Onboarding Psychology: Case studies and survey insights to improve your new-hire experience.
Cezanne HR has released a new report: “The Psychology of Onboarding, Optimising the new-starter experience in the digital age.” The report brings together insights from a business change psychologist. It includes case studies and recent research to provide a best-practice approach to onboarding, even for remote employees.
Organisations need to engage people with their role and business as quickly and as efficiently as possible. It is vital to create an approach that elicits the best psychological response from new recruits going through this change. As well as an approach that projects the best image of the business.
In a recent webinar survey, 65% of respondents to a recent webinar survey reported onboarding new hires while working remotely.* 89% of respondents intend to recruit over the next year.**
It’s clear that COVID-19 hasn’t removed the need to focus on onboarding. If anything, it’s even more important to learn about the psychology behind onboarding. So this understanding is applicable to partial or complete home working arrangements.
Onboarding psychology
The onboarding report by Cezanne HR includes a dedicated chapter on the main psychology theories that underpin what a new employee experiences when they start a job. From the psychology of change and first impressions to the psychological contract. Nadine Michaelides, a business change psychologist and CEO of Anima and Chepyng delves into the research on these topics. She provides examples of the theory in practice from her work.
Nadine states: ‘Onboarding is a psychological process. When not handled properly, it can have far-reaching consequences. A change in employment is a major personal transition that requires sufficient support and compassion.’
Onboarding experiences
Cezanne HR also wanted to hear about onboarding experiences first-hand. So they surveyed 589 office workers who had been in their current role from 6 months to 3 years, with responses from the UK, Ireland, and the US.
The onboarding report includes insights that span from job offer to the welcome activities people experienced after their first day. It’s clear from the survey results that the current state on onboarding isn’t dire. However, there’s still plenty of room for improvement.
Pre-boarding is sadly an area that still gets forgotten, with 18% of survey respondents not hearing from their employer between their job offer and their first day. Recruiters might find this especially frustrating to read, given how difficult it can be to source talent. The report provides quick tips throughout, and the first one explains how an online HR portal can help with employer/employee communications during pre-boarding.
Businesses are getting better at ensuring that equipment (desk, computer, phone, etc.) is ready for a new starter on their first day. 79% of survey respondents had equipment ready on day one. But the response is a cautionary tale for businesses who fail in this area. The 20% who didn’t have equipment ready for them on their first day took longer to feel happy with their job-change decision.
Providing welcome events after someone’s first day is a part of onboarding that a lot of organisations could improve in. 51% of survey respondents hadn’t experienced welcome events. And, 7% were unsure – so they weren’t all that effective if they had.
The types of events/activities that ongoing onboarding included focused mainly on getting an employee productive as soon as possible. Where HR can drive improvement is in promoting ongoing onboarding in the first place. Then championing activities like stakeholder introductions and final probation reviews more.
Employee and employer case studies
Peppered throughout the report are employee and employer case studies, bringing a very human element to the piece. The employee case studies span several decades and cover the public, private, and third sectors. Dan Lucy, Principal Research Fellow at the Institute for Employment Studies, contributes insights from Hymans Robertson LLP, Allianz Ireland, and Plan International.
Dan’s advice echoes some of the survey findings. “Get the basics right, like having equipment ready on day one. Make sure the expectations of your new hire are clear and that you’re in touch with them from when they accept the role. And don’t forget to make them feel like they belong!”
About the Report
Cezanne HR’s report ‘The Psychology of Onboarding: Optimising the new-starter experience in the digital age’ brings together psychology, practical insights, and survey results in one report. The psychology explains the ‘why’ behind onboarding. Helping HR and line managers relate better to their new starters. And to create onboarding approaches that are more ‘human.’
The survey results are useful for HR professionals who need to convince internal stakeholders about the importance of onboarding. If it isn’t already a key concern. The quick tips included make it easy for readers to understand how they can improve their onboarding.
The case studies bring it all to life, providing both inspiration and food for thought.
*333 respondents, 28 May 2020 ** 267 respondents, 28 May 2020
Check out this Free Chrome Extension: EmailOnGitHub
We have a relatively new tool for you to check out, called EmailOnGitHub. This is a GitHub oriented tool. It’s available as a free Chrome extension. When sourcing, you will often find yourself on a GitHub profile, and as you know, GitHub hides the user’s email addresses.
After you install the extension, visit any GitHub user profile and you will see their email address displayed directly on their profile. It will also show if they have marked themselves available for hire.
That’s it! That’s all it does. But it’s pretty cool since it bypasses the need to manually search using other methods.
Created by former Microsoft Talent Sourcer Ela Mościcka along with Martin Petrla.
How Employers Can Read Virtual Body Language While Hiring
In an ideal world where face to face interviews are feasible, recruiters get half of the information about how candidates might turn out to be, through their display of body language. A firm handshake, confident posture, eye contact throughout- such indicators are critical in selecting the right person for the job.
An article in The New York Times highlighted how anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell observed that face-to-face conversation is only 35 percent verbal, with more than 65 percent being nonverbal.
The ability to read body language is much more than a fad. It’s science. If done correctly, the body language of a person can give away their emotional state at that exact moment.
Now, that organizations had to reorient their entire hiring process to accommodate a remote or work from home setting, recruiters face the uncertainty of missing out on the candidate’s nonverbal behavioral cues. There’s the added challenge of not being able to view a person entirely and being limited to assess the body language only through what a 15 inches screen can offer.
Here are some of the nonverbal signs and their hidden significance that you can pick up during a virtual interview:
1. Posture
The posture of an individual is a telltale sign of whether they are actually interested in the conversation going on. When a person is engaged with the conversation, they tend to lean in. A slouched posture or leaning back during a conversation is a sign of disinterest.
When a candidate displays such posture it usually means that either they are not taking the interview and the job seriously or else they are undermining your authority. Either way, such candidates are bad news.
2. Head Tilt
The head tilt is a behavioral cue that many miss out on. A person who tilts their head when you are talking is showing interest, listening actively, or interested in what you are saying. Such candidates show that they are not only good listeners but also value what the other person is contributing to the conversation. This is certainly a trait that a good team player usually displays.
3. Touching Neck
If during the virtual interview process, a candidate is constantly touching his neck or stroking his chin, it is a pacifying behavior of sorts. It could generally mean two things depending on the situation. Either they are displaying a nervous tick or they are being dishonest with you.
4. Hands
The hands reveal a lot about a person’s emotional state. The ability to see the hands of a candidate in a video interview will not always be possible. However, it would certainly be of your help to understand the meanings behind some common hand gestures.
Hands with the palms up position is a sign of being open and inviting opinions from the other person.
Hands with the palms down position is a display of confidence and authority.
Similarly, a person with their arms crossed might indicate being not comfortable with the situation or not agreeing with what is being said.
5. Eyes
The eyes are perhaps the easiest body language to keep track of mainly because it’s impossible to hide and are fairly hard to control.
When a candidate looks directly at you during the interview, it indicates that they are confident and paying attention. Consequently, frequently looking away might indicate that the person is distracted, uncomfortable, or trying to conceal their emotions.
Blinking is a natural process. But blinking too much or too little indicates their emotional state at that moment. People blink rapidly when facing uncomfortable situations or when feeling anxious. Blinking too little may indicate a person is trying to hide his nervousness or excitement.
6. Mouth
Mouth expressions and movements can be crucial in reading another’s body language. For example, chewing the bottom lip may point toward’s the candidate experiencing worry, fear, or insecurity.
When assessing body language, pay attention to the following signals:
Pursed lips. Tightening of the lips is an indicator of feeling disapproval or distrust about the other person or the conversation.
Lip biting. Biting one’s lips is usually signs of being worried, anxious, or stressed.
Covering the mouth. When someone wants to hide an emotional reaction, such as frowns or yawns, they might cover their mouths.
Two Way Street
Though useful, it’s important to remember that your decisions should not be based solely on your observations. An interview is an extremely stressful situation, and some candidates are bound to display some nervous behavior or the other. A candidate unable to make eye contact can be shy instead of being dishonest. Similarly, a person might smile in a tense situation due to nervousness.
To pick the right candidate, it is important that you pair the candidate’s verbal and nonverbal communication to arrive at the right result. Basing your result solely on one criterion would not be feasible or fair.
How to Boost Motivation When You’re Working from Home
Working from home is awesome – until you see your bed and the idea of a nap is too alluring to pass up. Or worse, your neighbor decides that it’s the perfect day to get started on his DIY woodworking project, firing up all sorts of noisy machinery while you’re trying to meet a deadline.
For many modern professionals, especially in the time of COVID-19, working from home has become a safety precaution as much as it is a privilege. But every once in a while, with multiple distractions at home hampering our productivity, it can be hard to stay motivated.
If you’re finding it difficult to feel productive, stay on task, and get your work done, here are some effective ways to help you stay motivated while you work from home.
1. Set Up a Dedicated Workspace
First things first, carve out a place that’s entirely dedicated to work, preferably outside your bedroom. You might be tempted to work in bed as it’s the most comfortable space in your entire home, but part of the reason we’re more motivated to work at the office is that we associate the place with productivity.
When you set up a mini home office and sit down at a desk where you can’t see your bed, your brain instantly knows it’s time to get work done. It establishes the idea that work is your sole purpose in that space. Even just the kitchen table or a corner desk in the living room is a better alternative than working in your bedroom. Also, make sure that your workspace is clean and free of distractions. Your house has many mental traps, so avoid placing anything near your workstation that can set you off on a different path.
2. Create a Schedule
Without a structured workday, you won’t be able to manage your time wisely. As you sip leisurely on an extra cup of coffee or enjoy a particularly hearty but long breakfast, you might find that you start shifting your work hours later and later. Then, you extend your workday later into the evenings, which causes you to have late nights as well.
That’s why it’s crucial to have a clear schedule and to structure your day like you would in the office. Establish a strict time to begin and end your workday, and try to stick to it as much as possible. To stay on schedule, divide your tasks into segments and take note of the time it’ll take to complete them throughout the day. If you have an online calendar, create personal reminders or events that tell you when to start on new tasks or shift gears. You can easily do all these with Google Calendar.
3. Work in Small Blocks of Time
This is somewhat related to the 2nd suggestion. Blocking out small periods of time and carefully planning what to do during that timeframe will make big tasks more manageable.
For instance, let’s say you’re a recruiter. You’ll have more motivation when you tell yourself that you only need to scan through 10 resumes on your HR recruitment software in the next 30 minutes, rather than telling yourself that you have to read 50 resumes by lunchtime. You can then take 5 to 10-minute breaks every half hour to release some stress and get you ready for the next round of tasks. This will help you feel less overwhelmed by the pile of requirements you have to finish.
4. Limit Your Distractions
You may find that you struggle to continue on with a task each time you’re distracted. You can stay motivated by limiting the interruptions you experience and the distractions around you.
This means mute your phone’s notifications, check your email once an hour, and stay off social media when you’re not on a break. You can also set your phone on “Do Not Disturb” until you finish a particular task.
If you’re working from home and have your kids around, keep them occupied, so they don’t end up interrupting your work. Give them activities to and only check on them at a certain time.
Additionally, establish some ground rules on what’s considered a legitimate reason to interrupt you while you’re working. Then, you can reward them with a cookie or a fun activity for behaving and playing on their own.
5. Don’t Forget to Reward Yourself
You might find yourself working best when you know that at the end of a stressful workday, there’s little reward waiting for you. For example, you can tell yourself that you can binge-watch the latest season of your favorite Netflix show if you finish work by 6pm. Or you can tell yourself that as soon as you finish a presentation, you can have a cup of your favorite tea.
Little incentives go a long way toward helping you stay motivated and get work done efficiently. It helps you see what you’re capable of accomplishing within the day or a certain time period. According to experts from Psych Central, rewarding oneself with little treats also helps a person feel more energized and contented, boosting their self-command and efficiency.
6. Have Personal Challenges
Aside from rewards, challenges can help you get moving too! For instance, you can challenge yourself to write 500 words in 30 minutes. Once you actually get past that goal, try beating it by writing 600 words during the next 30-minute time slot.
Along the way, you might also make some discoveries about your working habits. Maybe you’re more focused when you’re sitting at the kitchen table or you find that work faster after having lunch. Learning these things will help you set your day up for success.
7. Practice Self-Care
You’ll never stay motivated if you’re perpetually exhausted or you’re fuelled by caffeine only. To perform at your peak, you need plenty of rest, a healthy diet and self-care!
However, meeting your self-care needs at the moment might be a bit more challenging than usual. After all, maintaining a healthy diet composed of fresh fruits and vegetables isn’t easy if you’re limiting your trips to the grocery store. What you can do is to limit your sugar intake and eat as many home-cooked meals as you can.
Also, don’t forget to step back from work every once in a while or when it gets completely overwhelming. Just because you’re working from home doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of your paid leaves. Have a day dedicated to self-care at least once a month.
If you’re the type of person who still wants to stay productive during your mental health break, limit your productivity to reading up on articles that introduce a new personal skill such as email marketing or even something completely random like learning how to crochet.
Working from home and being your own personal manager is great, but it’s easy to let your personal life bleed into your work life. At home, there are plenty of distractions and you can become your own productivity killer.
Hopefully, with the tips above, you can stay motivated, even in the most challenging circumstances. Wishing you the best of luck!
Talent Acquisition Toolkit: How One Simple Formula Can Move the Needle to Compensation Equality for All
How will Covid-19 impact Human Capital Management (HCM)? This is the million-dollar Human Resources question top of mind! While we don’t know all the implications of coronavirus, we are starting to see an opportunity arise for Talent Acquisition to take the lead on compensation equality with diversity and inclusion at the forefront.
For the past few months, Talent Acquisition has had to shift to 100% virtual. Recruiter and Hiring Manager Avatar, please meet your Candidate Avatar! To illustrate, avatars have no color, no gender, no sexual orientation, no height, and no weight.
And yes, while live zoom videos and video interviews have become more normalized, a small image behind a screen leaves much to be unseen.
The coronavirus effect of a virtual talent acquisition process has created an opportunity. Organizations can more effectively evaluate a candidate’s qualifications based on interview metrics directly associated with a role, a candidate’s credentials, and responses.
In turn, this has created an opportunity for organizations to extend offers based on data-driven metrics vs. the influence of conscious and unconscious biases.
How can Talent Acquisition ensure offers are extended to candidates based on data-driven metrics?
Compensation Departments run market data on open roles. They provide market ranges for hiring managers and recruiters to use when they discuss and extend offers. Recruiters must follow a Compensation Committee approval process before posting a role. Providing them intel on a role’s budget, internal equity, and market data.
A hiring manager’s (HM) primary focus lies within their own operation and department budget. Therefore, HM’s are not expected to be well versed in the art and science of market data and best practices around compensation. This is a perfect opportunity for Talent Acquisition to create a course, one-pager, SOP. Whatever your organization’s culture wants to call it!
Key Takeaway: Empower your hiring managers to recognize the impact of their conscious and unconscious biases. Free them of a compensation inequality burden that leads to decreased productivity and increased turnover costs in their department.
Transparency & Personalization
What’s more, market data and an employee’s total compensation package is becoming more and more available to the public. Websites such as glassdoor.com, salary.com, and mercer.com provide candidates with information on salary ranges. Including direct compensation data.
These platforms allow employees to share their data and experiences. Making it easy for candidates to see reviews on how consistent and inconsistent, fair and unfair, an organization treats their people. These direct testimonials are key to attract top talent.
97% of employees want to be recognized and rewarded for a wide range of contributions.
Fair and competitive compensation ranked #1 for employees in Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States.
Transparency on pay calculations ranked #1 for employees in Japan.
In addition to transparency, we have seen a dramatic shift towards personalization within HR over the past 5 years. In Talent Acquisition alone, Automated Tracking Systems (ATS) now offer personalized pages per role, personalized responses, and personalized assessments.
Benefits, Performance Management, and Learning and Development have all now followed. They evolved to a transparent and personalized model. Consequently ensuring they speak to their target audience. It’s time for compensation to join its fellow HR departments!
Key Takeaway: Building a compensation model that is personalized and transparent is a driving factor to attract top talent.
Authentic Conversations
Once Talent Acquisition educates HM’s and adopts a transparent and personalized offer experience. All that’s left is an authentic conversation! If organizations post roles and ranges internally and externally, employees and candidates can then have authentic conversations to fine-tune where they align within the market range. Based on their experience and education.
Feeling squeamish about this conversation? Don’t worry! Fierce conversations around culture, data-driven metrics, and expectations will be covered in that training we discussed above under education.
Also, comfort comes with practice! Looking for another way to look at this conversation as an opportunity? Take this occasion to ensure you and your candidate can effectively communicate. And that your candidate aligns with your team and organization’s culture.
Key Takeaway: Talent Acquisition has an opportunity to set a candidate and organization up for success by fostering fierce conversations that are data-driven and authentic.
In Summary: The Talent Acquisition Toolkit Formula
Education + Transparency & Personalization + Authentic Conversations = One simple formula that can move the needle to compensation equality for all!
PreContactTool is a Chrome extension that allows you to find the contact details for a person’s LinkedIn profile page. It works really well, but you were restricted to finding information one at a time. Well, now they have released a new feature called Talent Pools.
How does it work?
Like the rest of the tool, it is LinkedIn centric. Go through LinkedIn to find people you want contact information for. Then just click “add profile to talent pool” in the extension.
After you’ve built your list, click on Fetch Contact information. When the data is ready, you will get an email with the results. It still uses the same tool to find the contact information, but now you get to locate them en masse. Saving you both time and effort.
You get 5 free credits per month for free, and additional credits are reasonably priced. To use this, you will need an account. Sign up for an account on their website, and then install the extension.
Your Workforce is Entirely Remote. How Should You Manage?
The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken up every industry and changed business models and consumer habits around the world. It’s created new challenges and opportunities for HR professionals, workforce leaders, and business and project managers. We’re working through an unprecedented time.
Figuring things out as we go, pivoting when necessary, remaining flexible, and most of all working to support our employees and keep our businesses operating. In today’s remote workforce world, it’s never been more important – or more difficult – to meet employees where they are and work hard to tailor communication strategies to their unique needs.
Know your employees
The line between home life and work-life was blurry before the pandemic hit. And now, it’s indistinguishable. Our living rooms have become our offices, and our computers and phones are now our communication lifelines. You’ve probably noticed that some of your employees and colleagues are thriving in this environment, while others are struggling.
Meet your employees where they are. Do what you can to help them adapt, whether that’s reorganizing their schedule if they have kids or a partner working opposite hours. Or by creating a more structured plan if they’re struggling to work effectively outside the office. Get to know your employees and do your best to reach them in ways that make sense.
This will only happen if you invest the time getting to know and understand your team on both a professional and more personal level.
Provide the right resources
Knowing and understanding your employees will help you identify their specific needs and put resources in place to help meet them. Host virtual town halls, all-staff meetings, consultation sessions, and webinars on pertinent issues impacting your organization or culture and current events.
Whether that’s celebrating diversity or offering meaningful support for working parents, do your best to provide the resources to adhere to your employees’ needs and promote unity across your organization. Being in an HR role, you’re likely the common thread between employees in different roles across your company.
Forge connections between your employees and their colleagues with common interests or in similar situations. Whether that’s a love for cooking or working through having children at home full-time. Do your part to ensure your employees feel supported.
Separate work life and home life
Help your employees find ways to separate their personal and professional life. Start by thinking about what you’re doing to maintain a healthy work-life balance. Is it exercising to break up the workday, reading a book for fun, trying a new recipe, game nights with your family, or volunteering?
Whatever it may be, it’s important to find an outlet that enables you to disconnect.
Sometimes it’s difficult to be fully offline, even – and especially – when your home and work environment are one and the same. Encourage your team to use their paid time off in compliance with your company’s policy. And while you’re at it, take a few vacation days yourself.
An important aspect of striking a healthy work-life balance is to define virtual availability. Make sure your employees understand when you are “most available” and vice versa. No one should be working non-stop for eight hours every day, regardless of their job type or industry. So work together to create a schedule and a system that works for your team.
Communicate to your employees what time works best for scheduling meetings, and be available when you say you will. Come up with a virtual communication system. For example, if an assignment is urgent, ask that your employee sends you a text message. If the task can wait, use email or instant message. Find what works best for you and your employees.
Be an encourager
At a time when there’s so much uncertainty in the world, being a positive, encouraging, and consistent voice for your employees is more important now than ever before. Whether that’s sharing an uplifting video, inspiring words, or a piece of good news, be a light in your employees’ and colleagues’ lives.
This will go a long way in helping to support them during this difficult time and will demonstrate your strong leadership skills.
Don’t be afraid to figure it out as you go
While there is endless advice and guidance on what and how things should be done, remember that what works for others may not fit your situation. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to managing and communicating with a remote workforce.
Remaining flexible is key to successfully navigating this unprecedented time, and don’t be afraid of that. Be ready to iterate and build upon the lessons you learn.
Most of all, get to know your employees and understand how you can support one another through this time.
The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken up the world of work with massive disruptions to the global workforce. HR leaders are being forced to the forefront of the crisis and are required to lead their employees through an unpredictable environment.
Today, businesses across the globe are in various stages on the road to recovery. Still, they’re all having to re-prioritize to maintain leadership and help their organizations define what’s next.
As we navigate this new environment, it’s important to take a step back and look at your evolving needs, new business demands, and shifting priorities at a higher level. To help with this, we’ve created a Hierarchy of Needs for HR During a Crisis.
What is this Hierarchy of Needs for HR?
The concept for this Hierarchy of Needs actually came about from a conversation I had with RecruitingDaily’s president, William Tincup. In discussing the changing role of HR in this pandemic, we realized it’s important to recognize that during a crisis, business and HR priorities are vastly different than in our day-to-day.
We’re not fully prepared and equipped to handle a crisis like this because we don’t have regular practice with it.
From there, the Hierarchy of Needs for HR During a Crisis was born. It’s a big picture look at where HR should be focusing during any type of crisis – not just a pandemic. The hierarchy looks at crisis priorities through two key lenses for HR: employee needs and business needs.
For each of these lenses, there are four top layers of ‘needs’ to fulfill:
1. Employee Safety
The first and foremost need for HR during a crisis is ensuring employee safety. Employees are bound to have a rollercoaster of emotions during a crisis (nervousness, fear, confusion, etc.), and it’s up to HR to make sure they feel safe, confident, and comfortable.
From an employee needs perspective, ask yourself:
Are our people safe?
Do our people feel safe?
Do we have the right health and well-being programs in place?
From a business-needs perspective, HR should ensure the organization has all of the data, information, and systems in place to deliver proper workforce safety.
Ask yourself:
Do we have the right data, information, and policies to keep employees safe at work?
Do we have systems in place to ensure both physical and psychological safety?
2. Workforce Productivity
Once HR can build a foundation of safety amidst a crisis, the next layer of needs to fulfill is workforce productivity. Unfortunately, when disasters hit, we don’t have the luxury of time to hit pause for too long to figure everything out. Employees will want and need information, updates, and strategies – and they’ll need them quickly. For this reason, it’s critical for HR to ensure both their workforce and their business have what they need – from an information and technology/tools standpoint – to keep things going.
From an employee needs perspective, HR teams should ask:
What do our employees need from us?
Do they have fast access to necessary information and resources that they need to be successful?
Do they feel comfortable and confident?
From a business needs perspective, HR teams should ask:
What is our business trying to accomplish?
Do we have the right people to achieve these goals?
Are we able to reskill and reallocate talent to meet new business needs?
3. Connectivity & Alignment
The next level of needs for HR in a crisis is connectivity and alignment. During a crisis we can expect disruption of teams, roles, and priorities. And, especially when workers are forced to be remote, it’s incredibly important to deliver clear guidance and maintain a sense of connectivity for your workforce. When disruption hits, employees may feel displaced from their colleagues and managers and giving departments new goals to meet emerging business needs. It’s up to HR to ensure a sense of stability, connectivity, and alignment for both individual employees and larger departments within the organization.
To fulfill this need from an employee perspective, be able to answer these questions:
Are employees connected to their teams and workplace culture?
Do they have clear goals?
Are they getting the continuous feedback they need to succeed?
To fulfill this need from a business perspective, be able to answer these questions:
Is every department and employee aligned with our new goals?
Are our people clear on new priorities?
4. Growth
Lastly, the best path through a crisis for any organization is to focus on growth. Despite the impact of the crisis on your organization, HR teams should push their teams to focus on what’s next. Rather than dwelling on what happened. Use this time to identify growth opportunities for the organization and your workers, and ensure both have the right tools and strategies in place to achieve them.
From an employee needs perspective, HR should ask:
Are employees motivated to do their best?
Do they have access to learning and career opportunities?
From a business needs perspective, HR should ask:
Do we have the right people to support our growth areas?
Are there development opportunities available?
For all of these needs, HR teams can leverage a handful of tools and technology to help deliver on each new priority that might arise. Our team, for example, has pulled together the Employee Care Package for the New Workplace, which is a bundle of HCM tools that will help HR teams safely lead employees as they re-enter the workplace.
While we’re moving forward through the phases of recovery for the COVID-19 pandemic, the unfortunate reality is this won’t be the last crisis we encounter. But with this new hierarchy of needs and the lessons we’ve learned over the past few months, we can all prepare now for future disruption.
Employer branding is quickly emerging as a top priority for organizations in a post-pandemic world. At a time when global businesses are preoccupied with surviving the COVID-19 induced economic slowdown, employer branding has suffered. Furloughs, layoffs, and rightsizing have been dominant themes across the employment market. And have done little to build confidence amongst jobseekers.
However, the situation is getting better. During recent BLM protests, we saw employers taking accountability for their D&I initiatives and stepping up to express solidarity with the underrepresented. Organizations also publicly acknowledged that their diversity and inclusion strategies needed realignment and promised to work on it.
Hiring will resume as the economy reopens, and people return to work. While the job market is likely to remain employer-driven temporarily, the best candidates will still be picky about where to work. And that’s where organizations have the opportunity to rethink how they approach and engage talent.
Employer Branding in a Post-COVID World
One of the biggest problems with employer branding is that it is often associated with superficial perks and benefits, instead of being aligned to core business goals and the corporate brand. Free lunches, bring-your-pets-to-work, and in-house masseuses are all nice to have. But, do they really drive your competitive advantage as a business?
Economic volatility, uncertainty, and shorter shelf life for knowledge have placed a premium on professional development opportunities. According to Gallup, jobseekers care deeply about their development when looking for jobs. An astounding 87 percent of millennialsrated “professional or career growth and development opportunities” as important to them in a job.
Gallup also found that “opportunities to learn and grow” is one of the top three factors in retaining millennials. And is the only aspect of retention that separates millennials’ needs from those of non-millennials.
So, it seems pretty cut-and-dry, right? Employers must offer L&D opportunities to hire better talent and improve their employer brand. However, it is easier said than done. Talent acquisition leaders and the C-suite need to focus on building the employer brand organically.
L&D programs have been a mainstay for organizations for a while. So, delivering opportunities for new talent is not a significant challenge.
The real challenge
The real challenge is delivering opportunities that enable the organization to build a new talent dimension. Which is key to the company’s corporate brand. Here is where TA and functional leaders must ask themselves: “What will drive our competitive advantage over the next five years?” Is it going to be leadership skills, digital competence, or a combination of both?
For businesses looking to thrive in a post-COVID world, technical excellence must be supplemented with skills like teamwork, empathy, and customer-centricity. Organizations must also re-examine key individual and team behaviors that are desirable in a post-COVID world. For instance, contribution could make way for commitment. And employees must learn to focus on relationships, rather than just communication.
Developing an employer branding framework that helps you answer critical questions about your capabilities as a business, candidate perception, and organizational values are essential. And here’s where digital coaching platforms promise to transform the way you look at professional development as an extension of employer branding.
Alexandra Connell, Founder and CEO, Pluma
“Employees are attracted to organizations that build cultures that they want to be a part of. This means cultures that are inclusive, flexible, authentic, and successful. When organizations invest in their people, those kinds of cultures follow as a natural outflow,” says Alexandra Connell, CEO, and founder of digital executive coaching platform, Pluma.
Executive Coaching and Employer Branding: A Match Made in L&D Heaven?
A big part of measuring the success of an employer branding strategy is learning how it resonates with potential hires and employees. “We work closely with a lot of our HR partners to help them find ways to let employees know about the fact that they’re offering Pluma. And give people at all levels opportunities to apply or be nominated for the experience so that distribution is equitable and noteworthy,” says Alexandra.
A great way to obtain candidate feedback is through surveys. and work with recruiters to get their assessment of candidate responses. This should help you understand ground realities and plan future upgrades on your branding strategies. Using insights from candidate feedback, you can keep refining your talent development framework to focus on more relevant capabilities.
Now, coming to the question of how digital coaching platforms could fit into your larger talent attraction and retention strategy. They offer a personalized and scalable alternative to traditional, expensive, one-size-fits-all coaching practices. It follows a natural evolution of on-demand learning for a generation of post-COVID workers.
Human Skills
As AI and allied technologies become more capable of performing routine tasks, the need for human cognitive skills will continue to increase. High-performing organizations of the future will be the ones that adopt a culture of lifelong learning. And facilitate opportunities for employees to develop new skills continuously.
Alexandra believes digital coaching platforms can help unleash employee potential in a way that was impossible before. She says, “The workplace is ever-shifting, and people learn better when they can interact, reflect and confide in someone that they find credible. It’s only natural that that practice would be over a period of time and oriented around establishing a real relationship and accessing your coach as-needed.”
“I think the demand we see for Pluma, a scalable but personal and people-oriented solution is a natural outgrowth of the business environment we see today. As is the desire for things that are on-demand,” she adds.
While most organizations have had some leadership/management development programs in place. They’ve typically catered to a select few within the company. The exclusivity of traditional coaching programs makes them ineffective for meeting the demands of the current workplace. Additionally, a candidate interviewing for a mid-level position will not be sold on your promise to make coaching available five or ten years down the line.
Digital Coaching Platforms
As candidates increasingly place professional development as a top priority when assessing career opportunities. Digital coaching platforms serve to democratize knowledge and skills previously restricted to senior executives within organizations.
Speaking about the limitations of traditional training programs, Alexandra says, “Mainly just that they don’t reach broadly or deeply enough. The programs are usually excellent, but they tend to touch maybe 0.1 percent of the population. It’s not adequate reach for a meaningful culture shift, retention impact, or succession planning. Pluma allows organizations to provide all the benefits and impact of traditional coaching. A six month, 1:1 relationship with an experienced executive coach, for less than what they’d spend per head on a half-day off-site. This means organizations can coach hundreds rather than a handful. And impact their organizations at a deep and meaningful level.”
However, positioning your company as a learning organization involves more than just purchasing a coaching platform. It requires a cultural shift in terms of how learning is viewed within the organization. Your commitment to supporting professional development for employees should clearly come across in your employer value proposition, career site, and job descriptions. It also needs to be embedded in the business. This means securing C-suite buy-in and incentivizing the right behaviors.
HR leaders need to make professional development a part of employees’ regular flow of work. By breaking down barriers to participation and encouraging leaders to join coaching programs can help you ramp up adoption. And, in the long run, build a larger repository of skills within your organization.
Alexandra shares three tips for organizations looking to build a culture of continuous learning:
Make it part of people’s day-to-day. Avoid programs that create extra homework or extensive time away from their teams. Look for options that allow people to experiment in their daily work and create dialogue around that.
Scale it as much as possible. If you have a 200,000 person organization with 30 high potentials (hi-po) in your hi-po program. You simply aren’t reaching enough people. Find solutions that make sure to address a broader base of employees.
Support learning in your culture. It’s important that the C-Suite and other senior leaders make time for their teams to commit to learning. And that they themselves model that kind of behavior. Having key senior personnel join kick-offs and events is a powerful way to say this matters, and we care.
The HR team will lead this initiative. But to make it stick, it must be owned by the C-suite. As any good leader will tell you, the most important job is attracting, retaining, and advancing the best people. Integrating talent into the center of the corporate brand, rather than spinning out a series of cosmetic benefits, is the best way to do that.
Tying it All Together
Building a great employer brand is more than just shiny marketing strategies and gimmicky perks. It is rooted in a clear corporate purpose and set of values that help you attract candidates who share those fundamental beliefs.
Digital coaching offers an opportunity for organizations to bridge the gap between what they promise and what they can deliver. In terms of employee experience and professional development. In the current environment, particularly, organizations must offer a tangible, lasting benefit to candidates seeking to work for a future-ready company.
You may not be the workplace of the future today. But if you can successfully demonstrate your intention of getting there, it should certainly be a part of your positioning. By offering a combination of aspirational elements in your employer brand, you can breathe life into what would otherwise be a bland collection of promises. That will do little to compel candidates to look closer.
Given our new world of work, employer reputation will ultimately boil down to consistent values and validity of their organizational cultures. And professional development as a value proposition serves as a clear and accountable employer branding metric. One that will continue to drive your competitive advantage for years to come.
Calculate cost of living with the free Numbeo tool
If you source or recruit for openings that require candidates to move, here is a tool that can help you collect data. Numbeo is a new tool that helps people with relocating. It’s a cost of living calculator. It’s also free!
Put in a location and find the monthly estimate costs for a family of four, a single person, as well as the comparison to New York prices and the city’s rank and COL Index. The tool also provides a breakdown of individual average costs of dining out, rent, grocery items, and utilities.
Comparing between two locations to decide on a move? Use their comparison tool and discover the difference in the cost of living between two locations. The tool will provide a breakdown of rent, utilities, consumer prices, groceries, and more.
Other Comparisons
Numbeo also provides data for comparisons on quality of life, crime, health care, pollution, traffic, and property prices.
The data comes from government data as well as crowdsourced data. Overall, this is a useful tool for relocation, or even if you’re just planning a trip.
Creating a strong professional network will set you up for future success. For many, that means setting up your LinkedIn profile. However, this looks a little different for people working in the medical and pharmaceutical space.
Oftentimes, nurses, doctors, and medical/pharmacy technicians do not benefit from creating a professional network on LinkedIn. So, when tasked with a pharmacy technician role, the challenge may seem daunting to someone who is new to medical recruiting.
Keeping an open mind and taking an out of the box approach to a medical role will help you see success with confidence. Here are some tips to start you off.
Medical Licenses, Degrees, and Certification Programs
Do some research. See what schools provide a degree or a certification for the job you are working on. Most of the time, a college/university will have a staff directory available to the public. Reaching out to professors who teach classes necessary to receive the appropriate degree or certification is a good place to start.
Professors want to see their students succeed, so they may be open to referring past students. Or, may have information on posting the job to the university careers page. If not, maybe they will share the information about the opportunity with their students in class.
Doing research on where the candidates are coming from will create a system of the candidate coming to you. It’s always worth the time!
Active License Searches
While having the candidates come to you is awesome, you can continue to actively source to ensure you have a strong pipeline of candidates to present to your hiring manager. Even though candidates for medical roles may not typically live on your go-to sourcing platforms, there are many different avenues you can try.
If your candidate does require certification, take a look to see if the certification has a registrar of people who have an active certification.
From there, you can search social media sites or personal websites for your candidates to contact them about your role.
Medical Meetups
Otherwise, check out local meetups in your area. If you find a group of Registered Nurses in Northern California, take a look at their members’ page. Oftentimes, you have enough information on a member profile to find a candidate’s social media or contact information.
If a member has a profile picture, check to see what Google results come up when you search the image. You can also use information in their introduction and their location to help you find more information on candidates.
Doing research to learn about the education and licensure of your medical roles can help you find creative avenues to head down to produce stronger results. Taking time to research a role at the beginning of your process can help you understand what strategies will be most effective for your role.
While research may seem time-consuming, it will help you cut down time on trial and error and allow you to present an impressive batch of candidates to your hiring manager.
Fireside chat with William Tincup & Ruth Thomas of CURO
A few years ago I was speaking at a compensation conference. The subject was what was happening outside of comp. See, when you get to know compensation professionals you learn very early that they care deeply about compensation. And that they might not care as much about onboarding or talent acquisition or outplacement, etc.
They really CARE about compensation. During this conference, I had a few comp practitioners show me spreadsheets that they had created to manage compensation for their organization. Now, compensation folks can create some really really really advanced spreadsheets.
Think Microsoft Excel for experts. It was cool but you know me, I was wondering why they didn’t have access to great compensation software the entire time they were showing me these spreadsheets. That’s where Curo comes in.
I first got to know them 150 years ago when they were integrated with HRsmart. Great comp tech and great folks behind the scenes.
Without any further ado, let’s get to know Ruth and Curo.
Ruth Thomas has over 30 years of global HR and reward management experience. She is a Senior Consultant at Curo Compensation and is one of the company’s co-founders. Ruth is an expert in the management of compensation processes and the design of pay and benefit structures, salary progression systems, and management incentive plans.
Ruth recently led the vision and development of Curo’s newest solutions for a Gender Pay Gap reporting and a Pay Equity analysis. As one of Curo’s leading subject matter experts, she works with prospects and customers to help them optimize the execution of their reward strategy through technology. Prior to joining Curo, Ruth held roles at Lloyds TSB Group, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Dow Jones Group, and Credit Suisse.
Q1: Work-related, what’s keeping you up at night these days?
Bearing in mind the current situation. A few things are pre-occupying me!
Like all business leaders in the current climate, we are thinking about the impact of the economic lockdown on the company. We have been busy re-forecasting and re-aligning goals and targets for the current financial year.
But we have a great, loyal customer base. And compensation management is a core HR function that doesn’t go away. The demands just change as the markets vacillate. We saw a delay of projects in the last 4 – 6 weeks, but are now being contacted by companies planning for the post-crisis phase.
No doubt compensation budgets will be tight. So ensuring strong governance on pay allocation will be critical, as well as pay differentiation for key talent. This is where technology excels with built-in checks and balances that guide decision making in line with compensation goals.
Leading the Pay Equity practice at Curo, I’m also concerned that progress to date on pay equity is not derailed. Ironically, wage disparity has been highlighted by the crisis. Women and ethnic minorities appear to be bearing the brunt of the pandemic.
We are seeing signs that some employers are using this “quieter” time actually to get their pay equity analysis done. Before the crisis, risk of litigation and fostering trust were the two primary drivers for action on pay equity. The stark reality is that these are even more relevant now. We are all under stress at work, at home, and in our communities.
Many are facing the unexpected reality of reduced or no income. At times of high stress and financial hardship, there is a risk of employees being more litigious. As concern about fair treatment is exacerbated.
But proactive action on pay equity isn’t just about a fear of litigation. Increasingly employers of choice were recognizing that promoting fair pay and pay transparency was critical for employee engagement and trust. And trust in pay practices is something employees need right now while they feel financially vulnerable.
Q2: What’s your short term (>3 years) vision for CURO?
Well, we want to continue to grow our client base for all our products. The greater the diversity, by geography and sector of our client base, the better our products will become, as we are a SaaS solution provider and work closely with our clients in shaping our product roadmaps.
I’d like to see compensation management technology adoption rates increase, its still one of the talent lifecycle modules that many rely on complex spreadsheet processes to run. Compensation process complexity is the main blocker for successful adoption with core HRIS and Talent Management solutions, so I’d like to see Curo supporting more organizations to transform their manual processes.
We’d also like to continue to play a key role in driving the agenda for fair pay and pay transparency – successfully supporting organizations to deliver actionable pay equity analysis that demonstrates their commitment to fair pay. With our new pay equity tool, we would like it to become accepted as the norm that every company does a proactive pay equity audit at least annually – because it is the right thing to do rather than because it is legislated. Ultimately it’s about doing our part to create an equal and inclusive workplace for all.
Q3: What’s your long-term (<3 years) vision for CURO?
Well, in the longer term, it’s to continue to innovate our product development in line with future reward trends. As thought leaders in the compensation space, we have always been leading edge in terms of driving evolving reward strategies.
For me, the big challenges in compensation are going to be how to pay for skills rather than jobs, how to offer greater personalization in reward, and ensuring fair pay across all types of employees. It will be interesting to see if the fallout from the Covid-19 crisis will accelerate the pace at which these predicted trends will become mainstream.
Q4: You’ll know CURO has reached its full potential when?
When everyone chooses to move to a specialist compensation technology solution, always consider Curo as a candidate.
Q5: What advice do you give leaders regarding evaluating technology?
For reward leaders know your process requirements – all too often, we see prospects and sometimes clients forced on to an integrated talent solution that can’t meet their compensation needs. So they end up backtracking and building spreadsheet workarounds for the missing areas of functionality. Now is not the time to add complexity to business processes; we are all going to have to do more with less, so streamlining through automation is essential.
Be open-minded about adapting your processes. Often we see prospects looking for a perfect fit for their current compensation processes. In doing this, they overlook the benefits a technology solution can offer.
And finally, look for a solution that will scale with your business and your future requirements at the same pace as you.
People Analytics and the Future of Talent Acquisition
What the hell is People Analytics?What is he going to tell me I need to worry about this time?
Have no fear! People Analytics is actually the name to that unknown something we’ve always been looking for. To help us actually be part of the business and not transactional service providers.
Put simply, People Analytics is the study of the problems that are associated with people and work. There are two main branches of People Analytics data. The first one is usually familiar. These are the inside out People Analytics platforms. So employee engagement surveys, pay parody reports, and turn over reports are all internal HR data generated by a company. They are learning about the people in their own company from their own data.
The revolution is in “outside-in” people analytics platforms. This enables behaviors like competitive salary benchmarking, employee engagement comparisons, and comparative diversity. In the future, before you work for a company, you will be able to not only see how diverse they are. But also how they rank against other companies their size. The tools to deliver these insights are new but they are here now. This is why people analytics has suddenly become extremely relevant and important.
Glassdoor did a lot to try to move us in the direction of corporate transparency, but People Analytics can get us across the finish line.
How? Why?
Because you can police A website but you can’t police THE internet. The reason is that outside-in people analytics platforms act like Google for HR data. Google isn’t designed to search for and display salary information for jobs in New York and Chicago.
People analytics platforms are designed to do exactly that and it means that they are less subject to bias.
Now this information has existed for a while in the public domain, but until recently no one has tried to organize it specifically around HR. This shift and sudden change coincide with the rise in the importance of Data Science and Analytics in corporate America. There has been a renewed focus on deploying analytics to more areas of business.
Unexpectedly, we are at the beginning of the true democratization of HR data and transparency propelled by corporate America itself. So what’s in it for them?
Well for one thing they can finally, at scale, compare themselves to the larger market and their competitors. Some Fortune 50 companies have been able to do this for a while. But a company that, for example, had 50 million in revenue, is unlikely to have invested in that type of information or technology.
Not because it wasn’t valuable, but it typically doesn’t become worth the historical cost of investment until a company is to the point where investing increased HR efficiency justifies the expense. Even then most of the work was outsourced. That doesn’t account for the fact that nearly no one in HR knows what to do with this type of information or how to effectively deploy it.
But large corporations and scientists have long understood the benefits of benchmarking results and making those results repeatable, scalable, and public. People Analytics will empower millions of companies to begin to benchmark their own human capital. It will also enable millions more people to do the same.
Employee Retention
HR in general is considered to be an overhead cost department. A great way to get ahead in that type of environment is to learn how to reduce costs. A simple use case is employee retention.
Citing a 2017 Retention Report by the Work Institute of over 34,000 respondents; it concluded that 75% of the causes of employee turnover are preventable. It also said, “ In dollar figures, the replacement cost is $15,000 per person for an employee earning a median salary of $45,000 a year”
Now if I’m working in an HR function of any kind in a time like this I’m thinking, if I can come up with a system that helps my company save 10 people who would have left would that make me move valuable? What if I start paying attention to our People Analytics dashboard, and dropped managers a note to engage with members of their team that they think might be a flight risk.
That same person could then put in their end of year report that they saved the company $150,000 dollars in lost productivity costs and recruiting cost thanks to data-enabled employee engagement.
In the future, expect to see an expectation for a company to publish their HR data. This will include things like turn over, the average time to fill a job, cost per hire, and diversity ranking. All of these things will be scrutinized by future wall street analysts trying to use HR data as a leading indicator of company performance. They will benchmark companies against things like the most recent McKinsey study (see below) that says companies that get diversity right are up to 35% more profitable than the bottom quartile of companies.
The broader implications
This is just one case study. There are many more. The implications for the broader world of sourcing are profound and I will have to elaborate more in the future. I interviewed Maria Dolgusheva of Panda Docs for this article. Maria holds two Masters degrees including one in Business Analytics.
According to Maria, “TA doesn’t need to become a Prophet but they do need to be able to use the tools that make HR more personal and effective.”
So what does this mean for you? In real terms, it means there is going to be an expectation that you come to an intake meeting with data. You will be expected to already know who all the candidates are. And how likely they are to make a move at this time. You will need to be able to augment the meeting with data on the expected salary range and time to fill. When you fill a job you will also have to justify the diversity of your slate against the market.
All of that seems strange to recruiters right now but as AI automates more of the repetitive tasks Recruiters will move from actors to managers. They will be managing systems in motion. There will still be some call for individual outreach, but by in large algorithms and pre messaged content will conduct outbound sourcing.
Increasingly, “automated yes” hires will require no human interaction. If you pass all screening the system can schedule interviews, follow up with hiring managers for feedback, and give a suggested pay rate based on internal compensation and marketing data. An automated system can even send an offer email. The hiring manager will come to rely on the system to tell him an expected acceptance rate before an offer goes out. No human can do those types of things at scale and speed.
So where on Earth will you come up with all of this?
You will get all of this information from people analytics platforms. If you want to think of an ATS as an engine, then think of People Analytics as the dashboard in the car. Now you as the driver are getting analytics about what is happening with the engine. Based on the conditions you observe you react by pushing on, pulling, or turning a device or pedal.
Recruiting is about to become much more like driving.
Gas in the tank will be the pre-mapped talent market. The start button is the automated sourcing function. The engine turning is candidates moving through the system. Automating a rejection based purely on automation is currently illegal in many places. However, no law anywhere makes an automated yes illegal. So yes gets automated, then it is up to the recruiter to manage the no and the maybe. As well as keep an eye on the speedometer and gas tank.
If the steps between application and offer are perfect for automation. They are basically the same every time. In the process if not in content. Data will force companies to have consistent interview processes because, without it, the data will be useless. Michael Beygelman CEO of Claro HR calls this the “Datafication of HR.”
The work from home adjustment
The COVID pandemic has changed a lot of things and one of the most dramatic is the work from home change. I do not foresee a future where we work in offices in anything like the numbers we have seen pre COVID. Companies have discovered a few things.
First, a lot more of the work they accomplish could be accomplished remotely than they expected. Secondly, productivity in many cases has gone up. Even in less than ideal conditions of working remotely with children, not in school, there has been a general rise in productivity. Third, the people who are now able to work remotely are not going to be inclined to start going back.
Remote work has become a requirement in many fields. Where in the past, it was largely seen as a benefit.
Not only are people not missing their commute they are worried about working in an office with other people who may get them sick. In the past, we have accepted that this happens and we go to work. But, COVID has changed the way many people feel about the topic and has changed their risk tolerance. Post-COVID you can expect to see a significant minority of the job market simply refusing to work in an office.
This means that the important role of People Analytics is only going to grow. Remote work means communicating complex information in precise ways with large groups of people. Many of them will not be experts in the field they are seeing information about.
So your head of programming and sales are going to also see HR data. People Analytics is that platform or means of that communication for HR. In simpler terms, it means HR is going to have to communicate with the business in business terms. The language of 21st-century business is analytics.
A final word of advice from Maria, “Recruiters need to familiarize themselves with technical concepts. They need to understand Python, SQL, and it wouldn’t hurt to familiarize yourself with Tableau.”
The good news is that this engine is just pulling out of the station. All aboard!
Since it began, the pandemic has compelled organizations to reassess their business priorities. Survival strategies have replaced conversations around growth and diversification.
When the world is still coming to grips with the impact of the pandemic, it might be contentious to begin discussing talent acquisition.
However, given the current situation, business resilience, and continuity in a post-covid world is quickly emerging as a key priority for leaders across the board. Despite ongoing cutbacks and layoffs, businesses will continue to rely on talent to survive and thrive.
As the world returns to work, now is the time to build a talent strategy that helps you do more with less. Building a successful candidate pipeline for critical roles can take years of work. And a good amount of trial and error. The good news is – we have some time until business gets back to normal.
So, HR and talent acquisition professionals are uniquely positioned to leverage this time to plan and develop the right capabilities to steer the ship forward.
Let’s look at how you can put the lessons learned over the past few months to achieve recruiting zen with a pipeline of qualified candidates.
What is a Talent Pipeline?
A talent pipeline is a set of stages that a candidate moves through. As they progress from a lead to an employee. Once each pipeline stage is completed, candidates advance to the next stage. Like most modern recruitment practices, talent pipelining has been derived from proven sales and marketing strategies.
Talent pipelining is proactive recruitment at its best. Building it will help you fill positions faster than Chinese firms can erect skyscrapers.
What’s more? You don’t have to settle. You can choose your pick from a highly qualified group of candidates who’re already familiar with your organization. The essence of a building a successful talent pipeline lies in candidate relationship management because you are no longer looking to fill open roles. But thinking about meeting future talent needs.
Every organization, regardless of size or the industry, stands to benefit from building a sustainable talent pipeline. In addition to better candidates, talent pipelining allows you to diversify your talent pool, deliver personalized candidate experiences, and improve your overall employer brand.
Organizations have had to make difficult decisions over the past few weeks. Especially in terms of headcount and budgets. As a result, candidate perception of organizations has also taken a beating. While the overall candidate sentiment is likely to be negative at the moment, talent acquisition teams have an opportunity to rewrite the rules of engagement with talent planning.
5 Steps to Building a Successful Talent Pipeline
A successful talent pipeline is often the result of strategic talent planning combined with employer branding. If you already use an applicant tracking system (ATS) or an integrated talent acquisition suite, you have a head start.
This five-step guide will take you through the fundamentals of building an effective talent pipeline:
Step #1: It All Begins With Your Employer Brand
At its core, talent pipelining is about influencing candidate behavior. More than anything else. How do you get talent interested in your organization? What sets your company apart? Why should candidates choose to work with you?
The answer is your employer brand. Your reputation as an employer will attract high-quality candidates. Even in a market that’s reeling from the effects of a global pandemic and calls for increasing racial diversity. Your brand reflects your organization’s core values, culture, and vision.
And it is set to become even more critical in a post-covid world. Where candidates can witness how organizations reacted to the crisis. It is not what we say, but what we do that defines us.
Some of the “best places to work” were also some of the earliest companies to announce furloughs and layoffs when business was slow. It just goes on to show how awards and titles can mean very little when the rubber hits the road.
Add to that the recent events that rattled our collective consciousness and significantly changed our perception about racial equity. This has also put organizations on the spot. Candidates and employees are watching keenly as organizations and HR teams respond to the unfolding crisis.
At a time when candidates can quickly look up information about your organization. From compensation and benefits to the work culture and advancement opportunities. Building a strong employer brand is no longer optional.
So, how do you position yourself as an employer of choice in an increasingly competitive talent market? Here are a few simple steps that can help you get started:
1. Career Sites
Most candidates will land on your career site through social media, job boards, or organic search. In a way, your career site is their first impression of your organization. Once they are on your career page, they’re looking to learn more about what you have to offer. And what makes you unique.
Use your career site to showcase your values, culture, and give them a glimpse of what life in your company looks like. This is where you show candidates instead of telling them the values you cherish as an organization.
Ensure that the messaging on your careers site is consistent with that on your social handles, website, Glassdoor pages, and company literature.
Check if the site is mobile optimized and supports popular internet browsers. Best-of-breed ATS and recruitment marketing solutions offer dedicated modules for career pages and easy integration.
2. Glassdoor Page
One of the most popular employer review platforms. Glassdoor is a go-to resource for candidates looking to learn more about an organization. With detailed reviews on everything from the interview experience to salaries and culture, Glassdoor is undoubtedly one of the most potent branding channels available to employers.
Setting up a company profile and encouraging employees to post their experiences can help you project an authentic employer brand. While also revealing shortfalls and potential issues across the candidate and employee experience.
3. Social Media
Social media has quickly become the dominant marketing channel. Recruitment is not an exception. According to Glassdoor, 79 percent of job applicants use social media in their job search. So, projecting a positive employer brand on social media is key to attracting the best candidates.
Most recruiters typically use social media for posting jobs. However, this doesn’t contribute to employer brand building. The best way to use social media for brand building is by promoting authentic conversations about life at your organization.
Celebrate employee achievements. Share real-life stories. Post photos and videos to show potential candidates what it is like working with you.
Example 1: Kronos successfully demonstrates the values it stands for through this post
Example 2: Netflix does a wonderful job of tapping into the power of diversity with this video
4. Employee Advocacy
Building on your social media strategy, you can also look at employee advocacy as an effective branding tool. Employee advocacy is the word-of-mouth marketing equivalent for recruitment.
Identify employees who can act as your brand ambassadors and share the perks of working with your organization a wide audience. Candidates are three times more likely to trust your employees over recruiters to provide credible information about your work culture.
5. Keep Listening
One of the biggest mistakes an organization can make in branding: not listening to what people are saying. While we all love glowing reviews and positive testimonials, candidates are bound to have varying opinions about their interviews or their overall experience.
Instead of ignoring comments or reviews that are critical of your organization’s process. Respond to candidates with empathy and grace. This is your opportunity to show candidates that you truly care about their experience, and you would still like them to consider your organization in the future.
Step #2: Identify Critical Skills Gaps and Future Talent Needs
It is well documented how companies like Yahoo, Blackberry, and Kodak failed to keep up with the times. In a world marked by disruption and increasing competition, success is a result of organizational agility. In the people context, agility refers to an organization’s ability to align its leaders, workforce, and processes to meet the market’s changing demands.
Leaders today need to anticipate shifts in the economic landscape and respond by delivering the right skills in the shortest time possible. However, it is tough finding great talent unless you already know them. This means having a pipeline of qualifies candidates ready to fill your organization’s skills gaps.
But first things first. How do you decide the skills you need in your pipeline? Here’s where strategic talent planning comes into play. Strategic talent planning can help you assess the state of your current workforce and anticipate future talent needs.
Here are some questions that can help you get started with talent planning:
What are your short- and long-term business goals?
The first step in talent planning is understanding where your company is headed in the short- and long-term. Once you know where you are headed, you can begin acquiring the skills to help you get there.
For instance, if your organization is looking to expand its product portfolio, then you know that you’ll have to hire more engineers and product marketers over the next few years. On the other hand, if your company is looking to enter new markets, you’ll likely need more salespeople.
What skills do you currently have?
Before you begin hiring new talent, take stock of the people and skills you already have in your organization. You can perform a skills gap analysis to get an overview of your entire organization and plan your pipelining strategy.
Get all stakeholders on board. Including the C-suite, line managers, hiring managers, and employees. Determine what skills are missing at the team and individual levels. Line managers can fill you in on the current skills gaps in their teams.
You can also conduct organization-wide skills assessments, surveys, and interviews with employees to uncover skills gaps. If you have a workforce analytics solution, you can use it to get a consolidated view of your organization’s current skill sets and employee performance levels.
Additionally, you’ll also be able to analyze your turnover rates, new hires, and internal movement to optimize your talent pipeline. Once you’ve analyzed your current skills and underlying gaps in your organization, you can move to the next stage. Identifying future talent needs.
What skills will you need in the future?
Industry 4.0 and Digital 2.0 are set to bring massive changes across businesses. This means you will need to hire not only your current skills gaps but also your future work. Regardless of the industry you operate, you will need advanced analytical skills across critical business functions. Such as marketing, finance, human resources, and operations.
As artificial intelligence and machine learning become key drivers of the new world of work, your organization will need IT talent and processes to thrive in such an environment. To identify skills you will need in the future, begin by tracking your industry trends and collecting feedback from functional heads.
As a result of increasing automation, some jobs may become redundant in the future. In such scenarios, consulting with your learning and development (L&D) team on reskilling or upskilling initiatives is a good idea to broaden your talent pool. By now, you should have a list of skills ready for your talent pipeline. Both current as well as future skills.
Next, you need to source candidates to fill your pipeline.
Step #3: Design a Talent Sourcing Strategy
The objective of building a talent pipeline. This is not only to fill open positions, but also to improve candidate engagement, and increase conversions. Designing a comprehensive sourcing strategy will help you cast a wider net and enhance the quality of hire.
While you may already have a sourcing strategy in place, we’ve put together a few best practices to help you optimize your process and hire better.
Define your candidate personas.
A candidate persona is a research-based representation of your ideal candidate. It describes their traits, skills, age, and experience. Defining a candidate persona helps you tweak and optimize your sourcing strategy to find a near-perfect match.
The best way to build a candidate persona is by using historical data to unravel the key traits of high-performing employees at your organization. Workforce analytics solutions and feedback tools are your best bet at gathering this data.
If you do not have access to these tools within your organization. Good old-fashioned interviews and surveys can also get the job done. You can further enrich your data by collecting manager feedback on qualities/skills they feel are most valuable for particular job roles.
Approach internal as well as external talent
The current economic conditions are perfect for recruiters to begin experimenting with sourcing. Like businesses, recruiters will also need to do more with less. Shrinking budgets mean that TA teams can no longer rely only on external talent to fill skills gaps.
Identifying and training existing employees to take over managerial roles is much cheaper. According to the Saratoga Institute, the cost of internal hiring is 7 times lower than external recruitment.
What’s more? Your existing employees become productive far more quickly than new employees. They are already familiar with the organization. Managers also have a fair idea of their unique strengths.
As a recruiter, you cannot afford to ignore internal talent when designing your sourcing strategy.
Identify the right sourcing channels
Sourcing channels are the lifeblood of every successful pipeline strategy. They improve your chances of identifying good potential hires and building your A-team. Social media platforms, job boards, and online communities are all great places to connect with passive candidates.
You can use a combination of these channels to populate your talent pipeline. However, the key is knowing where to look. For instance, if you are looking to connect with product developers. You will have better luck on platforms such as AngelList, GitHub, or StackOverflow instead of Monster or LinkedIn.
However, for sales and marketing talent – job boards and LinkedIn will be a better fit.
Your candidate personas should tell you where your ideal candidates reside. How do they search for jobs? Do they use social media in their job search, or are they more likely to come via referrals? Answering these questions will inform your choice of sourcing channels.
Internships
Internship programs are certainly not a new strategy for talent pipelining. However, these programs are set to become more important than ever before. Especially for recruiters looking to build a diverse pipeline of candidates.
Recruiters can leverage internships strategically to deliver on diversity goals by making concerted efforts to engage with schools. As well as communities that work with underrepresented groups in the corporate landscape.
You are often likely to find communities that have their own programs to encourage growth, and teaming up with those initiatives is a great way to give back. While also benefiting from new and diverse talent.
Personalize your message
The next step is to match this information with your candidate persona to craft your message. Drip email campaigns and direct messages on social platforms can be useful for driving brand awareness and relationship-building.
Premium ATS systems and candidate relationship management (CRM) solutions feature dedicated messaging or campaign creation modules that can help you design drip and social messaging campaigns. Given the present situation, it is crucial to assess how your candidate communication strategy aligns with your pipeline goals. Like diversity.
If your organization has been struggling to find diverse prospects, launching targeted digital campaigns to engage with such candidates is a great way to build awareness and attract candidates who’ve slipped under your radar. Your messaging strategy should ideally be rooted in your careers page. And can be subsequently fleshed out across candidate touch points like social media and email.
Atlassian does a fantastic job of driving home the message with consistency:
Image 1: Atlassian delivers a powerful message on inclusion and diversity on its career site
Example 3: Atlassian’s LinkedIn post builds on its core message following from its careers site
Step #4: Engaging Your Pipeline
Once you’ve identified candidates for your pipeline, the next step is nurturing your relationship with them to build meaningful engagement. And engagement follows from a compelling candidate experience.
Every stage of the candidate experience journey needs to be seamlessly integrated. From the candidate perspective into an ongoing relationship. This is the foundation of a successful talent pipeline.
The candidate engagement journey defines how the value exchange between organizations and candidates develops over time. It ensures each touchpoint rewards the candidate by delivering experiences that are recognized as valuable by the candidate. Based on their interests, professional aspirations, and goals.
When adopting a candidate journey approach, recruiters often begin by mapping out all of the different touch points. And then define how the organization seeks to influence the candidate at each of these points.
However, this is a very employer-centric approach and doesn’t necessarily reflect the needs, expectations, and aspirations of the candidate as to how they see the relationship developing. So, how should you proceed? Segmenting candidates based on the stage of their journey with your organization can help you provide relevant, in-time content. That results in more applications.
Your employer value proposition (EVP) should ideally be a common theme across segments. However, the way you present it and the content formats that you use will vary based on the stage of the candidate journey.
Let’s take a quick look at the key stages in the candidate journey and the content you deliver at each of the touch points:
Image 2: Stages of the Candidate Journey
While the touch points listed above are certainly not exhaustive. They are some of the most significant factors influencing candidate decision. As we’ve mentioned repeatedly, talent pipelining is a long game and offers considerable room for experimentation.
Once you get the basics right for engagement, you can begin to tweak your approach. Or dabble with multiple content formats like webinars and virtual hiring events to improve recruiting outcomes.
Step #5: Choosing the Right Tools
This is the final step and, arguably, the most difficult decision for TA leaders. If you’re wondering whether your current ATS system offers targeted modules for talent pipelining and engagement, you’re not alone. Most ATS solutions offer excellent features for application management and career site integration.
So, you don’t need to overhaul your entire recruiting tech stack when building a successful talent pipeline.
You can invest in specialized talent engagement or candidate relationship management (CRM) platforms and integrate these with your existing ATS system. That’s the easiest fix. Solutions like Beamery, Symphony Talent, and TalentLyft offer a comprehensive suite of features and capabilities designed to engage with candidates at every step of their journey.
However, we’re also aware that a lot of TA teams might have limited budgets to work with due to the prevailing macroeconomic conditions. If you’re looking to do more with less, our suggestion is to use a combination of ATS, email, and social media tools to improve employer brand visibility. For employer profiles on platforms like Glassdoor, you will need to monitor them regularly yourself.
The two major potential problems with this approach are the lack of automation and managing multiple data streams from disparate systems. Nonetheless, this is also a terrific opportunity to get creative in the way you leverage content and each of these tools.
So, until business recovers, and it will, a bolt-on approach to talent technology can also serve you well.
Conclusion
Ultimately, building a successful talent pipeline boils down to how you plan, strategize, and leverage technology to support long-term business needs. As the demand for the best candidates is only set to increase, getting ahead of the curve will allow you to hire better talent.
This is an important time for recruiters. The landscape for candidates today is drastically different from the past years. Empathy, flexibility, and understanding will go a long way in building lasting relationships with candidates and successfully adapting to the realities of a post-covid world.
Business continuity is likely to be a top priority for you and your organization at the moment. Still, the relationships and the talent that you retain now will reward you with loyalty down the road.
Recruiting processes are not as simple as posting a job. Recruiters spend hours after hours searching for the right CVs. Call candidates to discuss job descriptions for 20 minutes, only to realize it’s not for them, arrange interviews, negotiate salaries on both ends. And the worklist continues. How can you improve productivity in your recruitment process?
In simple words, right from selling the job profile to the candidate to convincing the hiring manager to accept the candidate, the life of a recruiter doesn’t seem easy. As per reports, on average, it takes 36 days to fill a given position and costs $4,425.
So we can say that it typically takes a long time. And amidst your endless to-do list, you will keep wondering where the time flew. Again, many companies don’t have the sort of time or resources to invest in each potential candidate. Which makes it all the more important to increase the quality and efficacy of the recruiting process.
With so much going on, how do you make sure that you remain productive and on the upper edge of your job role? Here are five hacks to boost the productivity of the recruitment process.
Hack #1: Carefully manage communication with the candidates.
At times, staying in constant contact with each of your candidates can be daunting as you alternate between several recruiting assignments. And many candidates come into the same frame. However, to be successful in recruiting, it is extremely important that we remain in communication with each of our candidates.
Hanging interested candidates can push them off your organization. Many candidates are likely to submit multiple offers and look forward to different opportunities from different organizations. If they don’t hear from you in a while, they won’t wait around. To keep them restored, stay at the forefront of those candidates by being at the top of the inbox.
Right communication strategies also build stronger relationships. For example, if an applicant has established confidence in you as his recruiter. He is more likely to share some vital information. In the later phases, those might be useful to understand what it would take for him to accept your offer. Quite evidently, it will prevent a great deal from falling apart in the final stages.
Hack #2: Simplify the process.
According to CareerBuilder, 60% of candidates stop filling out an online application that’s too complicated. What’s more, 54% of Gen Z job seekers won’t even complete a job application if they suspect a company’s recruiting methods are outdated.
If your application process is too long, overdue, or challenging, many job seekers will stop and switch to others. Thus, try to keep it as simple as possible. You can try out steps like eliminating cover letters, replacing long-term applications with a series of fast online queries, using mobile-friendly applications, and chatbots.
Hack #3: Implement your employee referral program.
We already know that one of the biggest recruiting problems is seeking talent. To address the issue, many modern recruiters have begun to include their current employees in the recruiting and hiring process. And as such, employee referral programs became one of the most preferred and highly successful tools for compatible workforce-finding. Your existing employees know what you are looking for. Or say, who your ideal candidate is. And thus, they can recommend the best fit for your company culture.
Employee referral programs save you a significant amount of time, which you can use to focus on other essential aspects of your job. It also reduces the costs for recruiting and enhances retention and employment efficiency. Inducing many recruiters to shift to referrals aiming to increase their recruiting effectiveness.
Hack #4: Invest in the right technology.
Technology has now become inseparable from businesses. The effect of the technology and the data it collects in the field of recruiting is becoming more evident in terms of improving the selection experience for both the applicants and selection teams.
Considering the current remote working environment, having the right technology allows the recruiters to maintain their day-to-day operations from home without disruption. Apart from a cloud-based CRM, there are plenty of recruitment tools and software available to keep the team engaging.
With the right video technology, recruiters can quickly and easily interview candidates and hold team meetings.
Getting more in-depth, here are the four best trends in the recruitment technology that you must read.
Employer Branding Videos
Employer branding videos can increase the response rate to job posts from about 12 to 34 percent as it allows candidates to learn more about the business, its culture, and work offers all in one go.
ATS System
Your Applicant Tracking System can make or break your hiring performance. Considering both your long and short term goals, you must select and operate your ATS effectively.
Employee Trends
Analyzing and making use of employee trends is one of the newest trends. One of the best examples here is LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends Reports 2020. It sees four concepts reshape the way you can attract and maintain talent in the years to come. The rise of employee experience, the expansion of people analytics, the revival to internal recruiting, and the growth of the multigenerational workforce.
Eliminate Bias
Did you know that technology can eliminate human biases? Yes, you heard it right. Lately, Harvard University has designed the Implicit Association Tests to check people’s bias against others, which can, at times, be unconscious. Since bias seems to be common among humans, the idea is for recruiters to use machine learning or artificial intelligence to minimize human judgment in candidate selection.
Like for example, SAAS based recruitment system provides recruiters with a candidate matching program that monitors employee performance, on its own, with no space for personal, unfair, or emotional prejudice against the applicant.
Hack #5 Please stop multitasking
Mostly recruiters lead a fast-paced workday that consists of phones, emails, searches for ATS, reviews on LinkedIn accounts, data entry, live chats, and lots more. But it is essential to realize whether the multitasking efforts are bringing you the results you need.
According to Devora Zack, an author, consultant, and coach, “Multitasking is a myth. The brain is hard-wired to do one thing at a time. When we think we are multitasking, we are actually engaged in what neuroscientists call ‘task switching’ – switching rapidly between tasks.”
When you choose to do multiple things simultaneously, the quality of the work might suffer. It is better to do one thing at a time, focusing your attention to produce results of the highest quality.
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