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From Macro to Micro: Improving Candidate Experiences on a Human Level 

The Human Genome of Candidate ExperienceThe Human Genome of Candidate Experience

Candidate experience remains a popular topic, even some ten years after entering into the recruiting lexicon.

The point of candidate experience was, at first, to treat candidates as more than just a name on resume uploading into your ATS. But the underlying cause for this concern corresponds to where the job market was around 2010. As anyone who tried to get a job in the surrounding years, it wasn’t great.

That’s the part we seem to forget. And while it’s improved some since then, there’s always room for improvement. 

See, back when the candidate experience first came around, the U.S. was still dealing with the fallout from the Great Recession. Recruiting technologies were gaining traction in earnest as recruiters sought out ways to manage an influx of applicants.

Nowadays, the recruiting workload hasn’t diminished much even though the number of candidates per opening isn’t quite so high. If anything, recruiters in 2020 are tasked with more responsibility as both the front line of hiring and steward of the candidate experience.

Thankfully, as the discipline evolved, so did the technology, working on automating the more administrative parts of recruiting. That said, while candidate experience benefits from such solutions, it requires human intervention – on both a macro and micro level.

Here’s what that looks like: 

 

Macro Experiences 

The macro candidate experience involves your so-called best practices. The things candidates have been telling us that they want and need for as long as the industry has been paying attention. That starts with a simple, streamlined application process. No one wants to upload their resume and then have to type out the same information into your form fields. No one.

There’s also the issue of fairness and how fair the application feels to candidates, which is more subjective. It’s safe to say, your knockout questions followed by a quick, stock rejection email aren’t reinforcing feelings of fairness. 

Once they’re in your gaze, the experience needs to include basics like ongoing communication, coupled with feedback loops that allow your candidates to voice their opinions and ask for insights throughout the recruiting process – not just at the end. Onboarding is a big deal and shouldn’t be relegated to a stack of paperwork and sad walk around the office that puts your new hire on display like a zoo animal.

The same goes for referrals, a tried and trusted source of hire, provided you make the ask and spend the time engaging these job seekers. And the list of obvious albeit valuable ways to improve the experience at a high level goes on and on. 

 

Micro Experiences 

What’s less apparent to so many of us is the impact of micro experiences. These are instances and interactions that you can’t automate, driven exclusively by humans connecting with other humans.

Most of us spend our days hidden behind screens, and it can be easy to forget that once upon a time, everything happened in person. Even resumes were hand-delivered. That has changed, but we do retain the ability to collaborate with our fellow humans in a meaningful way. 

What does that mean in terms of dealing with candidates?  Thoughtfully considering the critical moments in their journey.  The moments that universally influence their perception of the process. There’s the initial communication, the interview stage, assessments, the offer letter, onboarding – you get the picture.

Now, ask yourself at each of these intersections: what can you do to enhance the experience? On that first call or email, perhaps you skip the scripted run-through in favor of a candid conversation that helps you identify more than just skills and qualifications. Maybe you get a sense of their hobbies, passions and interests, too.

Fast forward to the offer, wouldn’t it be nice to pair the form letter with something that reflects your candidate? The same goes for day one, year one and everything after. 

 

Merging the Two 

There are 23 pairs of chromosomes and several thousand years of learning separating humans from their machine counterparts. Leveraging our genomes throughout the recruiting lifecycle gives us the ability to alter the way candidates feel about our organization. And us.

What an incredible power – should you choose to use it.

We’ve allowed the candidate experience to linger at the macro level for too long, giving little to no thought to the micro experience.

That needs to change. Recruiters are the only ones qualified to do that work. Improving the candidate experience, if anything, allows us to overdo it and demonstrate our humanity to the other side, again and again.

You’d be surprised to see what happens with a little extra effort. 

 

USPhonebook.com Helps Validate Contact Data

US Phonebook can find and validate contact information that you’re missing!

 

 

We have another site for you to use to find people! For all your sleuthing needs, US PhoneBook.com is similar to sites like whitepages.com and spokeo.com, except their search results are free! We like free stuff!

There are two options for searching. First is the people search section. Use this to search by name and location. We tested the site for accuracy, were surprised to see it display our unlisted phone number. The address and family information was correct as well. One of the phone numbers was out of date, as well as an old email, but there was a lot of good data there!

The second function here is their reverse phone lookup search. Plug those unknown phone numbers in to identify who’s calling, or to verify you have the right number before you make a prospect call.

 

~ Noel Cocca

Look inside with Dean Da Costa:

3 Top Recruiting Challenges in the Digital Age & 3 Solutions

3 Recruiting Challenges and 3 solutions

 

Our digital age has brought with it a whole host of new challenges for recruiters. Not only is there an incredible demand for new talent in emerging markets, but candidates also have more control over their jobs than ever before, thanks to the increase in flexible and remote work opportunities.

In many cases, there is likely only a small pool of candidates that represent the right fit for your business—and competition for those candidates is going to be high.

Knowing that these recruiting challenges exist in today’s modern talent marketplace, how can companies prepare appropriately to address them? Consider the following challenges, along with their respective solutions.

Challenge: Information About Your Business is Widely Available Online

Nowadays, candidates can (and will) dig further than your website for information. They’re more effectively able to block out recruiters’ white noise and do their own research.

With this in mind, you need to own your brand and make sure you’re seen on the platforms potential employees are using in their research.

Solution: Take Control of Your Brand Story

Expect that potential employees will scour your social media profiles to build a better understanding of your business. Be active on channels that are relevant to your industry, and ensure that the content on them reflects how you want potential employees to see your brand. As Josh Spilker, Editor of Recruitment.com, explains, “Social media has become the number one go-to source for potential employees checking out the culture of your brand. One thing they’re looking for? Personality. This doesn’t mean your brand has to be outgoing or to be different than your culture. But it should be representative of what your culture is really like. So if it is fun and different: make it that way. If it’s strait-laced, that’s okay too. Your social media shouldn’t give a false sense of who your company really is.”

Another resource candidates have available to them now is Glassdoor, which has become the go-to place for potential employees to figure out what working for your company will really be like. As a result, it’s vital that your company claims its Glassdoor profile and actively manages any reviews left by current or ex-employees.

Challenge: Recruiting People with the Right Skillset

Successful recruiting has always been about employing people with the right skillset. This hasn’t always been easy, but in the digital age, companies have more tools at their disposal to improve hiring outcomes.

Solution: Create Candidate Personas

Save time and make better hiring decisions by creating candidate personas that’ll allow your company to draw from a qualified shortlist.

There are several paid tools to help you achieve this. If you’re building candidate personas for the first time, Hubspot’s free persona creator is a great place to start (though it’s typically aimed at marketers, it can be easily adapted to HR needs). You can also use Twitter profiling tools or an app like Crystal Knows to add further data to your personas.

Challenge: Attracting Talent to Your Business That Fits Your Culture

In the digital age of recruitment, the talent you attract needs to have more than the right skillset alone. They also need to be a culture fit if they’re going to be successful within your organization.

Solution: Create a Strong Company Culture

Company culture is a big deal for modern job hunters—it can even be the deciding factor in whether a candidate chooses to work for you or one of your competitors.

On the flip side, as an employer, you also want to make sure that new hires will fit in and build on your culture, rather than cultivate a negative work environment. But before you can evaluate whether a candidate will be a good fit, you need to make sure you have a solid, clear company culture in place.

Despite what many organizations and their employees believe, company culture is not a well-stocked beer fridge and an arcade machine. Those things can help to create a positive culture, but they don’t define it.

Company culture is the environment and personality of your organization. It’s an embodiment of all the things that make your company a good (or bad) place to work. In addition to offering enticing benefits and flexible work options, make sure you’re tuned into employees’ needs and that you address any issues or feedback promptly to improve employee satisfaction across the board.

Challenge: Filling Talent Gaps at Your Organization

Making sure that your business has all the skills it needs—when it needs them—can be another significant challenge for some companies. Economic uncertainty can put a financial strain on businesses that have to balance employee numbers with the current needs of the organization. If these needs change quickly—or if certain skills are only needed for a short period of time—this can result in talent gaps that can be difficult to fill.

Solution: Embrace the On-Demand Workforce

Talented freelancers can be hired on an as-needed basis from sites like Upwork and Peopleperhour. Alternatively, you can find freelancers using standard recruitment platforms like job boards and LinkedIn.

Building a team of reliable freelancers can lessen the pressure of recruiting, while also reducing business overhead when you don’t have the resources or the need for a full-time hire. This makes it possible to continue meeting client expectations without overstaffing on skills for which you don’t have full-time demand.

In today’s economy, recruiters can no longer rely solely on traditional hiring tactics to be effective. Embrace change. Adapt your strategies. Monitor recruitment trends and embrace them as needed to ensure you’re able to attract and retain the right talent in the digital age.

Levels Of Testing For IT Recruiters – Part 2

IT Recruiting Tech

 

In my previous post, I was talking about testing in general and understanding the difference between test position descriptions. Now, it’s time to learn a bit more about the levels of testing. I hope all of these topics I write about in these articles will help you to become better at your job, and assist you in finding the most appropriate specialist.

Test Engineers

If you have been searching for Test Engineers you have probably noticed the information below displayed on their profiles:

  • Integration testing between different systems and components.
  • Integration and testing of DTS server:
  • Reviewing, managing and raising defects identified during UAT.
  • Provide User Acceptance Templates and examples; as needed.
  • Business applications testing – UAT (User Acceptance Testing), INT (integration tests), ST (system tests).

Let`s focus on the keywords below:

  • Integration
  • Acceptance or UAT
  • System

The words establish for us some different levels of testing. What does it mean to you? Could you consider from this the kind of project a specialist would be interested in?

4 Levels of Testing

 

Testing Engineer Hiring

 

Let us take a closer look. We have different levels, so in simple terms, each level becomes more advanced than the preceding one.

UNIT TESTING

The lowest level is where individual units/functions are tested. ATTENTION! Software engineers, NOT testers, perform this! So be careful if you are looking for a specialist for unit tests. At this level software engineers just check a single function in the code.

INTEGRATION TESTING

At this level, test engineers combine single units and tests as a group.

Example:

We have an online shop. Imagine, you have logged in to the website, found products of interest and wanted to put all your items into the checkout basket. But there was something wrong. You couldn`t do this operation. In this scenario, the test engineers have to check what is wrong. They have to review everything between the website and the database and ensure there are no faults.

SYSTEM TESTING

As the title suggests, at this level the test engineer checks all of the systems. We are not interested in a single unit or how two groups of units are compatible but we want to know that all systems work from the perspective of the end-user (or customer, in this case).

During this stage, test engineers try to induce defects purposely, to verify all possible options and reactions of the system.

This is necessary to be sure that the product meets the client’s requirements.

ACCEPTANCE TESTING (UAT)

The last step! Here we make the final test of the system before we deliver it to the client.

The main goal = give confidence to the client.

If all of the information above is too complicated to understand (I hope it is not that difficult) I will give you an example:

Imagine… a car:

Unit testing – we check every single car`s elements. We want to ensure that every button works, windows go up and down, the drivers’ seat goes forward and back, wipers move, can we put fuel in the tank? Is the tire made of rubber and so on.

Integration testing – we are interested in how single elements cooperate with each other. For example we are interested that if we turn the key, will the engine start or if we slow down, will the ABS system work and so on.

System testing – we check how the car drives. If there is something wrong we have to fix all the problems. Everything should work perfectly.

Acceptance testing – we perform the final driving test before we deliver our car to the client.

That is all for levels of testing. In the next part, I will explain the types of testing that IT recruiters need to know.

Why Good Candidate Experience Matters & 3 Ways To Deliver It

candidate experience matters and how to fix it

3 Ways To Deliver 

The candidate experience first begins with a Facebook post from a friend who raves about her new job. Or it can start when a colleague posts news on LinkedIn that your company is hiring. Other places the candidate experience starts include Google searches, your organization’s careers site, or a recruiter’s private message.

In all of these examples, the candidate experience takes off when the prospective employee first interacts with your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and determines if they want to apply. Every subsequent touchpoint is important as the candidate experience matters now more than ever.

A recent study from Talent Board, a non-profit organization focused on the elevation and promotion of a quality candidate experience, speaks volumes. Research focused on North America, EMEA, and the APAC region discovered that candidates who described their experience as “negative” overall said they would not consider doing business with the company, would not apply again, and would not refer their friends and colleagues to work there. The news was much brighter for candidates who labeled their experience “great.” Those folks were happy to recommend the company to others and would consider doing business with the organization – even if they didn’t land the job!

Today’s recruiting leaders know that it’s vital to create a meaningful and personal experience for the candidates you hope to attract with your job offerings. Here are three ways organizations can create and deliver an effective candidate experience and enhance their EVP to compete in today’s job market.

#1 Boost your networking, social media and sharing game

Job candidates are looking for a signal. They want to find clues – or even just a gut instinct – that your company is where they belong. This sense of connection often starts with social and professional networks. Perhaps a video of a team-building day sparks interest. Or maybe a Facebook Live session beckons with a glimpse of an off-the-cuff employee experience.

You might call this an introductory or initial stage, and it can captivate even passive candidates. After all, the AI that drives social network algorithms will most likely continue to serve up content the potential candidate has engaged with before, including company posts or friends’ likes and shares about a particular organization.

Consider adding more content – videos, images, blog posts – that shows your brand’s culture. Remember that culture is both spoken and non-verbal, and offers an authentic look into your company’s deeper vision, so don’t shy away from real stories that might inspire a prospective team member.

#2 Creating a personalized pipeline

It’s not hard to improve the candidate experience since many job seekers have a poor experience with so many companies. Applying for a job can feel like tossing your resume into a large, online black hole. When we want to reach candidates – especially those whose skills are in demand – we should always strive for personalization.

When we personalize the candidate experience, we first meet the prospective employee’s desire to know what’s going on with their application process. We can also figure out how they prefer to communicate and what interests they have beyond the basics of the job. In this way, the relationship grows, step by step, between the company and the candidate. Consider new candidate and hiring manager feedback surveys to provide ongoing feedback to make the process even better. Even if you don’t hire the candidate, the relationship they’ve built with you can still leave a favorable impression. Then, make sure to use digital tools (such as machine learning) to surface these candidates for future job roles.

#3 Communicate and then communicate some more

Brandon Hall Group found that an effective candidate experience improves the levels of quality hires, engaged employees, employee retention, and business revenue. One way to improve the candidate experience is thoroughly authentic and timely communication.

One way sure-fire way to deliver a memorable experience: have the hiring manager deliver solid, honest feedback to the candidates. The hiring manager can speak to the parts of the interview process that went well, and even say why another candidate was chosen instead. Let’s say a job-winning candidate edged out the competition by having unique experience or specialized training. Most candidates would want to know that information so they could pursue the same career enrichment.

While making the candidate experience great is good business sense, it also makes a good human experience. Everyone on the recruiting team should apply for a job at your company so they can see how it works from the candidate perspective. From the receipt of the application to the phone call or email from the hiring manager informing the candidate that they didn’t get the job, the prospective employee should be communicated to with respect and professionalism.

Candidates are indeed a special part of your company’s success, from the first time they interact with your social media presence to the moment they walk into a lobby and are warmly welcomed by name. Creating an excellent candidate experience takes effort, but it’s worth it to shine a spotlight on why the candidates wants to work at your organization. Start today to create a personalized and meaningful experience for your candidates. Your future employees are eagerly awaiting their chance to join you.

 

Company Research Made Easy With Pathrise

 

Get your company research done with Pathrise!

 

If you find yourself with the need to do some company research, we have a free tool recommendation for you. Pathrise, a company that offers career services and resources to jobhunters, has a company comparison tool available for use on their site. You can find it here on their website.

At first glance, you’re given the option to choose from a few popular comparisons, or you can choose your own companies from the dropdown lists below. There are over 200 tech companies to choose from, so if you’re looking in the tech field, this could be quite helpful. You have the ability to compare company demographics, the interview and hiring process, salary information, hiring categories, and more! Pretty cool!

We especially love the inclusion of salary information, as well as the detail that is available on company demographics. For example, you can break these down by year, and see their ratios of gender, ethnicity, and roles. This could help you figure out what kind of candidates work at a particular company. In other words, they have compiled a lot of great information, the formatting is great, and it’s free.

All in all, this is a great place to go to get your research done. Try it out and let us know what you think! ~ Noel Cocca

 

Look inside with Dean Da Costa:

 

How To Stay Organized When Buying HR Tech

 

Staying organized with HR Tech

When you buy HRTech, it’s really hard to stay organized.  Understanding the landscape can be a difficult task, in fact in many ways it can be one of the most challenging tasks that you face in building your organization.

A few key things contribute to this, most often the number of vendors and demos that begin to overwhelm the process.

An easy path to sanity

Understanding why you buy from a vendor is as important during pre-sales as it is important post-sales.

Why?

There is a direct correlation with your experience pre-sales and during-sales for what you’ll experience post-sales and implementation.

Make sense?

Staffing Firms Facing an Uncertain Economy: Invest in Technology Now to Position for Success

Invest in tech now staffing and recruiting firms

 

As we turned into a new year and decade in 2020, we have heard continued concerns reflecting economic uncertainty- in fact, in our own recent GRID (Global Recruiting Insights and Data)  survey of staffing professionals, 64 percent listed economic uncertainty as a top challenge for this year, while 45 percent expect a recession, a number that rose from the previous year. If a slowdown, or even a recession, does occur, one predictable effect on the recruiting industry is that employers will cut back on temporary hiring, and many staffing companies, in turn, will focus on cutting spending and staff.

However tempting it may be to cut costs across the board and clamp down on investment, now is the right time to invest, particularly in technology, to position your firm for success. The question staffing companies must ask themselves is: what kind of company do we want to be coming out of a recession?

The answer, of course, is a competitive company that is leading their industry category. Interestingly, 71 percent of our GRID survey respondents expect revenue to increase in 2020, regardless of reservations about the economy. Lean times bring with them an opportunity to move ahead by investing when the competition stands still or even moves backward, and come out as the leaders when the dust clears.

Economic downturns can reveal vulnerabilities in companies, but can also give them a chance to seize this leadership. Researchers, publishing in the Harvard Business Review, found that just after the recession in 2010, only nine percent of the 4,700 companies they examined exited that downturn with high growth. These companies seized the chance to make large-scale changes in their operations, rather than simply slashing costs; they distinguished themselves by investing during the downturn, and chief among these investments was technology.

Technological advancement does not slow down with the economy, and this continuing innovation enabled companies then, as it does now, to invest in digital transformation. Such investment for staffing firms improves processes including sourcing and tracking talent, automating communications, and advanced data analysis, to name just a few. The result for that nine percent who chose to invest was automated processes, and increased operational efficiency and cost savings, making them more agile and innovative. This led to accelerated growth far ahead of companies who did not invest.

Are staffing firms investing in technology now? Some are. Going back to our GRID research, more than half of the respondents agreed on the need to embrace digital transformation. That said, only 26 percent named digital transformation as one of their top priorities for 2020, and an alarming 41 percent reported little or no adoption of their firm’s current staffing technology. Even in a sustained good economy, the opportunity to become a leader by investing in technology exists.

Regardless of the macroeconomic conditions as 2020 continues, the underlying message is that there is an opportunity to lead by navigating technological change through investment and adoption; and for staffing firms who want to lead the industry, that opportunity to stand out increases if a downturn does arrive.

 

Free Chrome Extension TalentScan Lite Helps Automate Candidate Sourcing

 

Helping you automate your sourcing process.

 

Today we’re going to show you a free Chrome plugin available called TalentScan Lite. What this tool does, is it helps you find emails and phone numbers, as well as manage candidates for a job opening you’re trying to fill. It can be used with LinkedIn, as well as Gmail, GitHub, StackOverflow, XING, HeadHunter, Facebook, and more.

For the quick overview, we’re going to start out on Linkedin. (Side note, don’t stay signed in to LinkedIn unless you like being watched.) To find someone to check this out with and show how it works, we’re starting with a current connection. On a LinkedIn profile page, just click the icon to launch the extension, and it will show you the contact with their name and photo. You can expand it to view the contact info, emails, etc as well as add that contact to a vacancy you have set up in the tool.

Next, we show you what the full web version of the tool looks like. This is your dashboard where you can manage your vacancies as well as the contacts you’ve added. In the free version, you get one vacancy to work with at a time. As you can see, it gives you a little bit of everything in this tool to find and manage your candidates. If you decide to upgrade to the paid version, it’s reasonable at only 29/month.

All in all, TalentScan is a pretty good tool and is actually one we use. It can be kind of hit and miss, but it works!

Check the video out for more in-depth on what this tool can do!

~ Noel Cocca

 

Look inside with Dean Da Costa:

 

Talent Acquisition Movers, Shakers, & News Breakers – February 2020, Part 1

Talent Acquisition News

 

FEBRUARY 2020 – Talent Acquisition News

Pardon the interruption! As many seem to agree, January was a long year. Luckily, we’re halfway into February now, and with 2020 in full swing, it’s time to look at the state of the industry, what’s happening and where things are heading.

With Velocity Career Labs, 14 industry leaders including Aon’s Assessment Solutions, Cisive, Cornerstone, HireRight, Randstad, SAP, SumTotal Systems, SHL, Ultimate Software, Unit4, Upwork, Zip Recruiter and more, have come together to create the Velocity Network Foundation. The Foundation’s purpose is “define, deploy and champion” the Velocity Network. An open-source, blockchain-enabled “Internet of Careers,” Velocity Network will give people the power to claim and manage their career credentials.

In another sign of solidarity, learning experience platform Degreed and learning management system LearnUpon are partnering to offer companies both products through a single solution. Through this unified learning experience, users and admins have the ability to search, access, and track learning with only one relationship to manage. Perhaps a sign of increased collaboration or even potential consolidation to come on the part of the technology vendor community.

LinkedIn appointed Ryan Roslansky as its new CEO, replacing current CEO Jeff Weiner as of June 1. Weiner started with the company back in 2008 as interim president, seeing LinkedIn through a series of milestones, including its IPO in 2011 and acquisition by Microsoft in 2016. Roslansky is already a LinkedIn veteran, having spent the last ten years in various leadership roles across the business, supporting the development of its popular publishing platform and acquisition of Lynda.com.

ManpowerGroup released research indicating that U.S. talent shortages have reached a ten year high, more than tripling over the last decade. The report includes responses from 2,000 employers and over 1,500 workers about what attracts them to an organization and what makes them stay – critical factors at a time when 69 percent of companies are struggling to fill positions, up from just 14 percent in 2010. The findings take different lenses to the skills gap issue, looking at what workers want by geography, gender, and generation.

The minds behind the annual HR Technology Conference have a new immersive event taking place in June, known as Select HR Tech. The agenda will feature six tracks, including Building the Business Case, Change Management, Driving Project Success, Going Global, New Technologies Impacting HR, and Workforce Transformation, all focused on helping business optimize their technology investments. Taking a hands-on approach to the topic of deployment, the first-year event will offer master classes, workshops, a Solutions Showcase and keynotes from Jason Averbook, Vinnie Mirchandani, and Brian Sommer.

Capital Investments, Mergers, & Acquisitions

  • Already a significant investor in Infor, Koch Industries will spend $13 Billion to purchase the rest of the company. Through the transaction, Koch will acquire Golden Gate Capital’s stake, and Infor will become a standalone subsidiary of Koch Industries. The news comes just a year after Infor raised $1.5 B from both Koch and Golden Gate.
  • Justworks closed a $50 Million Series E investment round, bringing the company’s total funding up to $143 M. Justworks is known for pioneering a technology-enabled version of the Professional Employer Organization model and intends to use the money to “level the playing field” for small and medium-sized companies with under 200 employees.
  • Phenom People brought in $30 M in Series C, noting an ongoing shift in HR towards AI-powered talent experiences. The company, which has grown to more than 500 employees with over 300 customers, will use the funding to further its platform development and continued company growth.
  • LumApps, a SaaS provider of enterprise communication solutions, took in $70 M in Series C, welcoming Goldman Sachs as a new investor. The intranet platform, which serves as a digital workplace, will use the fundraising to accelerate its R&D investment, product development, sales and marketing expansion, hiring, and potential M&A activity.
  • Uplevel, a startup out of Madrona Venture Labs, emerged from stealth mode with $7.5 M in seed funding. The company seeks to “disrupt what it calls the ‘software engineer status quo’ by giving leaders tools to measure how productive and happy their stables of developers are.”

Upcoming Events & Conferences

Other recent highlights:

  • Hireology introduced a new mobile app designed to simplify retail automotive hiring with improved on-the-go functionality.
  • Curo Compensation announced the general availability of its new pay equity analysis software, CURO Pay Equity.
  • Glassdoor unveiled two new tools for job seekers: Collections, to help manage the search, and Company Compare, to compare potential employers.
  • Paycom released Manager on-the-go™, a tool within its mobile app that allows for 24/7 accessibility to the manager-side functionality.
  • reacHIRE’s Aurora Platform aims to “fix the broken rung” and help companies engage and retain millennial and Gen Z women.

Got news to share with us for our next update? Contact [email protected].

 

Kaspr: Chrome extension to find email addresses

 

Find email addresses with Kaspr!

 

We love these free Chrome Extensions, and we have another one for you to check out! This tool is called Kaspr, (yes, like the friendly ghost!) and it is available for download on the Chrome Web Store.

What does it do? Well, you can use this tool to find email addresses from LinkedIn data. It is a LinkedIn centric tool. To start your search, you are given the option to search by name, job, company, school, and location. We left the search rather wide open in our test, and chose to search for Walmart/Developer.

Now, within your search results, you can click through for contact info. You will see that it has pulled out available contact information, such as work emails, as well as personal email addresses. They don’t guarantee that the information is correct, but you can always use other tools to verify these emails later.

Kaspr is free to use for up to ten credits per month, and you can purchase more credits if you wish on their website. It’s a pretty good email finding tool, and it is simple and easy to use, which we like to see!

 

~ Noel Cocca

Look inside with Dean Da Costa:

Can tech overcome the challenges of managing gig workers?

Side Hustles Second Gigs Jobs

Managing the unmanageable: can technology help overcome the challenges of managing large teams of gig workers?

Scheduling and managing hourly workers are challenging. Event-based companies such as caterers, entertainment venues, or party planners are very familiar with the importance of making sure temporary staff and gig workers are fully briefed, managed, and trained to deliver flawlessly. Whether it’s a sound engineer at a wedding or security staff at a concert, the role of these gig workers is what will make or break the success of event-based businesses.

The nature of these types of companies is that their staffing needs will be continually fluctuating. Often, gig workers choose these jobs to earn a secondary income or as a temporary way to make some disposable pay, as is generally the case with students during vacation time. This means that businesses are in a constant loop of new people that need to be trained and briefed – and whose standard of performance, reliability, or skill is yet to be proven.

1. Skills and experience:

With the growth of the gig economy, there are all types of hourly jobs that require expertise and experience across different roles and disciplines. Whether a business needs a professional bartender for a corporate event or a store needs additional cashiers to help during a seasonal peak, assessing the level of expertise and the skills and experience of gig workers can be hard. This is why experienced wedding planners or catering companies often command such high fees, with a huge part of their added value deriving from a strong bond with tried and tested teams they can rely upon. These professionals have an innate skill to match the right staff to the right event, creating delightful events and experiences for their customers.

However, this isn’t the case for most companies that can’t preempt or predict future business needs. This is partly what keeps staffing agencies in business, as to an extent they keep employees’ track records. However, in the future, there is a role for technology to provide insights on a gig worker. Part of the success of marketplaces like eBay and even apps like UBER is the fact that there is a rating system attached to the seller or the driver, respectively. While no measurement or rating system is perfect, it would help enormously as an indicator for anyone that needs to build and manage teams of hourly staff.

2. Communication:

Gig workers often disperse across multiple events, stores, or locations. Sometimes even with various teams operating simultaneously across different areas. Creating a system to cascade communication such as updates, cancellations, or changes in requirements can be a logistical nightmare. Staffing agencies often have to go through endless excel lists, calls, text messages, and email updates to schedule update, cancel or confirm attendance. In the age of automated platforms to connect and engage with stakeholders automatically, most recruitment and staffing teams are still in the dark ages when it comes to efficient communication channels. If Amazon can trigger an email reminder to let you know about an item that is waiting in your cart, why can we not automate personalized reminders about an event’s location, the dress code, or even an alert when there’s a last-minute change or cancellation?

3. Geography:

In addition to the other two challenges, the location management of the business or event, as well as the physical location of available skilled staff, can be challenging. Firstly, it isn’t as easy to clock in and clock out of an event as it is to do so in an office. What’s more, it can take a long time for HQ to find out that someone is late or that there’s been a last-minute cancellation.

The lack of visibility leads to unnecessary anxiety and stress as a result of the lack of control over the status of your staff. Once again, technology will play a crucial role in solving this. Geo-location is at the core of every smartphone on the planet, and this is something that should and will be used to gain much-needed transparency to understand the status and location of your workforce. In addition, it could alert you or even automatically clock staff in and out based on their arrival and departure times to/from a job location.

The challenge is real. And the opportunities to optimize and improve the relationship that businesses have with their gig workers are endless. However, while there has been a significant emphasis on creating tools and marketplaces to generate all types of gigs – from driving to cleaning to babysitting – there is still a lot of room to rethink and redefine how companies could and should improve the relationship with this new workforce. Even though they will need technology to make it happen, it will ultimately be about improving their relationship through better communications and a more open and transparent working environment for all.

Recruiting With Tobu Resume Database

Never let a great resume slip past you with Tobu!

Tobu is a great tool that takes resumes and inputs them into an easy to navigate the database. It saves you the tedious time and energy of manually checking the relevant information from each resume, and instead allows you to spend your time in more valuable ways.

You can upload resumes Tobu in any format, and it will do the heavy lifting, figuring out the structure of each resume and pulling the key information.

  • You can upload resumes in groups. With a free membership, you can upload up to 25 at a time (with unlimited overall uploads), but with a paid membership there are no limits.
  • Resumes are processed and appear on Tobu in a standard and easy to follow format. Sections such as Personal Details, Objectives, and Experiences are neatly laid out.
  • Quick summaries including name, contact information, current job title, and education appear on the left side of each profile, making it easy to get a feel for the candidate without reading the full resume.

You can also perform searches within Tobu, combing through your collecting of resumes for specific keywords, titles, and/or locations. You can also set this search to only comb through recent uploads, so you don’t waste time on resumes you received five years ago.

Tobu is user-friendly, extremely fast, and saves you valuable time. As a bonus, the free version of Tobu will be plenty for many workflows. If not, however, the paid versions are reasonably priced. Try it out, and never let a great resume slip through the cracks. ~ Noel Cocca  

 

Look inside with Dean Da Costa:

9 Employee Recruitment Strategies

9 Latest Employee Recruitment Strategies

 

Recruitment has evolved drastically in the last few years with widespread changes in strategies and the technology used to implement them. Unlike before, you no longer get to pick the talent, the talent decides where to go. Finding and hiring the right candidate is vital to the continued progression of a business, but recruitment is one of the most difficult processes to get right.

You can use in-house HR personnel to recruit talent or hire an agency to handle it for you. But, it won’t matter if you don’t have robust employee recruitment strategies. 

Apart from the essential tips like creating checklists and templates to streamline processes and keeping an updated website, here are nine of the latest recruiting strategies to boost your search for the perfect candidate: 

1. Understand That AI is The New Candidate Screener

Artificial Intelligence (AI) based software is among the newer talent acquisition trends. According to a report by Ideal, 55% of HR managers believe that AI will become a significant part of HR activities in the next five years. AI can greatly enhance employee recruitment strategies.

Every step of the recruitment process can be smartly divided into helpful sections. HR staff can collect more data about the candidate and make scheduling interviews a breeze – all with the use of AI. It also helps integrate analytics and is known for providing unbiased decisions and removing conscious or unconscious bias during the recruitment process. 

2. Create a Strong Diversity & Inclusion Strategy

Diversity and inclusion are key driving factors for business growth. A 2015 study by McKinsey stated that companies in the top quartile for racial, ethnic, and gender diversity are 35 percent. It also stated that 15 percent were more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians. 

Creating an efficient diversity and inclusion strategy also includes a good recruitment strategy. Top talent on the hunt for a new company will rely on the impression your company’s branding makes on them. Everything from the brand messaging to the website and the images used on sites like Glassdoor will affect a candidate’s enthusiasm in applying for your company. 

A sharp diversion and inclusion strategy starts with open discussions on areas of improvement. it involves vital aspects, such as creating a safe space, creating KPIs, etc. 

3. Think Out of the “Globe”

With the increase in globalization, almost every large company jumped on the chance to prove they were truly global, with smaller businesses also joining the fray. As a result, all major advertising and marketing strategies had global messaging as one of its defining factors. Simply touting a universal message is not enough to attract top talent; one also needs to focus on the local market. 

For example, a company based in New York can have “global” brand messaging and marketing, but at the same time, they need to work on how they are perceived by New Yorkers. Recruitment strategies that are aimed at attracting the top local talent benefit the company greatly as recruiting becomes easier. 

4. Seek Digital Recruitment Solutions

A 2019 report by JobVite estimates that 180 people must visit your job site in order to make one hire. Classified ads and manual selective ad posting will no longer be effective. Recruiting strategies need to use digital solutions to their advantage if they are to increase their reach. 

Your recruitment strategy must include critical points such as:

  • choosing the right platform
  • improving candidate engagement
  • utilizing programmatic job advertising (PJAs) 

All of this can help job ads reach a large number of people and more importantly, in the right places. Many recruitment marketing firms boast about their set of tools but choosing the correct one to suit your needs is a hard task. 

One tool, however, that works really well in employee recruitment is HR project management software. It helps you streamline the entire hiring process and ensures everyone is in the loop.

5. Take the Proactive Approach

According to a JobVite report, the unemployment rate has gone down in recent years, meaning the market is more in favor of those looking for a job than those looking to hire. This means recruiters have to be proactive in approaching candidates and initiate conversations.

Proactive recruitment involves building a relationship with skilled people in your area before an official job opening is there. So once there is an open position, you already have a pool of talent to pick from. This dramatically reduces the hassles of the usual recruitment process. A simple way to be proactive is to build relationships at networking events, trade shows, seminars, etc.

6. Don’t Forget Referral Programs

Referral programs have been a part of recruiting strategies for a long time. In simple terms, they give employees benefits when they refer a suitable candidate for open positions. Referred employees tend to be cheaper and easier to hire. 

An effective employee referral program clearly indicates the requirements of open job positions, provides good incentives, acknowledge good referrers, and keep employees updated on the candidates’ progress.

7. Give Importance to “Team” Effort

The saying “teamwork makes the dream work” is not just a catchy phrase when it comes to recruiting as a collaborative effort between your HR personnel, marketing team, and talent acquisition leaders – it is very important to improve team collaboration. This method is far more effective than depending solely on human resources recruitment strategies. 

It is important to provide adequate resources and guidance for this team effort to happen. Acknowledging good teamwork, at the same time, is equally vital. Working together this way also boosts the unity between employees.

8. Remember: Adaptability > Experience

Many, many employers focus on a candidate’s experience when hiring. While job experience is indispensable, a potential hire that is able to adapt to your company’s changing needs is far more valuable. Since most companies evolve with changes in their industry, employees who are rigid in their job role will become dispensable as time goes by. 

Soft skills such as good communication affect the mood of the team and the overall workplace. So, an employee who is decent in their specialty but who fails to properly communicate with team members and other departments clearly could lead to trouble.

9. Leverage Social Media

Social media is omnipresent these days, and recruiters can do so much more than just posting vacant job ads on multiple social networks. Nearly all of the above-stated points can be made better through the proper use of social media. 

Proactive recruitment, for example, is elevated when you utilize social media, the same goes for building a relationship with your existing customers and employees. Combining recruitment and social media marketing can give an excellent boost to your search for the perfect candidate. 

Adopt Latest Recruitment Strategies With HR Project Management Software For Streamlined Hiring Process

To add to all the strategies mentioned above, creating good recruiting strategies and implementing them is made easier. How? Through an all-inclusive platform or software. 

For instance, deploying a Human resource project management software combines multiple crucial functions in one place, provided you choose the right one. Do your research and know what you need before you pick one for your organization. Always choose a PM tool that features one dashboard, calendar view, team collaboration features, and reporting. 

 

How Recruiting Automation Can Improve Small Business Hiring

Small Business Recruiting and Hiring

 

Finding skilled and high-quality candidates is the number one challenge for recruiters. It’s no wonder. As a country, we’re at full employment. For the first time in 20 years, there are more job openings than there are people unemployed.

There’s been a dramatic decrease in the number of incoming applications for positions. 47% of companies report a lack of candidate applications. Of those that do apply, more than half don’t meet the minimum requirements. Couple that with low unemployment rates and an overall shortage of skilled workers and recruiters have their job cut out for them. They have to spend more time than ever doing passive recruiting of potential candidates that aren’t in the active job market.

How Is Recruiting Automation Being Used?

Most recruiters have turned to automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to help solve the hiring puzzle. Three-quarters of recruiters say technology is playing a bigger role in their hiring process this year and they expect that role to increase in the years ahead.

Here are some of the way recruiters are integrating automation into their organizations:

Job Advertising & Marketing

Recruiters are using targeted digital advertising tools to find candidates. Programmatic job advertising tools let you optimize automation to advertise your job openings aimed at those possessing the skills you need. You no longer need to put an ad on job boards and hope the right person sees it. Now you can deliver to the right targets using advertising platforms like LinkedIn.

Tools like Adstream, Wonderkind, and Appcast allow recruiters to dynamically target people with content that highlights your company culture and employee experiences aimed at differentiating your company from your competition.

Sourced to show what a potential candidate profile looks like when targeting through programmatic advertising platforms.

Social Media

95% of recruiters are using LinkedIn to source candidates. But LinkedIn isn’t the only social platform that recruiters use to find great candidates. Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms help companies get their open jobs in front of over 645 million professionals.  Keeping up with all the platforms can easily be a full-time job.

Instead, consider using automation to schedule recruiting posts and content marketing to attract candidates. Promote these posts to reach a more targeted base of candidates in larger volumes.

Automated Sourcing

Screening applicants is easy compared to the task of finding qualified candidates that are not actively looking for a job. The right candidate may not be actively searching for a job which means they may not be in touch with recruiters or searching job boards.

AI sourcing tools, like Ideal, Zoom.ai, and Textio, can help you identify individuals who might be a perfect fit but are not actively searching for a new role. AI tools can review candidates published resumes and LinkedIn profiles and find people with the skill set you need. Then, automatic communications over social platforms and via email can reach out to the candidate and see if they might be interested in hearing about the position.

Screening

By reviewing, scoring and ranking candidates, AI screening tools, like Freshteam, can be a huge time saver to recruiters. Candidate pre-screening tools can contextually evaluate a candidate’s experience, skills, and other key characteristics by looking for keywords and data insights.

Even a very simple screening tool should be able to scan resumes for contextual signs to indicate whether they meet minimum qualifications. This will allow you to reject under-qualified candidates automatically, and even automatically send an email explaining they are not a good fit.

Virtual Assistants

Chatbots and virtual assistants are becoming more common in the screening process as well. Once used only as a marketing or customer care tool, chatbots can now help recruiters by actually conducting parts of the interview.

Virtual assistants can gather simple information like graduation year and school and also ask a series of questions to determine candidate qualifications. These questions can be built to depend on each other by using logic rules. For example, when candidates answer a question one way, the AI can branch off into related questions, or move on to other areas.

Finally, virtual assistants can also help the recruit by answering common questions or keeping the candidate updated on the process. This will free the recruiting team to spend more time with each candidate and ask more complex questions.

Assessments

Recruiters build profiles of skills and characteristics they desire in candidates. Software can rank them based on this proforma data and provide assessments. This process removes hiring bias from the recruiting process.

Building profiles of top performers can be used by predictive analysis screening to evaluate future performance.

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)

Applicant tracking systems are increasingly being used by many organizations. Applicant tracking systems are a recruitment automation technology that allows recruiters to collect and track the recruitment process in a database.

Tracking begins as soon as the candidate applies and then follows each step through the process. The database provides a single location where all details and steps are tracked so every member of the team can quickly see candidate details and where they are in the process.

If an organization has dozens of candidates of many open positions applicant tracking systems can be vital to keep organized and not let any steps or candidates fall through the cracks. ATS tools such as Jobvite, Workday, and RecruiterBox both save recruiting team time as well as provides a quality experience for the candidates.

Automated Scheduling

Scheduling appointments can be time-consuming. This is especially true in passive recruiting where candidates aren’t actively in the job market or when a candidate needs to be interviewed with many team members. Hours can easily be lost going back and forth trying to find times that work with a candidate and each member of the team. In fact, scheduling headaches constantly ranks as one of the biggest pain points for candidates during the recruiting process.

Fortunately, scheduling automation can handle this for you and reduce the frustration for recruiters and candidates. Scheduling automation tools can sync with the necessary calendars and then present available times automatically. When a candidate chooses a time, it will also automatically save the appointment on the calendar, preventing double bookings. Automatic scheduling creates a more seamless experience and saves everyone tome.

Nurturing

When you’re trying to nurture relationships, it’s important to stay in contact with top prospects throughout the hiring process. Automated email can keep candidates up-to-date on the process and next steps and prevent any important steps from falling through the cracks. Regular touchpoints can help keep candidates engaged and interested.

Background Checks

Background checks and reference checks can also be automated to save time. Background checking tools, such as Checkr and GoodHire, can use name-matching technology and automated research to identify red flags. This tech can also reduce incorrect hits on common names which will dramatically increase the speed your team can do a background check manually.

The Benefits of Recruiting Automation

Recruiting automation saves time and lets recruiters work more efficiently. It also streamlines processes, reduces the time to hire, and produces more qualified candidates.

Streamlined Processes

Automation can streamline the overall hiring and sourcing processes, especially when an organization has many roles open or is interviewing many candidates. Automations can keep track of every candidate, where they are in the process, and push them into the next step or out of the process automatically or when based on rules. The automation can then even continue when the candidate is hired and through the onboarding process, automatically walking them through each step to get set up correctly with the company.

These automations make for a more efficient workflow and automates some of the routine processes like asking basic questions, doing background checks or even just scheduling an interview call. This lets recruiters worry about higher-level tasks such as assessing a candidate’s cultural fit.

Reduced Time to Hire

With streamlined systems, you can reduce your overall hiring time. Every day a position sits open is a lost opportunity for a company and increased costs of the recruiting team. Automation can speed up the process by completing screening and assessments automatically. It can also create a better overall recruiting system where fewer candidates fall out of the recruiting funnel saving time wasted on lost candidates.

Finally, reducing the time to hire is desirable for candidates who want to work for your company.  Automations reduce the time to hire which benefits the company and the candidates.

Better Candidates

Using predictive analysis, AI can surface better candidates for review. Once you determine the key traits of your most productive employees, automation can use it as a model to screen candidates. It can also screen out candidates that don’t meet your qualifications.

Additionally, using automation creates less work for recruiters so they can focus on building relationships with candidates and then with the hires. This will lead to a better outcome for all.

A More Competitive Environment

74% of recruiters report a more competitive hiring environment this year. Recruiting automation is crucial to stay ahead of the game.