought to a standstill. You will end up seeing unqualified or overqualified candidates if it’s too broad, and you’ll be wasting both their time and yours. A clearly defined set of requirements will automatically help to eliminate unqualified candidates, and fast track your process.

Regardless of the position, having clarity from the start will help you make faster decisions. This is especially true when you are looking at similarly qualified candidates. By describing what you truly need in the role, clearly defined requirements will help you make the right decision, and fill the role with the best person.

Ouriel Lemmel, co-founder,  WinIt

Request Available Times for Interviews in Applications

A great way to expedite the interview scheduling process is to request that applicants, in the job application, include available dates and times when they’re available for interviewing. This can be very helpful in eliminating some of the back and forth that can occur in coordinating a mutually agreeable time for an interview.

Drew Sherman, RPM

Share a Calendar Scheduling Link

The best way I know of to fast-track interview scheduling is by giving candidates access to my calendar. When I reply to their application, I direct them to a scheduling link at the bottom of the e-mail. This takes the time and energy that goes into planning off my hands, and empowers the candidate to select the time that best works for them, and also aligns with my schedule.

Anytime I can let technology do the work for me is an opportunity I try to take advantage of. Removing a human scheduler or going back and forth with a candidate on the best available times takes up a lot of energy and focus. A simple scheduling link does away with all of that inefficiency.

Devin Schumacher
SERP

Send Detailed Emails

You never want to be in a situation where you have to exchange several emails with a candidate in order to settle on a suitable time slot for both parties. It wastes time, creates confusion and shows a lack of organization. To prevent that, I always send thorough emails to invite applicants to interviews. In the email, I let them know all relevant details so they will rarely need to reply requesting more information. Some things I include are the role, interview format, approximate duration, what platform we’re using for the call, interviewers’ names and positions, and a link to my calendar with several time slots. The last one helps us find a suitable time for a call without worrying about time zones and work schedules.

Georgi Todorov
ThriveMyWay

Stay Organized Through a Systematic Approach

The key is to be organized and prepared. Utilize a system or software that can help you manage the candidate pool and screening process. We maintain a database of top talent that is regularly updated with candidate availability and contact information. We also have a team of recruiters who are in close communication with our candidates to ensure that they are kept up-to-date on the status of their applications. This strategy allows us to quickly match a candidate’s availability with our needs and to get them in for an interview as soon as possible.

Christa Reed, Job Searcher

Use Round-Robin Interviews

Having one or two people perform all the interviews for every position can slow down the process significantly. To keep us speeding along, interviews are a team effort, using a round-robin interview process in which different team members interview candidates on a rotation.

One manager can’t interview 24/7, but with the power and schedule of several teammates, we can move candidates through interviews much more quickly. We’ve also found we hire a more diverse set of people since every interviewer has a slightly different mix of values.

John Li
Fig Loans

Automate Schedules With Scheduler Tools

Scheduler tools offer an opportunity to automate scheduling across the business lifecycle. Particularly when it comes to recruiting, a seamless, connected process is critical for both the candidate and organization. Given the importance of employer brand in today’s job market, we are keen to ensure each part of the candidate process is thoughtfully curated.

Calendly has been a life saver, offering scheduling variation, ease and integration given the magnitude of interviews held weekly. This resource has supported us in engaging candidates globally (accounting for time zone) and helped us reduce double-booking. From an efficiency standpoint, scheduling tools such as Calendly reduce back-to-back emails and save significant time – a recruiter/hiring manager’s dream.

Chelsea C. Williams
Reimagine Talent Co.

 

DEI: You Have to Start Somewhere

There’s been an increased focus on diversity, equity and inclusion over the last few years and for a good reason – DEI initiatives have proven benefits. Benefits that impact people as much as the businesses they support. Even so, it’s well-documented that DEI efforts aren’t where they should be.

We know this because not only do certain companies publish annual reports, but we also hear it from recruiters all the time. They’re frustrated, and rightfully so. Part of the problem is that without dedicated, knowledgeable resources capable of weaving DEI into the organization’s fabric, DEI falls to whoever is willing to do the work – without actually empowering these endeavors. 

Where it Goes Wrong

Case in point, Jackye Clayton, co-host of the Inclusive AF podcast and VP of Talent Acquisition and DEIB, shared an all-too-common scenario: “DEI IS NOT A MARKETING CAMPAIGN! As I was drinking coffee browsing through LinkedIn, as I do most mornings, I saw a promoted post that said, ‘Come take a seat at our table.’ I went to their career page to see what I get for being brave enough to go to their table. Could I find salaries posted? No. I wanted to see who was at the ‘table’ today that looked like me. No one. There was a video explaining what taking a seat at the table meant to them. It means, feeling confident because I was invited to the table. But how can I feel confident if there is no one that looks like me?” 

In this instance, the company in question saw the popularity of DEI as a way to get more eyes on their post, but to what end? Clearly, advancing DEI wasn’t their primary objective, and that’s not OK. So how do we right the ship?

For starters, we seek to gain a clearer understanding of what DEI means to the organization, both in theory and in practice, in order to build strategies that uphold our overall goal. However, even getting to that point is a journey. 

Begin With What You Know 

In the example that Clayton shared, the company was short-sighted. They saw DEI as a gimmick and one that didn’t directly correspond to their workforce. Without knowing the organization in question, I’d venture a guess that they ran this campaign without thinking about what it meant – and whether or not it would directly affect any existing employees.

That demonstrates a lack of visibility and transparency on their part. What’s more, it skipped the starting point for any DEI initiatives, and that is to begin with what you know. 

While the maturity of an organization certainly factors into determining the state of DEI efforts, every organization has data on hand. Considering hiring data first, analyze your existing workforce and current candidate pipeline. Are you attracting diverse candidates? Are they being hired? How long are they staying with the company?

Knowing the answer to these types of questions will establish a baseline around recruiting practices and enable hiring teams to amend their current strategies accordingly. There’s also the matter of what happens post-hire, which requires a longer, more in-depth appraisal to account for equity and inclusion (can’t forget about belonging either). 

Taking Action 

As Cadient put it, “The first step is to take an honest inventory of your organization and recognize a lack of diversity and inclusion. To change things, you must be aware that the problem exists in the first place and then acknowledge the need for change.”

Awareness and acknowledgment stem from data and likewise, change and progress get tracked by data. Do you see where I’m going with this? If we want to drive meaningful change around DEI, we need to understand what it looks like and how we’re doing. After that, going back to Clayton’s point, we need to ensure our output matches our intent. 

That means making structural changes to reflect your organization’s evolution, from how you talk to candidates and employees and how you compensate to training programs and even everyday meetings. You can’t expect meaningful results from minimal efforts, especially if those efforts are disingenuous.

Cadient reminds us, “Improving diversity and inclusion in the workplace comes down to changing your organizational culture, not just hiring different types of employees.” 

Diversity, equity and inclusion are separate factors that work together to improve the employment experience from inside an organization. To achieve that, organizations need to start somewhere and keep going.

Data supports the mission, informing the organization of what’s happening along the journey, but only if you leverage the right resources to maintain alignment through each and every action.  

Optimizing Workforce Productivity with Technical Skills Assessments: A How-To Guide

According to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 1.4 million computer science jobs in the country, but only 400,000 graduates each year. To bridge the engineering labor shortage, organizations are tapping into better processes and technologies. However, many fail to close technical roles quickly enough due to challenges in technical recruiting. 

Owing to longer recruitment cycles, engineers often spend up to 40 hours per hire on recruitment activities. With one of the slowest hiring times, tech hiring teams work to optimize the workflow and boost productivity. Enter technical skills assessments: your answer to faster hiring and improved productivity. 

How to Optimize Workforce Productivity with Technical Skills Assessments 

Technical skills assessments help you not only hire faster, but also significantly improve your chances of diversifying your candidate pool and create a more inclusive workplace. Adopting a data-driven approach improves effectiveness and recruiting efficiency by identifying hiring bottlenecks and systematically refining your recruitment funnel. 

Here are a few ways you can optimize your team’s productivity with skills-based assessments:

  • Improve Workflows with Better Task Delegation 

Between their core coding responsibilities, recruiter communication and additional hiring tasks, engineers get only 10 hours of ‘deep work.’  

Technical skills assessment tools integrate with Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to support dynamic candidate communication, scheduling and interviewing. These integrations help recruiting teams automate administrative tasks, saving valuable time for your team. 

Skills assessments also allow you to determine each candidate’s proficiency. When candidates are pre-screened with a skills assessment early in the recruiting process, engineers can save hundreds of hours they otherwise would have lost interviewing unqualified candidates. 

  • Automate Interview Scheduling 

Recruiting teams spend a significant amount of time assessing and interviewing technical candidates. It requires recruiters to navigate through calendars of various candidates and interviewers and to facilitate a smooth experience for both parties. With remote hiring and hybrid work structures, setting up interviews is even more challenging. 

With automated interview scheduling, candidates can access their technical skills assessments and schedule interviews on the platform based on their availability. This saves the back and forth between the candidate and the interviewer or recruiter, speeding up the hiring process. Seamless integration with an ATS and scheduling platforms makes scheduling more accessible, even with panel interviews. When conducting multiple interviews with different panels, automated scheduling creates unique interview links and shares the correct link every time. 

  • Improved Communication and Collaboration 

Organizations can maintain productivity when teams work collaboratively and communicate effectively. Ideally, technical assessment tools should promote communication within and between teams. For instance, your tool should allow admins to control sharing of assessments and results with specific people, so that those who shouldn’t see results will not be permitted to access them. With controlled access and permissions, you can also define roles for your team members. This helps you stay organized while maintaining a workflow best suited to your organizational context. 

The recruiting tools you use should also make it easier to communicate and collaborate with candidates. While hiring technical candidates, coding assessments are essential to understanding candidates’ abilities. With technical skills assessment platforms, sharing assessments with your candidates happens with the click of a button. Candidates can complete these assessments in their own time. Asynchronous assessments allow both candidates and recruiters to exercise better control of their time. 

During the advanced or the final hiring stages, technical assessment tools should support collaborative coding sessions within an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). This helps you understand how candidates write, run and debug code in a realistic coding environment. 

  • Tracking Your Metrics

It is difficult to assess efficacy without data, and you won’t know if your efforts are yielding intended results unless you track key metrics. Identifying key performance indicators (KPI) for your business helps you define your goals and observe change over time. 

Technical assessment tools often feature dashboards and data visualization capabilities that highlight key recruiting metrics. These help you track your progress in real time and reduce hiring time and cost. 

Learn More

A continuing engineering shortage and inability to meet recruiting demands require companies to optimize their  workforce to meet their business goals. Technical skills assessment tools help evaluate a candidate’s technical skills, automate administrative tasks, encourage collaborative workflows and allow for data-driven analysis of the recruiting funnel to enhance workforce productivity. 

Recruiters: Social Media Can Highlight Company Culture

Social media is no longer just a bunch of platforms where people post selfies of their summer vacations. The vast ecosystem of over 4.6 billion social media users across the globe includes businesses that rely on it to build a reputation and showcase their values. 

The social media presence of a company affects its relationship with both current and future employees. Talented job seekers will want to work in an environment that appreciates and respects them by promoting balanced company culture, and nowhere is this shown better than through social media channels. 

Today, we’ll see how you can fully leverage social media to reflect the core values of your company culture and attract valuable employees. 

What Makes Up Company Culture?

When considering a company’s culture, think of the faces of employees after they finish their workday. The combination of the way they are treated as both a team and individuals, their rules for interacting with one another, their most prominent characteristics and their established approach towards work equal their company’s culture. 

On a larger scale, this also includes how the company presents itself to the world through different channels, both offline and online, and the impact it has on society. Brands such as Nike and Google have made names for fostering admirable company culture. Perhaps this has attracted the most skilled individuals who built the companies to these heights. 

For those with the same aim, there are several aspects to be considered, such as the management style, mission statement, employee expectations and leadership structure, among others. But is building an outstanding company culture worth the work? 

Benefits of Prioritizing Company Culture

You should consider paying close attention to the culture of your company and how it translates into measurable benefits. From a hiring perspective, it hits on the following points: 

    • Positive identity. Valuable employees are often brought by referrals. Satisfied employees working under a fair company culture will spread the good name of the company by word of mouth and by posting on social media. 
    • Recruiting. Establishing a reputation in your industry for the way you treat your employees is likely to make recruiting easier avoiding common bottlenecks. Talented candidates will choose you over competitors, and you’ll have to spend less on recruiting new staff. 
    • Staff retention. A straightforward benefit of good company culture is increased employee retention. No one would want to leave a workplace if they receive daily the same supportive energy of those welcoming messages in their onboarding.
    • Company image. Building a warm company culture and focusing on employee branding ranks in the same spot as your traditional marketing efforts. Eventually, you’ll understand that promoting your company culture is a type of marketing. 
    • Employee satisfaction. Employees are the engine of your business, and the harder they work, the faster you grow. As long as you create a space where they feel appreciated and satisfied, their productivity and willpower to do their best work will increase. 

Recruiting and retaining new staff in 2022 doesn’t have to pose the same challenges as ten years ago. Instead of having to process hundreds of applications manually (which is easier if you use a free email for Mac to manage emails), you can attract the ideal staff who matches your company culture and reduce irrelevant applicants. But what’s the role of social media here?  

How to Use Social Media to Showcase Your Company Culture

A behind-the-scenes look into what goes on in the daily lives of your employees has immense power in building your company’s reputation. Don’t be too shy to experiment with content formats and platforms — this TikTok ad example shows how a platform can be used profitably by serious brands.

Social media portrays the spirited teamwork that goes on internally without much effort, and it’s factored into evaluating your company. 

Imagine the opposite: a brand with no LinkedIn profile or other socials. Most would think this company lacks seriousness or at least that something is wrong with it. To avoid making such an impression and leaving a bad taste in potential exceptional hirees, follow these tips: 

Make Your Brand Personable

Knowing how to make an Instagram story with professionalism, including proper fonts and crisp graphics, isn’t all you need to give life to social media. Are the faces of those who represent your brand memorable and personable? Include smiling employees and not-so-perfect photos of the work environment mixed with interactive graphics and event pictures. 

Use Content Created by Employees

This is the secret trick used by e-commerce brands to get more sales and by social media experts to grow brands rapidly: user-generated content (UGC). It’s the casual type of content captured in an amateur manner by employees themselves while working. It may include casual selfies or engaging contests organized by reposting their content. 

Showcase Your Employees

Don’t miss employee or team winnings. It’s your chance to show the audience how employees are appreciated for their achievements. Dedicate entire posts to welcoming them to their new positions, announcing promotions, or simply congratulating them for winning industry-related competitions or completing further specializations. 

Develop a Company Tour

You might have noticed short videos from big companies, like this one from Google, depicting what it’s like to be part of their workplace. You can achieve a similar result without spending an arm and a leg for a professional video. Walk the outsiders through a day in the life of your company from the morning until the doors are closed. Include footage from the most prominent spaces, such as recreation areas, offices, balconies and other spots.  

Engage on Social Media

Success on social platforms like Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn will always depend on engagement. Converse with your employees and followers to show that you actually take the time to have genuine talks and respond to feedback. Plus, comments can lead to reshares of your content, which broadens the reach of your cultured brand. 

Implement a Diverse and Consistent Social Media Strategy

Make sure your social media strategy considers multiple types of fresh content posted across your channel regularly. Don’t be that company that posts once a month or simply reproduces its website content. Keep your audience updated on the latest happenings and ask open-ended questions that encourage conversations. 

Have a Presence Where It Makes Sense

Not all platforms may benefit your company. We mentioned above that TikTok is flourishing, but if your ideal audience and potential employees don’t consume such types of content, it makes no sense to be there. Instead, focus your efforts on other platforms, like LinkedIn or Twitter. 

Next time a potential client tries to find your email address (your company or employees) by searching on Google, a LinkedIn profile has a higher chance of showing up rather than a TikTok profile. But you should do it yourself and stay on the platforms where sharing your company culture matters. 

Conclusion

Don’t forget: bad news spreads fast and far, but good news spreads slowly where it has the most importance: your current employees. Building a positive and rewarding culture is the first step to making a name for your brand because your employees will portray it with honesty both offline and online. 

This is then multiplied when it falls in front of the broader public who will applaud, share, and talk about your company culture. These tips were some general points to focus on, but you’ll likely build your unique strategies along the way. What matters is that you keep sharing your workplace culture with the world, and the results will come. 

The Rise of the Data-Driven Talent Acquisition Leader

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that data has transformed HR over the last decade, especially the talent acquisition (TA) function. The introduction of better analytics solutions and AI-powered tools, processes and metrics have enabled TA leaders to uncover efficiencies in recruiting, onboarding and training new hires.

This shift has brought about the rise of data-driven talent acquisition leaders who have access to richer and more accurate data than ever before. With the explosion of business apps in the workplace, access to large high-quality data sets is no longer a challenge. At least 10% of organizations use over 200 business apps.

Gartner predicts that organizations’ investments in enterprise technology will hit $4.4 trillion in 2022 despite talks of a looming recession, job cuts andor ongoing geopolitical issues.

In this article, we explore how the role of the data-driven talent acquisition leader has evolved and how analytics and emerging technologies have fostered this growth.

The 5 Key Skills of Talent Acquisition Leaders

The responsibilities of talent acquisition leaders have evolved and become more diverse over the years. It’s no longer just about hiring the right fit; TA professionals must ensure that they comply with larger business goals. For instance:

    1. Make hiring processes consistent with the organization’s diversity and inclusion (D&I) goals
    2. Optimize candidate journey continually
    3. Ensure that the talent acquisition efforts are meeting the set metrics and benchmarks

Successful data-driven TA leaders who have cracked the code of meeting these goals often have the following traits:

Synthesize Insights from Data

Working with analytics tools means you are swimming in an ocean of data. Effective TA leaders know how to pull data from multiple sources and use it to make critical decisions. For instance, metrics such as offer acceptance rate, time to productivity, cost of getting to optimum productivity level, resignation rate and turnover rate offer valuable information.

Experienced TA leaders take it a step further and thread them together to establish relationships between, say time to productivity and resignation rate to build a stronger retention strategy and improve the onboarding process.

Maintain a Robust TA Tech Stack

Top companies have a wide range of software applications in their HR tool stack that play well with each other. Apps like the ATS, learning experience platforms, core HR solutions (like payroll, HRMS and HCM), social media platforms and performance management are key pillars of a modern TA tech stack.

In most instances, data from each system flows into other systems in the stack, forming a complex mesh of data exchange.

A data-driven talent acquisition expert knows how to keep this ecosystem healthy so that data itself doesn’t become a bottleneck for HR. To put it succinctly, they know how to optimize their tool stack and not make it a frankenstack.

Build a Robust Talent Acquisition Analytics Ecosystem

The TA analytics ecosystem is made up of people, processes and technology. In addition to collecting HR-centric data, successful TA leaders are able to derive meaningful insights from data across other business units like finance, sales, customer success and marketing. They thread this data together with HR data to develop a narrative around cause, effect and outcome. 

Effective TA leaders also understand that it’s invaluable to have people on the team who understand statistics, machine learning and data science – analysts or data scientists are crucial to developing the narrative. They are an indispensable part of the modern HR team. Thesey valued individuals who can translate numbers into language, becoming the interpreter between the technical team and the C-suite leaders.

Marry Strategy, Data and Decisions

TA leaders use data to establish benchmarks that can help them improve the strategic direction of their talent acquisition efforts.

Data analysis skills enable talent acquisition professionals to measure where their efforts rank compared to the benchmarks and decide how they can do better. This entails getting data from the right sources, visualizing it for easier comprehension and making decisions based on the insights derived.

Have a System for Everything

Working with large data sets means you need to have a set process in place every step of the way. A data-driven TA leader uses data to solve problems with varying complexities. A slight error in data handling, and you risk getting inaccurate results. Therefore, TA leaders focus on taking a systematic approach (an assembly line, if you will) towards solving problems to make data collection, wrangling and interpretation efficient.

The Role of Analytics in the Talent Acquisition Function

TA analytics leverages data and analysis techniques to talent acquisition outcomes. To implement better recruitment strategies and improve employee performance, among other things, organizations rely on the following four types of TA analytics:

Descriptive Analytics

Descriptive analytics is the foundational layer of analytics that answers “what happened?” It presents past data and information as it is, which is then used to identify trends, patterns and outliers in the data. While descriptive analytics is great for understanding how current processes and activities impact outcomes, it doesn’t help make predictions.

For example, metrics like time to hire, time to fill, cost per hire, first-year attrition, etc. describe what happened in the past. But they don’t necessarily predict or diagnose anything.

Since this data forms the basis for future analyses, it needs to be cleaned, visualized and communicated with the stakeholders clearly.

Diagnostic Analytics

Since descriptive analytics tellsays what happened, the natural progression to this question is to uncover “why did it happen?” And that’s what diagnostic analytics aims to find out. Similar to descriptive analytics, diagnostic analytics also uses historical data.

If you have identified two patterns in your data, you can begin to link patterns to a probable cause. For instance, if you notice a high attrition rate or low offer acceptance rate, you need to delve into the employee experience data, find out potential causes, and address them.

Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics is where analytics starts getting a bit complex because you are now using past data and present trends to forecast future events. It answers the question, “What might happen in the future?”

Here’s where TA leaders work with experts such as data scientists and statisticians to make predictions. Using predictive analytics, you can predict if a candidate would be a good cultural fit, perform well and how long they’ll stay if they’re hired.

For the high attrition rate scenarios, the trend of Great Resignation could be one of the drivers. So, now that you have this information, you can predict that the high attrition rate will continue until you address the key problem areas.

Prescriptive Analytics

Prescriptive analytics is the closing of the analytics loop. It answers the question, “What should we do next?” It consolidates insights from the previous three analytics types and makes recommendations. This form of analytics also relies heavily on data science, machine learning and statistics.

To address the high attrition rate, you may notice that fixing the problem areas will take some time and a change in the strategic direction. In the meantime, using prescriptive analytics, you can optimize your hiring efforts so that your employee strength isn’t off-balance.

How AI Is Changing the Talent Acquisition Landscape

Artificial intelligence has facilitated a monumental shift in the talent acquisition function. Speed, efficiency and scalability are the visible benefits of AI, but it contributes on a granular level to the way candidates are hired, onboarded and trained. Let’s look at the five ways AI improves the talent acquisition function.

Candidate Sourcing

There are countless avenues to source candidates for a single job role. Recruiters have to sift through job boards and social media sites, compile a candidate list and engage with them during the process.

Manually, it would take many hours to find the right match. AI can increase the efficiency of sorting through thousands of results to identify top matches for a role. AI also lets you build a composite view of candidates by unifying their relevant information (such as their Github repository for tech profiles) under a single view.

Candidate Screening

With the qualified talent pool ready, you can use AI-based features in combination with the recruiter’s human intelligence to efficiently and fairly find the best candidates for the role. By combining the job description, the recruiter’s expertise and machine learning algorithms, the best fit candidate can be identified quickly. 

Also, you can clone profiles based on the top employees, and the AI algorithm will find the closest fits based on their skills and experience.

Diversity Hiring

AI helps organizations stay on track with their D&I goals. Using machine learning, recruiters can discover large pools of underrepresented candidates. And when reviewing candidates these tools can reduce unconscious hiring biases by redacting names, photos, salaries and other details that might unfairly influence the hiring decision. AI can help find a representative talent pool and ensure each candidate is assessed fairly.

Candidate Engagement

Staying in touch with multiple candidates simultaneously can get taxing, plus you need to reach them at the right time. SeekOut’s  AI-powered email personalization allows you to make a strong first impression. Use customizable templates with messages automatically scheduled at the best time to send, and information from the candidate’s profile to reference in your email to increase response rates. 

And that’s not all. Build relationships with candidates using automated, multi-step email campaigns. Increase engagement over time and view response analytics to learn how to improve your outreach strategy and improve response rates.

And that’s not all. Leverage candidate relationship management (CRM) integrations to get a unified veiew of the candidate journey and determine where they land – prospect pools or job pools.  

Onboarding

The employee onboarding process requires a lot of paperwork and lengthy processes that can be exhausting. Thankfully, new AI features can offload a lot of this tedious onboarding work. For example, employees can interact with chatbots to learn about organizational policies. Similarly, chatbots can gradually source in forms and documents to make the process less daunting.

AI-powered assessments can gauge the employee’s skill level and craft a customized learning path to get the new employee up to speed on their work responsibilities.

Closing Thoughts

Having the right talent on board is critical for organizations to meet their objectives. Considering how wide the talent pool has gotten, recruiters must pick the right talent as efficiently. With the rise of data-driven TA leaders and better analytics and AI solutions, screening, hiring and onboarding top talent has become easy while prioritizing the D&I initiatives and keeping hiring biases at bay.

What Do Job Candidates Want?

It’s a question that seems pretty simple, but for some reason, people keep asking it: what do job candidates want?

If you said, “A new job and a hiring process that is transparent and responsive.” You would be right, but for some reason, that straightforward answer isn’t enough. We know this because every year there are all sorts of new surveys that work hard to dig beyond the obvious answer in order to find more nuance beyond the predicable response that at least 90% of all job seekers would offer up.

With Criteria’s 2022 Candidate Experience Report, just released this month, it gleans more insight from job candidates in the wake of The Great Resignation. Since Criteria describes itself as a “talent success company that helps organizations make more objective, evidence-based talent decisions that both reduce bias and drive outcomes,” they have a slightly different take on what job candidates want than a great many of these surveys do.

5 Things Today’s Job Candidates Want

That’s always a good sign, and here are five key highlights from the new report that dives into the thoughts, feelings and desires of job candidates today:

    • Flexibility is the No. 1 priority for job candidates – Candidates ranked work-life balance as more important than compensation, work culture and benefits. A third of candidates (33%)  have turned down a job because it didn’t offer flexible or remote options.
    • Over half of candidates (54%) have abandoned a recruitment process because the salary didn’t meet their expectations – Salary transparency is one of the hottest topics of 2022. Candidates overwhelmingly agree that they’d rather see salary information front and center in a job description. Nearly six out of 10 (57%) strongly agree, and another 25% somewhat agree. But that wasn’t the only reason. Over half (53%) also say that they abandoned a recruitment process because of poor communication and another 32% abandoned it because the process took too long.
    • Candidates are confident in their ability to command pay – Candidates may be hungrier for salary transparency because they’re confident in their ability to command pay. The majority of candidates feel confident that they will be paid enough in their next role, with 48% saying they strongly agree and 31% somewhat agreeing. Interestingly, the amount of confidence varies widely by the different groups surveyed. For example, candidates in the retail and transportation & logistics industries were especially confident, as were Asian and Black candidates. Confidence also seemed to decrease with age, with younger candidates exhibiting higher confidence than older candidates.
    • Candidates are also confident they’ll be able to find the job that they want – Job seekers are feeling optimistic that their next role will meet their needs. In fact, a full two-thirds of respondents were “Very confident” that their next job would be satisfying. Confidence levels differed amongst groups – for example, those in the education industry were less likely to be very confident compared to other industries, and Black, Asian and Hispanic candidates were more confident than their white counterparts.”
    • In general, candidates perceive the hiring process as fair – A combined 71% of candidates feel that the hiring process in general is fair: 40% strongly agree and 31% somewhat agree. However, nearly a third of candidates (28%) feel that they are disadvantaged by the traditional hiring process: 10% strongly agree and 18% somewhat agree. Asian and Black candidates were more likely to feel that the hiring process was fair, but also more likely to feel disadvantaged by traditional hiring.

The study also asked candidates what qualities they wanted from their new employer when they take their next job. Again, what candidates are telling them isn’t groundbreaking, but it is instructive. The issue isn’t organizations don’t know all of this, but rather, so many have failed to respond to it.

What Organizations Can Offer

Candidates may hold the balance of power in today’s job market, but employers can stand out in the crowd by offering candidates what they actually want in their next role. The study asked candidates to rank seven (7) major qualities that an organization can offer, in order of importance. Here’s where they ended up:

    1. Better work-life balance;
    2. More opportunities for career advancement;
    3. Better compensation;
    4. Better manager and/or team;
    5. Better work culture;
    6. More sense of purpose at work;
    7. Better benefits.

Here’s my take: This report is about the overall candidate experience, and I’ve written about that before at Recruiting Daily — like back in 2018. I also wrote about it a year before that when I noted that, “It will take more humans, less automation: to solve the problems that so many candidates had with the lack of a decent candidate experience.”

Criteria’s Candidate Experience Report spells out yet again what recruiters and hiring managers already should know about what candidates want, but they knew most of that back when I was originally writing about it here in 2017-2018. The big question then, is this: what about the candidate experience has changes since then?

The answer? You know it all too well: virtually nothing. Some organizations take what candidates tell them to heart and make the proper adjustments to their process, but honestly, most don’t. In other words, the candidate experience is pretty much the same in 2021-22 as it was back in 2017-18. It’s sad to say that, but it’s true.

The Key To Hiring? It’s The Golden Rule

It’s also true that what I wrote for Recruiting Daily in my very first blog post in May of 2017, titled The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the Candidate Experience, is as relevant today as it was then. I made this point:

“Everyone who recruits or hires should have to be a job candidate at sometime.”

That is still true, and although the aforementioned report didn’t use those exact words, the insights they got from job seekers around the globe, the very insights that drove their new report, pretty much made the same point.

But, I also said this:

“Any company can treat top candidates well (although that not always a given, as I found out), but how they act toward the great nameless, faceless mass of people who apply to them really speaks volumes about how they treat not only those who actually do get hired, but how they probably treat their customers too.

It’s a version of the Golden Rule — treat your job candidates as YOU want to be treated. If you truly care about the Candidate Experience, this shouldn’t be so hard for recruiters and talent managers to understand.”

Job candidates may have more leverage today, but what they want in a job and an employer hasn‘t really changed much. But the challenge remains. Will more organizations listen to what job seekers are telling them and make the appropriate changes?

The Recruiter’s Guide to Technical Assessments

High demand for engineers and developers has led forward-thinking companies to adopt technical skills assessments in their hiring processes. Among essential criteria for hiring developers, recruiters ranked technical assessments as the third most important criteria (39%) after willingness to learn (55%) and work experience (40%). Despite their popularity, however, recruiters can struggle to make the most of technical assessments.

In this article, we dive into the challenges recruiters face with technical assessments and how they can leverage these solutions optimally to achieve better outcomes. 

What is a Technical Assessment?

Technical assessments help organizations measure candidates’ coding, collaboration and problem-solving skills. Recruiters use coding or technical assessments to understand a candidate’s job-relevant skills, allowing them to make data-driven and unbiased hiring decisions. With technical assessments, you can assess for the following types of skills: 

Core programming language skills such as code-writing skills, code quality and speed

General software development skills such as working with testing frameworks and version control 

Skills specific to the role such as mobile app development

Problem-solving skills and ability to collaborate on a team

You can create a more objective and fair hiring process with technical assessments, leveling the playing field for all candidates. Skills-based assessments ensure that your hiring process is compliant with the legal and regulatory guidelines. It also reduces your risk of using unintentionally discriminatory hiring practices.  

Although technical assessments are effective tools for hiring software engineers and developers, they are not without challenges for recruiters. 

Challenges in Creating Technical Assessments 

Designing the Perfect Assessment

A good technical assessment helps you accurately assess a candidate’s coding skills based on experience and knowledge. But a poorly constructed assessment will cause unqualified candidates to move to the next stage in the funnel or rule out talented candidates right at the beginning. Moreover, poorly-designed assessments can be riddled with bias and irrelevant questions, hampering your hiring decisions and ruining the candidate experience.  

Your company’s engineers are generally not trained to construct complex coding questions, and using publicly available coding assessments comes with another set of problems. 

Leaked Coding Questions and Plagiarism 

You might have faced this situation before when candidates submit a plagiarized solution. With the increasing use of coding assessments, instances of cheating and code plagiarism are also rising. 

When companies rely on their in-house engineers to create and maintain coding questions, those engineers quickly become burdened with managing leaked questions and rewriting assessments. 

Time-Consuming for Engineers

Managing a process prone to cheating, bias, and other inefficiencies is stressful and time-consuming for recruiters and engineers. Apart from the time it takes to hire and onboard a candidate, engineers may  spend hundreds of hours designing and redesigning candidate assessments. 

So, how can you conduct technical assessments the right way? 

Conducting Effective Technical Assessments

Tailor Your Process To the Role

You will be hiring for various roles and must adapt the process to meet your hiring needs. Here’s how you can design your technical assessments to evaluate different kinds of candidates. 

Start with the job description: This helps you narrow down the skill set based on role responsibilities and should be grounded in job analysis conducted by experts, such as IO Psychologists. Sharing the job description with your candidates will set the right expectations, making the process transparent. The job description should list essential or “must-have” skills. Be careful when listing additional “nice-to-have” skills, as these could discourage qualified candidates from applying. Once you have your list, you know which skills to assess and which coding assessments to use for every candidate. 

Design relevant assignments: Senior and junior candidates will need different assessments based on their experience and the role. Tasks that are too easy, irrelevant to the job role or unnecessarily long during the initial stages may cause qualified candidates to drop out of your hiring process. 

Assess Real-World Skills: When assessing candidates, focus on real-world skills, i.e., the ones they will use in their everyday work. Remember to keep validating and improving your hiring assessments. Work with your hiring manager and recruitment team to understand the specific skills to assess. 

Brush Up Your Techspeak

As a recruiter, you don’t need a computer science degree to hire engineers and developers. But if you want to hire the best ones, you need to know the fundamentals of the role you are hiring for. 

To create an accurate job description, you will need to understand the basic terminology surrounding daily tasks and responsibilities. For instance, if you don’t know the difference between a frontend and a backend developer, you will struggle to connect with the candidate. While interacting with candidates, basic technical fluency will enable you to understand their skills, ask the right questions to assess job fit and help decide the correct assessment to use.  

Invest in the Right Solution 

Manually building technical assessments is time-consuming and affects your productivity and workflow. On the other hand, pre-built technical screening tools streamline top-of-funnel candidate screening processes by directly evaluating candidates’ coding skills through a validated and predictive assessment tool. 

Technical assessment tools support data-driven decision making with the following benefits:

    • Streamline technical assessment and interviews
    • Save engineering time with a validated, leak-proof question library
    • Open candidate pool to more diverse candidates 
    • Reduce bias and increase diversity in hiring 
    • Spend time on qualified candidates only
    • Ensure excellent candidate experience 
    • Improve the quality of hire

How to choose the right technical assessment platform

A technical assessment tool will optimize candidate evaluation, saving your recruiting team time and resources. With online technical assessments, your hiring will move much faster as you eliminate manual work. 

There are many tech assessment solutions in the market, but choosing a solution depends on your hiring needs and goals. The solution should also be easy to implement and integrate with your existing tech stack. It should also have a comprehensive library of framework-based assessments and research-backed strategies for detecting and eliminating plagiarism.

The right solution will empower you to make better hiring decisions with reliable and structured technical assessments. 

Ready to Use Technical Assessments?

Assessments enable you to assess a candidate’s coding and problem-solving skills. For recruiters, conducting technical assessments can be a time-consuming process. With tech assessment and interviewing platforms, you can optimize this process.

Level One Sourcing: Dean Da Costa’s Boolean Search Tool Tutorial

Most industry sourcers have a certain degree of familiarity with Dean Da Costa.  You might know him from his training videos, SHRM presentations, or from his ability to hunt down the best search tools. But, were you aware that he made his own custom boolean search tool?

This nifty bit of tech has quite a few features, so today Dean is gonna break the site down to show you how to get the most out of it.  If you pay attention, he’ll also be showing a way to get free insider access to his advanced boolean search page with even more capabilities.

The basics of this boolean search tool

While it may seem as if this tool is a website, it only works as a download.  Dean doesn’t have these links publicly hosted, so to get access to it you need to download that portion of his web page.  You can still bookmark it like a normal site, and you’ll never have to worry about it not working correctly.

So what exactly are we getting with this boolean search tool? Well, there’s a bunch of pre-built x-ray terms that you can auto populate Google with, which will cut down your custom search time drastically once you get the hang of it.  If you aren’t particularly strong in your boolean Jedi force powers this would be an excellent way to learn while still doing your job.

Pro Version? Whats the deal?

So, Dean likes to be a big ole tease when it comes to his advanced version of the tool. It’s not a paid resource, so we doubt you could even get it from him by throwing bills in his face. He only offers the more complex version every 3 or 4 months at various live events he attends.

He updates and adds to this pro tool, so every public release has new features.  The next release window will be hosted by RecruitingDaily, coincidentally!  Our virtual September 28-29th #HRTX event has a segment dedicated for Dean called Hacking Tech Talent.  Definitely check it out if you’re enjoying his tool but want more out of it!

We recommend starting with the free version, however. The pro version has so many additional options that if you aren’t familiar with how Dean’s tool works, you might just get a little lost in the sauce. It’s an overwhelming amount of extra options that might intimidate someone who just wants to use it for simple searches. But just like with a wild black stallion, once you tame this tool you’re basically the coolest person ever.

Links and other goodies

Dean Da Costa provides a lot of amazing sourcing tools and techniques for the community, check out all the articles he’s featured in on our site Here!

Dean has a free page of sourcing tools, links, and other recruiting resources that we highly recommend you check out! That page has an overwhelming amount of stuff, so you gotta really love sourcing to appreciate the infinite hours of work Dean has put into it.

Here’s the Google Drive link to Dean’s downloadable Level One Sourcing page.

September 28 – 29 #HRTX is also a great learning experience for sourcers and recruiters of all skill levels. Besides Dean Da Costa, we have over 50 additional industry leaders all giving their 2 cents about how to be a better recruiter, sourcer, or just a more effective human being.  It’s no cost to register and is spanning over 2 days. so whether you attend for one particular speaker or the entire time, you’ll definitely be learning a lot and having a good time. Register now!

Why Flexibility Is Vital for Hiring and Retaining Top Talent

As labor markets remain relentlessly competitive and economic pressures like soaring inflation show little sign of abating, it’s crucial for companies to be capable of attracting and retaining talent. HR professionals need to give candidates compelling incentives to make it through the entire interview process and ultimately accept a job offer, and this means recognizing how their demands and expectations have shifted.

This is the main focus of a recent report based on a survey of almost 2,000 job-seekers around the world – discovering how candidates perceive the hiring and retaining process and providing insight about what they really want. 

One of the biggest finds? Job seekers prioritize flexibility above all else. When asked to rank certain job factors by order of importance, they ranked flexibility and work-life balance in the top spot, over compensation, company culture and benefits. And if an employer fails to offer flexibility, there can be consequences, one-third of candidates said they have turned down a job because it didn’t offer flexible or remote options.

After two years of working remotely, it’s clear that how and where employees work will never be the same. This is why HR teams and recruiters have to provide flexible work arrangements and ensure that candidates are aware of these options in the interview process.

When companies provide the flexibility candidates are asking for, they’ll demonstrate that they’re committed to the well-being of their employees and capable of adapting to a new era of work.

Flexibility Is the Number One Priority for Job Candidates

When the study asked candidates what they value most in a potential employer, opportunities for career advancement, better compensation, and workplace culture were near the top of the list. But the main feature candidates are looking for is “better work-life balance.”

A key element of striking this balance is providing flexibility – now that employees know what it’s like to work outside the confines of a standard office environment, they have increasingly embraced the independence offered by remote work.

According to a recent PwC survey, 63% of the employees who say their jobs can be done remotely expect their employers to offer a mix of remote and in-person work over the next year. Similarly, Gartner anticipates that 48% of employees will continue working remotely at least some of the time – up from 30% before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite the inevitable headaches caused by the shift to remote work, 83% of employers say this transition was a success. In other words, companies will continue to provide remote work options, so HR teams have to make these options a priority if they want to remain competitive.

“Flexibility” is the word that appeared more than any other in the research. This doesn’t just mean HR professionals should continue to offer and refine remote work options – it also means they have to treat all candidates as individuals with their own unique concerns and priorities, and this begins with the recruitment and hiring process.

Demonstrate Your Commitment to Flexibility in the Hiring Process

Candidates abandon the hiring process for many reasons, such as salaries that don’t meet expectations, better job offers and negative reviews about a company’s culture. For one-third of candidates, the fact that a company didn’t offer remote or flexible work options was enough to drop out of the recruitment process.

This is a blaring warning to companies that still force employees into the standard nine-to-five office setting, and it should remind companies that offer flexible work options to emphasize these options in the hiring process.

One of candidates’ main reasons for giving up on the hiring process is “poor communication from the employer / recruiter” – a reason which is second only to “salary didn’t meet expectations.” While it’s clear that employees want companies to be upfront about the salaries they offer (82% say they prefer when job descriptions list salary information), they also want transparency and open communication across the board.

When hiring managers and recruiters clearly outline a company’s remote and flexible work opportunities during the recruitment process, they’ll address two major candidate priorities at once.

The survey revealed that companies are losing far too many candidates because they have a lackluster hiring process – a finding consistent with other research. For example, a 2021 survey found that over three-quarters of senior candidates say recruitment processes affect their perception of a company. This is all the more reason to have open discussions with candidates about crucial issues like flexibility.

Navigating a New Era of Work

The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed a wide array of sweeping changes in how employees work, and many of these changes are likely to be permanent. Candidates’ demands and expectations haven’t just shifted because they’ve grown accustomed to remote work and other forms of autonomy in their professional lives – they’ve also realized that they can be more selective in the jobs they accept.

Over the past few months, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that quit rates are at record highs – a sign that employees are searching for better opportunities.

A core theme of the report is candidate confidence: 79% of respondents have faith in their ability to command pay, 87% believe they will find a satisfying new job, and 84% feel they’re able to demonstrate their full potential to employers.

These are all indicators that HR policies need to stand out from the competition, and one of the best ways to do so is by providing flexible work arrangements. According to Deloitte, 94% of professionals in the U.S. say they would benefit from work flexibility, “with the top gains being less stress/improved mental health, and better integration of work and personal life.”

Companies with flexible work options have more engaged and productive workforces than their competitors, and as our Candidate Experience Report demonstrates, they’re in a stronger position to recruit top-notch employees. Although companies are still determining how they can best make the transition to flexible work, the evidence that this will have a positive long-term impact on their ability to hire and retain talent is becoming stronger every day.

Social Media Recruiting in 2022: Strategy, Examples and Best Practices

Social media platforms are mostly used by companies to reach their target audience and promote their products/services. However, did you know that social media platforms are also being used by 92% of recruiters worldwide to find top talent?

Not only recruiters, but 41% of workers have also admitted that they use social media platforms to look for new job opportunities. These statistics clearly show that social media platforms are the future of recruitment and that is where you must direct your recruitment efforts in 2022. 

On the flip side, if you’re not completely sure what social media recruiting means, we’ve got you covered.

What is Social Media Recruiting?

Social media recruiting (a.k.a. social recruiting) is about utilizing social media platforms to research, discover, engage and attract the ideal candidates to your company. Using social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., you can research talent on the market, network with potential candidates and share job postings. 

And believe it or not, social media recruiting is one of the best ways to share the job vacancies at your company and promote your company’s culture. It also helps you establish a positive image of your company as an employer in the eyes of your ideal candidates. 

In this article, we will teach you how to create a social media recruiting strategy for your company with examples and share the best practices to get started.

How to Create an Effective Social Media Recruiting Strategy?

Finding top talent in your industry isn’t always an easy feat. To overcome this challenge, you need to leverage social media platforms for finding and hiring your ideal candidates. 

Here’s how to create a social media recruiting strategy for your company:

Research Your Competitors

The first step to creating an effective social media recruiting strategy is to figure out what you are actually up against. 

In other words, start by finding out what social media platforms are most popular among your competitors. Then, spot the types of content your competitors are posting on each social media platform, and how well they’re performing in terms of engagement.

Create Ideal Candidate Personas

Before you can start the social media recruitment process for your company, you need to create ideal candidate personas for the vacancies you’re looking to fill. 

For this, you need to create a list of personality traits, necessary qualifications, skill sets and other mandatory requirements for each vacancy at your company. And while you’re at it, make sure to analyze the areas of recruitment where your company struggles and prioritize that in your social media recruitment strategy.

Define Your Recruitment Goals

Now that you know who and where your ideal candidates are, the next step is to define your recruitment goals to benchmark your social recruiting strategy. 

The easiest way to do so is by figuring out what exactly you aim to accomplish with your social media recruiting strategy which is not possible with the traditional ways of recruiting i.e. direct advertising, contact forms, cold-calling, etc. 

Select the Right Social Media Platforms

Although LinkedIn and Facebook are the two biggest and most popular social media platforms used for recruiting. But you don’t need to limit yourself to those two platforms. 

Depending on your ideal candidate personas and industry, you can (and should) branch out to other social media platforms to reach the top talent. Today, you can reach out to ideal candidates on Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok and many other social media platforms for recruitment purposes. 

Determine Key Performance Indicators

Once you’ve decided on the social media platforms to use for recruitment, you need to determine the key performance indicators to track the success of your strategy. 

The right KPIs will help to identify which social media platforms and strategies generate the highest number of ideal candidates in the shortest time. 

Time, cost, referral rate, source of hire, social engagement and offer acceptance rate are some of the primary KPIs to consider for measuring the success of your social media recruitment strategy.

Optimize Content According to Each Platform’s Requirements

Every social media platform has different specific requirements such as image/video size, character count and so on.

Therefore, you shouldn’t cross-post the same content on each social media platform. Instead, you must optimize content according to each platform’s media specifications and caption length to make them polished and professional. 

A/B Test Creative Assets

Up till now, you might have been A/B testing headlines or copy on your company website, but have you ever A/B tested your visual assets on social media platforms? Posting a GIF instead of a static image about job openings at your company can increase the overall engagement of your posts. 

However, keep in mind to test only one option at a time. Otherwise, you’ll never know exactly which element worked best. 

And while it’s true that creating and maintaining different versions of visual assets can be overwhelming. Therefore, we strongly advise you to integrate a digital asset management solution to store platform-specific versions of all your creative assets in one place. 

Take Advantage of Social Media Tools

There are a plethora of social media tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, etc. to help you plan, schedule and post your content. Using these tools, you can aggregate all your social media accounts in one place, which saves you from the task of juggling back and forth. 

In simple terms, social media tools help to simplify operations and save you time to post content on all social media platforms.

Social Media Recruiting Examples

Social media platforms not only make it easy to stay connected with your customers but also help you to connect with your potential candidates. 

Let’s take a look at how various companies from around the world are leveraging different social media platforms for recruitment purposes.

RealSelf: LinkedIn Recruiting

LinkedIn is undoubtedly one of the best social media platforms for recruiters. It provides an unparalleled overview of candidates.

Real Self SocialWith over 810 million professionals and being a professional social network, it’s no surprise that 87% of recruiters use LinkedIn regularly.

RealSelf, for instance, never shies away from boasting about its awesome employee benefits in one of its LinkedIn posts.

Just like RealSelf, you can also take advantage of the LinkedIn features to showcase your company culture, perks, etc. and encourage ideal candidates for your company.

Scopely: Facebook Recruiting

Facebook isn’t a dedicated professional social network like LinkedIn, but it surely can, and is already being used for recruitment purposes. 

The fact that it’s the biggest social network with just about every internet user on it (more than 2 billion users to be precise) makes it a goldmine for recruiters to find, interact with and recruit ideal candidates.

Scopely, for example, has been successfully attracting and recruiting top talent using Facebook. 

Not only do Scopely share glimpses of their company culture regularly, but they also actively post about their current open positions to reach their ideal candidates all the time.

XactlyCorp: Instagram Recruiting

Though Instagram might not seem like the best place to find ideal candidates, many companies have successfully captivated their ideal candidates’ attention and encouraged them to interview. 

XactlyCorp is one of the many companies that has been leveraging Instagram to show off their company culture and employee perks in a simple yet creative format.

As you can see in their above post, they creatively added a few of their employees in one of their Instagram posts who are highlighting what they love most about working at Xactly Corp. 

Social Media Recruiting Best Practices

Now that we have covered some examples of how companies are using social media for recruiting candidates, it’s time to discuss best practices for recruiting candidates on social media platforms.

Create an Editorial Calendar

Producing content every day can be time-consuming and even frustrating at times. But know that it is extremely crucial to be consistent if you want to win at the game of social media recruiting. 

Moreover, you can always simplify the process by creating an editorial calendar to refer to for creating content. An editorial calendar can make it easier to plan different themes for the post and execute your strategy properly.   

Get your Team on Board

Instead of assigning the task of executing your social media recruitment strategy to your HR department, it is highly recommended to involve your entire team in the social media recruitment process. Doing so will skyrocket the results.

Comment on Prospective Candidates’ Content

Since most people tend to share their thoughts on social media platforms, the odds are your prospective candidates are doing the same. And this is a perfect opportunity for your company to start a conversation with them. 

So if you haven’t been commenting on your prospective candidates’ posts up till now, you need to start doing it from now onwards. This will encourage them to send a direct message, which brings us to the next point.

Send Direct Messages

Instead of waiting for your prospective candidates to reach out to you via DM, you should take charge and start the conversation from your end. 

The best way to do this is by creating personalized messages for each prospective candidate and expressing your interest in hiring them. And while you’re at it, make sure to include specific information about the job vacancy so that they have all the details needed to make a well-informed decision.

Leverage the Power of Hashtags

Hashtags are the most powerful way to reach your target audience on social media platforms. However, it’s important to use relevant hashtags to ensure that your social media posts are reaching the right audience. 

#hiring, #jointheteam and #jobvacancy are a few hashtag examples you can consider using in your social media recruiting posts. However, it’s not necessary to limit your posts to these hashtags. Instead, we advise you to research hashtags in your industry properly and use them accordingly. 

Conclusion

With traditional recruitment methods seem to be dying a slow death, leveraging social media platforms for recruitment purposes is on the rise. It’s a modern and far more convenient way to network with top talent across the globe and connect with potential candidates that you may not have been able to reach via traditional approaches. 

But don’t forget, though, that your social media recruiting strategy must be well thought out and planned. Hopefully, this article will help you with creating an effective strategy for your company.