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What About Recruitment in 2020? – The Digital Dimension

2020 Digital recruitment

 

As much as recruitment is a sector that thrives on relationships, human interaction and critical face-to-face meetings, digital channels connect everything together.

From potential applicants conducting their first job search and HR professionals posting business-critical ads, through to busy recruiters working at breakneck speed to find the perfect candidate on LinkedIn, the industry depends on the speed of communication, and online visibility.

At Blueclaw we regularly take a deep dive into the most important developments, opportunities and challenges in different sectors – and our recent interviews with digital experts working within recruitment brought out some key trends.

Content Marketing – Bringing Candidates Closer

Time and again, content emerged as a topic of vital importance. In such a competitive space, with many recruiters advertising non-exclusive roles with the same phrasing and copy as their rivals, it’s no wonder that it’s hard to stand out in search engine performance – or to candidates.

As Owain Wood, Head of Marketing at Carmichael Fisher states;

“We’ve worked hard to create an experience that reflects our brand, if your current platform is not clearly representing your business, brand, products and services in the way you want it needs addressing…. Content is of course one of the best ways to drive traffic and lead-generation.”

For Shane McGourty, one of AdView’s directors, original content has been a critical driver of growth –

“In 2018 our in house AdView Publisher Program was our main focus. Our 500+ publisher network generated around 80% of our traffic and 2019 we of course, wish to grow this.”

Content marketing allows recruitment firms to be differentiated in search performance, while also giving candidates content to care about across social media, in the press and at the critical point of making an application.

Owain had words of warning for those who see content as mere marketing fodder;

“Bad content is just as bad as no content at all. When devising content topics, be strategic about what you are writing about. If everyone else is writing about the same topic, find a niche, as posts from brands with more authority will bury yours.”

Social media – From Reactive to Proactive

Recruiters love social media – from public posts advertising opportunities to the more subtle art of coaxing a candidate towards an interview via LinkedIn and Twitter messaging, it’s a key component of the modern recruiter’s toolbox.

However, our panel predicted that the best recruitment firms would go beyond the baseline of casual posting and move towards more planned, proactive and measurable social media strategies.

As Emma Allison, Head of Marketing at ForwardRole states, it’s not just about what you put out…but what you get back in terms of engagement;

“I expect social media will continue to grow as a channel within the recruitment sector over the next few years. Live video for instance has been gaining momentum for a while now, with many brands experiencing higher impressions from Instagram and Facebook stories, than posts published on their newsfeed.”

Owain Wood’s view is one shared by our strategists – that effective social media strategies contribute to the performance of other channels – with some indications that SEO may be among them;

“Despite Google saying that social media is not a direct SEO ranking factor, it can amplify the ranking factors that Google does consider to be important. If you are creating engaging shareable content, it will get shared, links will get built and in turn that will influence your SEO – and it’s worth noting that Bing considers it a direct ranking indicator.”

Google for Jobs – A Challenge and an Opportunity

Google for Jobs has already started to shape the digital recruitment landscape – and the challenge is for recruiters to adapt to take advantage of potential opportunities while acting to minimize risks.

Shane McGourty sees Google for Jobs as something that may have implications for how Google makes money from the recruitment sector;

 “Google jobs is the big fish here, that is going to be huge and has already made a massive impact since its go live late last year. The question is will Google AdWords suffer on the back of this new strategy?”

As every marketer knows, Google puts serious focus into monetizing their services wherever possible, profitable and sustainable – and if Google is offering up content that might previously have been behind a paid click, sooner or later they’ll find ways to make up any shortfall.

Presumably, this is part of Google’s inscrutable long-term plan for Jobs – but marketers should be prepared.

Emma Allison explains Forward Role’s approach;

“It’s early days as far as Google for Jobs goes, but it’s already having an effect on where we choose to spend our budget, with more focus onsite on job boards than ever before.”

In balancing the need to be visible in Google for Jobs while also maximizing inner page rankings with unique, qualitative content – with social media being the glue that keeps the machine turning – there’s a lot of recruitment sector marketers to consider.

To read the full panel interview, please visit – https://rdaily.co/blueclaw19RD

Prophet II Turbo levels up with a Company Identifier

 

Target any company with the Prophet II Turbo Company Identifier

 

Prophet II Turbo by HiringSolved just added something new and important that we thought you should know about! Let’s say you want to target a specific company and do some recruiting.

First, head to their company website and launch Prophet II from the right side of your screen.  You will see a banner saying how many people they found within that company, we have 63k according to the program. From here you can easily run that as a search. Let’s see what it does!

Next, if we take a look at that search results page, we can see some more detail about who we’ve found. In this example, there are actually more people than the popup stated. We have access to over 70,000 people at this one company with a single click! You can access this feature from the Smart Search and Expert Search as well, which is helpful when you want to filter out locations or choose other exclusions. If you don’t know how to access Expert Search, we show you how here.

Right now their free version allows 600 credits per month, and you can add 20 people to a list each day, free! If you want more, their Standard and Pro accounts are very reasonable.

It is important to note that these profiles are sourced from many different social profile databases. There are hundreds of millions of people within these networks, and a lot of these people aren’t even on LinkedIn! Grab contacts from About.me, Behance and Github, while your competition is stuck using LinkedIn. Quickly and easily target a company and tear them apart! This new addition to Prophet II Turbo really enhances what it already does so well.

 

Look inside with Dean Da Costa:

 

Creating A More Inclusive Job Posting

Inclusive Job Postings

 

Often times, job descriptions can be vague, misleading, or written in a way that limits diverse hiring. Your best diversity, retention, and engagement strategies will be for nothing if your hiring process is restrictive from the start. It pays to invest time and effort in writing a proper job description that attracts a wider audience. To write a job description that promotes diversity, consider the following points:

Use gender-neutral language

When you’re writing up a job description, you might be tempted to use hard-charging words that reflect your ideal candidates. Words like ninja or rock star might seem like an easy and catchy sell. However, studies reveal that these descriptors create a gender bias, and reduce the number of women who apply for the positions.

Research by Textio shows that “higher-paying executive jobs are written to attract more men, compared to non-executive positions.” Words like competitive, fearless, and enforcement create a bias that attracts men, while words like transparent, catalyst, and in touch will evoke the same response in women!

When creating your new job description, swap the “bro speak” for inclusive language that encourages community, and appeals to the human side of your candidates.

Check your pronouns too, and consider switching any instances of “he/she” to “they/their”, so that all candidates feel welcomed to apply.

Examine for barriers of entry

Gender exclusion is only one piece of the puzzle. Job descriptions can be full of socioeconomic biases that create more barriers to applicants.

Required educational backgrounds, for example, exclude anyone who could not afford to attend university (consider that 95% of American colleges are too expensive for the majority of low-income students). Of course, to become a doctor, you’ll need a Medical Degree. But, consider the job you are looking to fill, and consider whose expertise you may be missing out when deciding to mention a degree requirement on your posting. For example, does someone for an entry-level sales job really require a four-year bachelor’s degree? And could strong sales skills be better assessed by looking at their past work experience or achievements outside of school?

Create concise postings

If your job description lists an excessive amount of responsibilities, then candidates who don’t meet each and every point may shy away from applying. This also relates to gender exclusion because women tend to only apply for roles when they feel they meet 100% of the criteria, while men tend to still apply as long they meet 60% of them!

Prioritize and list your most important goals. Be clear on when a skill is a “nice to have” versus a “must-have”. When it comes to writing out each section, brevity is the soul of wit and will help you clarify your message!

If you’re not sure how to prioritize, consider sitting down with someone in the role and going through their daily, weekly, and monthly tasks. Make a list of your top 5 competencies based on those tasks, and ensure that your job description is reflective of that.

Cut the jargon!

Research shows that relying too heavily on jargon can keep young talent from applying to your roles, as they may not yet have a handle on the language and feel unqualified to apply.

Make sure that when a person reads your job description you’re using real, comprehensive language. When someone reads the description they should know exactly who the company is, what the role entails, and who the company is looking for.

Include a well defined Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) statement

Textio research shows that job descriptions with a listed EEO statement fill 10% quicker than posts without. However, it’s not enough to simply state that you support equal employment. Rather, Textio suggests making it clear exactly what you support, why you support it, and how it affects your company culture. Here is an example from Textio itself! “Textio embraces diversity and equal opportunity in a serious way. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. The more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.”

Invest in teaching your hiring managers about unconscious bias

Make sure that bias training is part of everyone’s job. It is important to note that bias is not a bad word and recognizing inherent biases improves the safety and wellbeing of a workplace.

If you’re tight on budget, there are plenty of free resources to help people better understand what bias is and how to be more inclusive as a company. Free tools like the Gender-Decoder, or Google re:work’s unconscious bias training are a great place to start.

We are all human, and thus we are all bias. However, building self-awareness is all of our jobs, and a first step in creating a more inclusive workplace!

 

Tool Review: Source 500 Desktop

 

Boost your ability to source more leads with Source500!

 

We have another brand new tool called Source 500. This is a great little tool that expands on your existing LinkedIn Recruiter account. It does a lot and the way it works involves a neat little trick that we will explain below!

Let’s get into what it does.

  • Open the program, it is a standalone desktop application, not a browser extension.
  • Once you launch the program and login, it will auto-launch LinkedIn.
  • Now, it launches LinkedIn, but it does so within a browser called Chromium.
  • This browser works differently and activity is not as public so you may get away with a little more than you’re used to. Sign in to LinkedIn and you get taken into your Recruiter account search page.

We’re going to see how to source some candidates now. We know some information and we want to really target a specific skill set for it, so first put in a job title, and then your specific skills. We can refine by location, and refine even further with a ton of different options. In this example, we chose the first name. This narrows our potential search results down to only 7 people. Pretty neat, but there’s more: Now we can capture those candidates!

If we click that capture button, what it’s going to do is gather all the available information on those people, and then it’s going to go a step further and find me contact information! This is the magic part, where it finds all the contact information. The tool will typically find about 65% of the emails that you need. In this particular example, we’ve found emails and phone numbers for 3 out of the 7. Not bad, and we can use some of the other tools in our arsenal to find the rest. We take that data and can export to CSV and can do whatever we want with it.

What’s really cool, is because this tool is doing searches within this Chromium browser, LinkedIn can’t mess with it. We know someone that was able to download over 1,000 contacts using this tool in less than an hour! LinkedIn can’t limit your searches with this tool, because they can’t see them, which is the best part. You get credits to capture contacts, which you can choose from their pricing plan depending on what your needs will be.

So there we have it! Another tool for your toolbelt!

~ Noel Cocca

Look inside with Dean Da Costa:

Do hiring algorithms prevent bias or amplify it and how to get it right?

algorithm bias

 

In some circles, these algorithms acquire the image of a ‘bias-free stakeholder’ in the hiring process. Often managers assume that because the software is devoid of emotions (unlike humans), using them would mean the complete removal of personally-motivated bias from the hiring process.

Any application of AI (Artificial Intelligence) or Machine Learning (ML) learns from the existing data fed to it. This raises concerns such as an amplification of pre-existing bias in the data that have made hiring managers approach them with caution. 

Amazon’s experiment into an AI-based recruiting system was scrapped after it started penalizing resumes that included the term “women’s” or names of women’s colleges. Essentially, the software taught itself to prefer resumes of male candidates over those of female candidates. 

Yet another study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) proved market disposition towards white names (such as ‘Emily’ or ‘Greg’) that got more callbacks for interviews than black names (such as ‘Lakisha’ and ‘Jamal’).

This raises questions over how these algorithms work.

Working of hiring algorithms

Hiring algorithms is a broad term referring to algorithms that are used by job boards, recruiting sites, or resume evaluation tools. Algorithms find their place throughout the entire hiring cycle.

These hiring systems do have their benefits. However, documented amplification of biases only makes it harder for hiring managers to trust them.

To understand how to overcome these biases, we must examine how they introduce bias at each step.

Bias in sourcing algorithms

Job boards attract recruiters to advertise on their platform with a promise of a wider reach and efficient spending of the hiring budget. 

They circulate the job descriptions around on their platform using predictive algorithms. This job advertisement process introduces the first level of bias.

The focus of these boards is to optimize ad spends. They advertise jobs based on who is most likely to click the job ad, not on the job-candidate match. They borrow the ad distribution logic from the real-world data and this is where they pick up biases.

For example, if the real-world data reflects the pattern of black candidates applying to low paying jobs, the same pattern will be used to distribute ads. The majority of ads for low-income jobs will be shown to black candidates. This closes off the more qualified black candidates from high-income jobs.

Real-world biases are replicated more than contained in this process. And recruiters have no control over it; often they are not even aware of it.

Some job boards or resume template sites claim personalization as their main feature. They learn from the recruiter’s preference as they respond to candidate profiles for specific job roles over time. This makes them a lot similar to Facebook because they replicate those biases seen in recruiter behavior

If a recruiter subconsciously associates certain hobbies, educational choices, or names to a specific group, this pattern gets picked up, replicated, and finally reflected in the candidate profile that the recruiter sees. 

Therefore, sourcing tools affect the visibility of jobs by reflecting real-world bias. 

Bias in selection algorithms

During the screening process, hiring managers often use ‘knockout’ questions based on the core nature of the job’s requirements but may go beyond the job description. These questions come directly from recruiters themselves and are not screened for bias. Even the shortlisted candidates cannot pass any further if recruiter bias kicks in before or after talking to the candidate.

Some tools use machine learning (ML) to bypass this interpersonal bias to some extent. Even then these tools learn from past selection data which, as you might expect, often reeks of racial or sexual prejudice. 

In fact, these ML-based algorithms work against the very purpose of diversity and inclusivity programs aimed at eliminating this bias.

More sophisticated tools use factors such as longevity, performance, productivity, lack of disciplinary actions or frequent job changes to predict ‘on the job’ success of the candidate. 

Since these measures are regulated by the government in the United States, assessment vendors must prove how they remove the bias from their algorithms. These steps are nothing more than subjective evaluations from within the company, which is another source of bias seeping into a hiring process. 

Bypassing these measures is to justify the use of algorithms (producing inequitable results) with a concrete business interest.

How to remove bias from hiring algorithms

The first step to removing bias introduced or amplified by hiring algorithms is to discard the idea that these algorithms are flawless. To build a better process going forward, you must look at the positive and the negative outcomes of inequitable hiring algorithms.

So, how can recruiters who rely on hiring algorithms still make it fair and unbiased? 

1. Feed a diverse dataset to your hiring algorithm

As we already know, hiring algorithms do not act alone. Hiring algorithms optimize results for the dominant group within their input datasets. If their results indicate bias, the data that was fed to them must have contained the same bias, albeit to a lesser degree.

To eliminate bias from the outcomes, you need to eliminate it from the data being fed to it. Use a more diverse dataset for training your AI-based hiring algorithm. 

If you do not have a diverse dataset, you can train your AI to optimize for underrepresented factors of the minor or the non-primary groups. If your resumes are restricted to a specific geographic location, use the names of women’s colleges in that city/state/region. When optimizing against racial bias, train your AI to lay more emphasis on non-white names.

If you do have a diverse dataset but the dominant groups may still indicate bias, change the definition of dominant groups for your AI algorithm. Feed data models to them that focus on other factors representing non-primary groups.

2. Make your hiring team more diverse

Because AI tends to follow the real world rather than improve it, make your hiring and AI teams more diverse. Not only sexually or racially diverse people, hire people from non-traditional professional backgrounds. This includes hiring creatives, linguists, sociologists and passionate people from other walks of life into your AI and hiring teams.

Focusing on a diverse team of professionals may still leave out the best hires if you rely on outdated success markers such as mandatory degree qualifications. To build a truly diverse team, open hiring to candidates with non-academic expertise by focusing on a broader set of skills.

Often smaller startups may not have resources for the overhaul of their hiring process. In such cases, consider augmenting your staff with staff from another, more diverse agency. Make sure you follow staff augmentation best practices throughout your engagement.

For the long-term sustainability of such initiatives, consider developing training programs to help diverse candidates integrate into your hiring and AI teams. 

3. Monitor the AI outcomes of your hiring algorithm at all stages

Before you jump on to the AI-based hiring bandwagon, talk to the vendor of the said hiring software and ask them to explain the process. If they cite IP issues or there is a lot of resistance in sharing their algorithm, ask them for a test run. 

Be very aware of the existing biases in your sample dataset before you feed it to the tool. 

If you already use such a hiring tool (whether proprietary or from a third party), hire an auditor to test your software. You can also audit the outcomes yourself by looking for previously unnoticed trends among selected and rejected candidate pools. 

These audits will help you understand the scope, depth, and frequency of retraining needed to remove the potential biases reflected in it.

Final Words

An ideal solution would be an end-to-end bias screening framework aimed at removing the bias from the entire hiring process – from sourcing to selection. This requires buy-in from all stakeholders. Only when you consider the side effects of using these algorithms, you can create a plan that addresses the core of these issues. 

 

Swordfish Advanced, With New and Improved Features

 

The new, the improved Swordfish, with more to come!

 

Swordfish is a fantastic tool we have discussed before, and it has been recently updated with some great new and improved features. It’s already the best pure contact information finding tool around, and it just keeps getting better and better. There are several other tools like it that are good, but Swordfish is hands down excellent. Use their web app, the Chrome extension, or both. It’s free to sign up, and you get 5 credits each month for two months just to give it a test drive. Trust me, you’ll want to keep using it.

Let’s take a look at features. File uploads! This is the neat stuff, you have a CSV with pertinent information that’s missing data. Drop it into the page and just let it go to town! You need phone numbers or email addresses, there’s an 80+ percent find rate on contact data. Really really good!

Next, are ad-hoc searches, find the rest of your contact detail info by inputting their social profile URL, or search by name, phone, email, or even their physical address.

What’s next for Swordfish? An update that’s on the way will be the ability to highlight a name or other contact detail and immediately do a Swordfish search via right-click. Real tools don’t stagnate, they are continuously adding and updating, and Swordfish is one of these. Another upcoming feature…facial recognition! You’ll be able to paste a photo URL and the tool will find the rest. Amazing!

~ Noel Cocca

Look inside with Dean Da Costa:

Artificial Intelligence in Recruiting: Possibilities and Limitations

Limitless Recruiting

 

“companies need to both embrace new technology and retain talented recruiters”

AI may have only recently emerged into the popular consciousness, but it is certainly not new. People have been researching AI since the 1950s with famous AI systems making headlines in the decades since, including IBM’s Watson, which famously won the TV quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011.

But AI technology is now cheaper than ever to develop, opening it up to more businesses. And thanks to its ubiquity, AI is slowly becoming a more recognizable part of our daily lives.

This proliferation has inspired scare stories about AI taking work away from humans. In reality, it will take years of serious adoption and advancement for there to even be a conversation about AI replacing humans. Investments in people and technology should always run in parallel: one will not necessarily take precedence over the other. Recruiting is fundamentally about interacting with other humans, and AI is revolutionizing these connections.

The applications of AI in recruiting

Adoption levels for AI technology are still low in the recruiting industry. According to Bullhorn’s Global Recruitment Insights and Data for North America, only 27 percent of recruiters are prioritizing investment in digital transformation to improve their operations. This could be attributed to a prevailing sense that AI can only be used by large companies with considerable resources and vast data sets. But since AI no longer requires massive data sets, smaller companies can feasibly adopt machine learning and pattern recognition to enhance recruiting processes – all without replacing human staff.

In fact, AI can offer several different types of intelligence for recruiters to benefit from, including:

  • Talent intelligence: Providing insights on how best to reach quality candidates for a particular role, including where to post jobs, the average number of candidates you need to source to find for that role, and common characteristics of suitable candidates.
  • Workflow intelligence: Helping to create an intelligent workstream for application management once suitable candidates have been identified, which may include automating processes like screening, invoicing and billing.
  • Insight intelligence: Giving recruiters and salespeople on-the-job intelligence and prompts, such as “These are the 10 most common screening questions for this type of role,” or “Now is the best time of day to reach this particular candidate or prospective client”. This means recruiters can benefit from automatic prompts as they work – saving them time and taking them directly to the useful insights.

In these cases, AI does not present a threat to recruiters. Instead, it optimizes work processes, allowing staff to focus their energy where it matters most.

There are limitations of AI

In the movies, it is easy to find genius-level AI-driven robots with a taste for world domination. Perhaps this makes some people nervous about introducing AI into workplaces. But even with the advances made in recent years that should lay those fears to rest, AI remains limited in the real world.

This is partly due to how AI works. Computers are great at recognizing patterns, such as correlations in a data set. But correlation is not causation. So, while AI can alert us to a pattern of events, it cannot necessarily tell us why they are happening.

Nor are AI systems immune to error. And if these errors are not caught during the machine learning process, they can become very difficult to correct, resulting in misleading data.

In general, AI systems work best when designed for a specific task. But this means they have a narrow application. And if you rely too heavily on AI, you may lose sight of the bigger picture, such as wider market changes your system was not designed to consider. So, if more women are entering the software development industry, biases built into the algorithm – which, after all, is programmed by humans – could still turn up mostly male and mostly traditional candidates. The unconscious bias built into the AI will ensure that you’re unintentionally missing out on this influx of new talent.

The key point here is that AI is not infallible and will always require some form of human assistance. We tell AI systems what to look for and how to analyze information. And we decide when and how to apply the analysis they provide.

Consequently, AI cannot and will not replace humans in the current industry. In fact, we may never reach this point. Instead, companies need to both embrace new technology and retain talented recruiters, whose experiences and insights are irreplaceable.

Is AI the future of recruiting?

Will AI play a role in recruiting in the future? The answer is yes. By simplifying the recruiting process, AI allows recruiters to work more effectively. It is important for recruiting professionals to approach artificial intelligence not as a threat to their livelihoods, but as a vital tool.

 

 

Thinking Outside the Box, Old School

Out of the Box

5 Steps To Get Out of the Recruiting Box

Have you heard this in the last 90 days?  We need to think outside the box.  I’m sure that after that question was posed an interesting series of suggestions followed.  Many had ideas of how different technologies could be used in order to increase candidate flow.  Here is the thing.  Not all recruiting can be done from behind a desk.  I want to share some of the old school ways recruiters have connected with talent in the past that don’t involve technology but do involve handshakes and IRL conversations.

Out of the box idea number one.  Host a networking event. 

In most cases, we work in places that have nice facilities.  Inviting the community you recruit from for a networking event gives you the ability to engage with talent and build an employer brand.  Host an event and provide a speaker on a topic your talent pipeline wants to hear about.   I recommend two things for a networking event even if you don’t have a speaker.

First set up tables with topics of interest to the talent you have invited.   Place some of your hiring managers at the different tables and give them a no-pressure way to engage with potential talent.   Have you ever read a director or VP resume where they indicate they help with recruiting?  Give them the chance to earn that line on their resume.  Let your HM’s sell the job at a happy hour.

Don’t forget the fishbowl/raffle to gather even more contact info.  Part of the draw for your event needs to be a prize that your prospects will get excited about.  It is worth a $50 dollar gift card to get contact information for your target market.

The second idea, create “ambassador” cards for your employees. 

Give them a card where they can fill in their information and hand it out to their contacts.  Print the card so that it has a link to your employee referral portal or the email address of the email for the referral inbox.  This is a great way to help your employees generate referrals without requiring a lot of effort on their part.

For the third idea, try attending industry events. 

Do you recruit cybersecurity?  Why not attend Black Hat?  One thing marketers understand that recruiters struggle with is it isn’t the only the message that matters, it is the place and the time.  Marketers understand you have to go to the places your audience lives.   Hosting a booth at an industry event gives you access to talent that you might not have been able to connect with online.

The fourth idea, promote diversity and inclusion. 

Along the same lines of industry events also promote activity among the different Employee Resource Groups or Affiliation Groups.  Diversity and inclusion are major initiatives for most of corporate America.  Hosting industry events focused on diversity and inclusion is a win for the company and for the community.  It doesn’t matter what you do to promote diversity and inclusion if you don’t take the time to share with the community.

Idea number five, have you tried a billboard? 

Placed near the office they can not only help increase brand awareness they can also be targeted to specific skill sets.  A billboard that says something like, tired of sitting in traffic?  If you worked for us you wouldn’t be!  I’m not sure what he right message is for you or your audience but I would guess they do drive a car around your offices on a somewhat regular basis.

Finally, be consistent.  One of the challenges of outside of the box is that they require consistency in order to produce results.  No one career fair or industry event is going to fill all of your jobs all of the time.  Living in a world dominated by technology it is easy to forget that not all recruiting can be done from behind a desk.  At the end of the day, long term recruiting is about speaking to people and making connections.  It is far easier to make a connection with another human in person.  It has been the only way for most of our existence as a species and it remains an effective way to recruit.

Talent Acquisition Movers, Shakers, & News Breakers – September 2019, Part 2

Talent Acquisition News

 

Welcome to fall conference season, everyone! From big-name keynote speakers to big-time product announcements, we’re officially in the thick of things. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of what’s going on:

SAP SuccessFactors made waves at their annual conference, unveiling a plan to take on “Human Capital Management” and turn it into “Human Experience Management.” Can’t say we’re surprised by this one, given the rise of “experience” language throughout the year and the number of other vendors touting similar approaches (Phenom People, for one).

OutMatch is adding natural language processing and gamification to its Talent Discovery Platform, assuming a powerful new technology, formerly called Eureka. Using AI to match candidates with companies and jobs based on technical skill, soft skills, and cultural fit, the move builds on the company’s existing capabilities.

Seen by Indeed takes the place of Indeed Prime, bringing with it a more “holistic” approach to today’s tech-hiring challenges. That means a broader view of talent and talent needs, helping employers connect candidates at all stages in their careers and across relevant job titles. The solution includes automation features as well, reducing time spent sourcing, screening, and scheduling qualified candidates.

GR8People is tending to its employee referral program functionality to incorporate “ultra-personalization.” The enhancements give companies the ability to redline program settings and accommodate various referral types, set custom duration periods for referral ownership, create unique referral URLs for employees to share with their networks and more.

Human Resource Executive® magazine announced its Top HR Products of 2019, ahead of the annual HR Technology Conference and Exposition it produces. The news comes alongside its Awesome New Technologies and New Products releases. It’s a lot to process, but you’ll see a few trends pop up again and again: artificial intelligence, machine learning, predictive analytics, automation, digital transformation, and so on.

Capital Investments, Mergers, & Acquisitions

Background check company Checkr raised $160 Million round of funding, planning to use the capital in three ways: expanding platform functionality, creating new products, and developing new international capabilities. A week before, Checkr invested in Argyle, which provides an interface to connect with any workforce platform.

Beekeeper finished out its Series B with $45 M in funding. The Switzerland and U.S.-based startup provides a mobile-first communications platform for employers that need to communicate with blue-collar and service-oriented workers, and intends to become the “Slack for non-desk employees.”

São Paulo-based Revelo closed $15 M in Series B, the largest to-date raised by an HR Tech startup in Latin America and the first Series B round for that sector in Brazil. The company seeks to help knowledge workers find their jobs online while using machine learning to make it easier for employers to source and screen job seekers.

Plum brought in $4.2 M in seed funding. The SaaS company uses AI and I/O psychology to help organizations make predictive talent decisions, with solutions for both talent acquisition and talent management, ranging from campus recruitment to HiPo identification and everything in between.

Seeking to engineer the future of diversity and inclusion, Joonko Diversity secured a $2.4 M seed round to scale its marketing and customer acquisition efforts. The company’s products work to make intentional improvements toward increased D&I throughout the recruiting and hiring process.

Upcoming Events & Conferences

More Recent Highlights:

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

 

The Reach Chrome Extension Review

 

Save time and effort making lead connections with the Reach

 

Search Authority Dean Da Costa takes us through an inside look at the Reach, a Chrome extension tool for locating email addresses for your leads within LinkedIn. Click top open the extension when viewing a LinkedIn profile, and it will automatically fill in your search criteria without the need to copy and paste. You can also manually search by name. Prior searches are saved automatically, and you can export your searches to a list, copy the email address, or send an email right from within the tool.

You can take it a step further, and verify these email addresses within their verify tool. The verification process supports work email addresses only for now, but it will check the mail server for status, format and email type. This will decrease your bounce rate significantly when sending out to your lists.

The Bulk feature allows you to find or verify emails in bulk by uploading right into the tool. Handy if you’re verifying a lot at once, there’s no need to go through the steps one by one.

The final feature is the List feature, where you can add leads you have found and verified. The contact name, status, and company are displayed, along with a link to the LinkedIn profile.

We’d like to see these features open to more email address types, as professional domains are only supported at this time. This will be the tool to use once you’ve already found all the personal email addresses you can, and will come in handy to complete your list. We enjoy the ability to create quick, simple lists.

Overall, the Reach is a nice, interesting little tool. It’s compact and easy to use.

~ Noel Cocca

Look inside with Dean Da Costa:

How Are Companies Reinventing Job Descriptions?

Job Descriptions

 

“boilerplate job descriptions won’t cut it in today’s market”

When creating a job posting, do you simply copy and paste from one template to another, or do you take time to creatively market the role you’re looking to fill? If you’re the former, it is time to rethink your strategy. Retaining top talent is a growing challenge, and companies are looking at new ways to build buzz and attract candidates. More creative, conversational, and unconventional job descriptions yield better quality candidates and higher success in filling open requisitions. So when it comes to the traditional job description, what’s changing?

Transparency

Transparency comes in many different forms. For starters, companies are becoming more open about listing the salary directly on the job advertisement. Doing this creates a balance between employers and candidates, alleviating stress about the dreaded salary conversation. While employers might lose out on a negotiation advantage by doing this, they also avoid wasting a candidate’s time who might be applying for a job that’s below their salary level.

Companies are getting more clear and transparent in how they write about the realities of the day job. For example, they might include the size of budgets they’ll be working with, who they’ll be reporting to, and the types of projects they will be working on. Some even include the challenges and pain points too.

Job descriptions as a marketing piece

The classic boilerplate job description is no longer enough. Instead, employers need to step up their marketing game and consider their job descriptions as a piece of marketing content. It should be branded, catchy, and captivating enough to make someone want to jump ship from one company to another.

For example, Monster has found a new way to engage with talent by creating an app that allows people to include videos directly on their job descriptions! Skill Scout is also helping companies tell their story with their platform that enables organizations to make DIY videos to be used on job descriptions. These companies are tapping into human nature, as job descriptions with a video ad are viewed 46% more than written ones, and job posts get 36% more applications when accompanied by a video.

Another company, Basecamp, created a unique job description in the form of a letter from its CEO.

Get different teams involved with the job description process, as this function no longer needs to live in the hands of the HR team, says Marina Byezhanova, founder of Pronexia.

Byezhanova says that when writing your description, to first think about your hook, and what would make someone want to work for you over anywhere else.

If you think that marketing is someone else’s job, think again!

Focus on what you offer versus what you need

“what’s in it for them”

Byezhanova explains that she sees a growing trend with companies focusing their ads on what they offer, rather than what they need. She says that “The market has shifted. Companies are treating jobs like marketing and sales pieces”. When writing out job descriptions, she encourages clients to shift their focus from “here is what I need” to “here is what’s in it for you.”  If you start working with that in mind, it changes the tone and structure of the description. When writing your ad, make sure the “what’s in it for them” is longer than the list of requirements. Ensure that your list of requirements is reasonable and meaningful, rather than the generic laundry list that most companies default on.

It’s also becoming more relevant to highlight and clearly identify your company culture, provide a strong Equal Employment Opportunity statement, and share information about your values. One candidate reported she accepted one job over another because the posting not only had the company mission statement listed, but the team had listed and explained their unique team mission and vision statement right on the job listing.

Ditching the laundry list of items

“cut the generic stuff out, be critical, and ask yourself what is really necessary.”

When listing out your requirements, put everything down on paper, and shave it down to the most impactful competencies and experiences. Marina challenges the typical description and says to “cut the generic stuff out, be critical, and ask yourself what is really necessary.”

Consider your top 4-5 list of competencies, your top 4-5 required experiences, and commit to those. While you might be tempted to add lines like “detail-oriented “or “ability to adapt to change,” consider that generic points like that don’t really differentiate candidates, or deliver any real impact to your message.

The boilerplate job descriptions won’t cut it in today’s market, and companies need to think more dynamically about the way they interact and engage with their talent pipeline. Let them know what’s really in store for them and don’t be afraid to let your true colors shine through!

 

Resources:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/should-companies-have-to-post-salary-ranges-on-job-listings-1.4419534

http://hrexecutive.com/job-descriptions-include-pay-data/

https://www.hiringpeople.co.uk/blog/job-descriptions/

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/news/employers-are-reinventing-job-ads-4426235/

 

Recruitment Ops: Making it Work for Your Organization

 

Recruiting Operations

Strategy to Execution

As a discipline, operations is concerned with planning, organizations and supervising the production and delivery of an organization’s products and services. A major function of everyday management, quality operations ensures that a business runs efficiently and effectively. 

Taking this mindset and applying it to recruitment makes for a strong, measurable competitive advantage – when executed properly. That last point is crucial because while many recruiting teams have amazing strategies, in theory, a general failure to execute hinders their success. Overcoming this challenge requires going back to basics with logistics and operations to realize and unlock their potential more fully. But achieving this is easier said than done. 

Operations Management 101 

In most cases, inefficiencies happen when recruiting teams grow, and new processes take hold. Here, previously aligned efforts become disparate, and the whole talent acquisition lifecycle becomes every recruiter for themselves, instead of working together. It’s bound to happen and isn’t any one person’s fault per se, but rather the nature of expansion. However, being people who hire people for a living, we should, ideally, know what growth means to our practice. 

If and when this occurs, you have a few options. The organization could bring in someone who specializes in recruitment operations to take hold of the situation and re-map the processes. Or, in a case where this isn’t an option, it can take on the task itself and manage the undertaking from start to finish. Yes, this may sound like a project management issue, but really, recruitment should be under the auspices of full-on operations. It’s never a one and done situation, requiring long-term, repetitive output, which is the very definition of operations management. 

We know this because of today’s job market, wherein some 51 percent of recruiters are recruiting all year, even for jobs that aren’t even vacant yet. And while this may not be the new normal forever, it is for the foreseeable future, prompting the need for a more operational approach. 

Coordinating Coordination 

Of course, implementing recruitment operations where it did not previously exist requires more than merely bringing in outside help or re-evaluating what’s happening internally. It’s a journey, one that necessities dedicated time and resources, as well as coordination on the part of your recruitment stakeholders (including leadership!). Because by getting everyone involved, you’re able to solicit feedback across teams and departments at the outset. 

From there, you have to dig into what’s happening at each stage of the recruiting process and determine where you’re losing efficiency. Whether that’s a lack of time to source or unpredictable hiring managers asking to see additional candidates even after a few rounds of interviews, identify when and where information gets lost or delayed, as well as where recruiters are duplicating the same work. It’s happening somewhere (otherwise you wouldn’t be running through this) and you need to pinpoint every issue and address each impact on cost, quality and speed of hiring. The data is there, and this is your opportunity to leverage it beyond basic reporting. 

Once you have the numbers, go over the results collectively to redefine workflows and requirements to match your recruiting team to the process. There’s no benefit to having senior recruiters processing applicants, provided the work is getting done along the way. 

Agreeing to Agree 

Having completed the assessment phase, it’s time to implement recruitment operations as an ongoing initiative. You’re seeking to realize the strategy and innovation that fell to the wayside, by setting achievable goals based on your top priorities at this moment, striving to be increasingly agile as needs change in the future. That’s a lot to take on, against your team’s no doubt hefty workload. So to achieve this, you’re going to have to contract with stakeholders and leadership again and apprise them of what your recruitment operations approach looks like going forward. 

There will likely be additional negotiations and adjustments that take place, factoring in costs and budgets, changing technologies and your organization’s goals. But with any luck and a whole lot of patience, this will shore up those processes that were falling through the cracks before, and help build alignment and agreement between recruiters and hiring managers. And at the very least, will set a new precedent for what recruiting intends to do, as a newly oiled operational machine. 

Until recently, recruitment operations functioned as a vaguely nebulous resource that may or may not apply to individual use cases. However, as we approach the future of work and recruiting takes on more considerable responsibility for the viability and success of the organization, we’re going to look to recruitment operations to shine a light on our capabilities and help guide the way. Whether you choose to find a well-established professional or home grow your methodology, recruitment operations bring structure and rigor back into the process when it’s needed most, and that spells the difference between ineffective versus effective outcomes.  

Editor note: Want to learn more?  Check out our library of webinars at RecruitingWebinars.

Access a hidden “expert mode” in Prophet 2 Plus!

Prophet II with the “extra special” Konami expert mode

 

HiringSolved released Prophet II and Prophet Pro July 2019, with some pretty amazing new updates to their search. Prophet II now utilizes a powerful AI-powered search interface, enabling searches across millions of open web profiles. Use it to search and identify qualified leads by skillset, location, job titles, previous employers, and more. Search for leads across social profiles like About.me, Facebook, Behance, Reddit, GitHub, StackExchange, even Tumblr, and Instagram. Easily export your results to utilize in any system. Pretty cool, right?

What you may not already know is that this incredibly useful tool contains a hidden expert mode. Cheat code time!

Old school gamers that remember Contra will know this code already. It’s called the Konami Code, and using it within Prophet II has a surprising result. It unlocks an “Expert” search function that enables the use of boolean searches. If you’re not familiar with it, here’s how it works.

Open Prophet II, and using your keyboard, type this key combination: Arrow Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A.

You’ve now unlocked Expert Mode! The color scheme will go dark and you will now see an additional tab for Expert search. You can still use the regular Smart searches, but the boolean search will get you even better results! Use the expert mode hints for formatting tips or create your own. Your search results come from all over the web and the best part is that this is outside of the LinkedIn network that you’ve probably already exhausted. From here, find email addresses for your lead results, save into folders, download folders, whatever you want.

That cheat code used to guarantee you a victory, and used within Prophet II, it guarantees access to a whole lot of people! We really like this tool, and it’s always great to find recruiting tools that aren’t LinkedIn reliant. Plus, with 100 free contacts per month, you really can’t go wrong. Depending on your reply rates, you could easily turn those into at least one hire per month, maybe even two!

Look inside with Dean Da Costa:

Three Ways Programmatic Media Powers Your Recruitment Marketing Strategy

Some things can be left to chance. Your recruitment marketing strategy isn’t one of them.

It’s important to have a plan — specifically an agile, strategic, omnichannel talent marketing plan, leveraging programmatic media — that streamlines and simplifies your efforts while effectively allocating your budget to high-performing tactics.

At its core, strategic media planning helps drive candidates into the funnel — including candidates that aren’t ready to make an immediate decision and need nurturing over time.

Behind that sound strategy? Technology. Definitely technology.

Programmatic marketing uses analytics and machine learning to serve ads to your target audiences. It also optimizes the ad buying process automatically and in real-time which leads to high-cost efficiency and requires minimum manual tweaks and monitoring.

This technology helps you target the right people in the right way, at the right time. It empowers you with relevant data that can be applied to your career website experience. It also lends a laser focus when remarketing to right-fit talent, including in niche markets.

Remember that not only does media empower you to access passive leads — it also complements and supports your outbound efforts, provided your audience is familiar with, and receptive to, your employer brand.

1. Programmatic media helps you be agile

Every brand is different and therefore requires a custom approach and the ability to pivot in response to changing business needs  — whether that is on a yearly, quarterly, or even daily basis.

You may need to dial up or down aspects of your plan at different times of the year, and you may need to adjust your strategy on the fly. When that strategy is backed by nimble programmatic technology, you can effortlessly, successfully pivot your approach.

 

2. Programmatic media helps get the word out

Say, for example, there aren’t enough candidates for a job or there’s a limited talent pool for the jobs you’re trying to fill. Maybe you’re experiencing high volume hiring needs or have experienced an influx of quick quits. You may even need quality hires for a specialty skill set.

As long as your foundation is a solidified, compelling employer brand — and the technology to convey it — you can get your message out. You can let your target job-seekers know they should work for you — and express why. Technology puts your brand message work — in the right places, at the right time, and in the right way.

 

3. Programmatic media helps you chart successes — and failures

Technology lets you track what you’re spending on media and know-how successful it is. Then, it automatically optimizes your campaigns based on performance and goals in real-time.

Without the power of analytics, you’re unable to track your spend, and you can’t identify whether or not it makes sense. That leads to end-of-year chaos; a lack of budget for necessary efforts; and the failure to adequately attract, engage, and nurture the talent you need.

Fortunately, there’s no reason to run around like your head is on fire. You can calmly, methodically tackle your media strategy with great results. You can bring talent into your experience, nurture them through to hire, and free up recruiters to build relationships one-on-one.

Since recruiters are not marketers and shouldn’t be expected to be, it’s time to let a tech-powered media strategy do the heavy lifting. Let it adjust your spend as the market and circumstances dictate. And let it nurture quality candidates so you can focus on tasks at hand.

 

The End of Manual Sourcing

A Case for Automation

Most machines start with the parts before the whole ever comes together. The builder has to scrutinize how each part will fit together and make sure each piece will fit perfectly so it’s able to flawlessly perform its function. In the world of recruiting the end goal is to add highly scrutinized parts (new hires) to an organization and fill in any talent gaps that are inhibiting the machine from running at its maximum potential. Hiring great talent begins with finding great talent. There are many strategies out there but the most common is to post a job and wait for the resumes to come in. If a recruiter isn’t relying on inbound leads the next step is to begin scouring networks for passive talent before the screening process can begin.

There are a multitude of job boards and professional social media and portfolio sites where that needle-in-a-haystack candidate could be hiding. Many recruiting teams will admit that the time spent searching for candidates and sifting through resumes is the biggest contributor to slowing down the hiring process.

Why Are Recruiters Burned Out?

Many recruiting teams rely on inbound traffic, which means posting jobs and sifting through a mountain of resumes. Recruiters who are tasked with a tedious outbound discovery process spend their time in an endless google search and sending mass amounts of InMail instead of connecting with talent.

 Recruiters can spend up to 60% of their day finding talent and less than 20% doing what they love, which is interacting with candidates.

Estimation based on Fetcher data

Time is Money

Sourcing manually not only siphons valuable time each day, but it can also be extremely costly. When a position remains open for more than the standard 23–36 days, companies miss out on the valuable contribution that role provides. Not only are requisitions open longer when sourcing is done manually, but hiring teams also run the risk of regretting a hiring decision that was made under duress. Not hiring the “right” person for the job affects retention rates and will likely bring the recruiter right back to the beginning of this vicious cycle and that much closer to burnout. In the world of manual sourcing, everyone in the organization loses and the negative impact on incredibly valuable recruiters is monumental.

 It’s Time to Automate — Work Smarter, Not Harder.

Automating the most tedious tasks, sourcing and outreach, has the potential to reduce turnover rates by 59%. In addition to building a committed workforce, what if automating top of funnel efforts could make a recruiter’s day look like this?

Estimation based on Fetcher data

By automating candidate research and outreach recruiters are able to streamline their process and swap sourcing candidates with talking to candidates.

 Tech Should Work For You

Technology should be the fuel additive that makes the hiring machine run better and faster. Companies are constantly competing for talent and small but mighty teams are often competing with the FAANG giants. These large companies typically have an army of recruiters at their disposal and the capital to pay exorbitant agency fees. When a smaller company can’t compete with salary and perks they are able to automate candidate sourcing and outreach to gain an edge. This also enables recruiters to give candidates a much more personalized experience they are sure to remember.

Many candidates are looking for jobs they can be excited about while working with people who inspire them. Personal and meaningful interactions with a recruiter can make all the difference in the world, but, there is no way recruiters can focus on the candidate experience if their bandwidth is spent before they ever speak to a candidate. Every touchpoint suffers as a result.

Automated candidate sourcing reduces bias and builds more diverse teams

We’ve all heard about unconscious bias but most teams and technology have a long way to go before bias in the hiring process is eradicated. Recruiting teams can begin by vetting the tools they use and stay away from the fully automated tools that claim the tech alone can solve a lack of diversity in the workplace. Even a diverse pipeline is subject to bias once the resume reaches the recruiting team but there are steps we can take to combat bias from the starting block. Using a tool to automate candidate sourcing combined with a trained human in the loop to make up for what tech and AI lack is the best way to pinpoint non-obvious candidates.

Pipeline Automation is Just the Beginning

Spammy and impersonal InMail and email outreach will turn potential new hires off

The need to fill open roles quickly often results in templates that feel spammy and are likely to end up in the trash. While it feels good to be noticed by a recruiter, candidates can tell a lot about an organization by how recruiters reach out to them. As a sidecar to automating candidate search and discovery, an automated outreach strategy can also help recruiters reclaim hours in their day.

 How much time you can save? A lot!

Estimation based on Fetcher data

Recruiters who spend less time sourcing are happier. Happier recruiters create more impactful interactions with the amazing candidates in their pipeline. A great candidate experience secures great talent which results in teams that are more productive and committed to the companies they work for. In the end, productive and loyal team members ensure company goals are met which contributes to a healthy bottom line. Everyone wins when inefficiencies are removed and each stage of the hiring process is supported to optimally perform.

Hiring great talent is critical to the success of any organization. If antiquated processes that are proven to do more harm than good aren’t removed, recruiters will continue to be frustrated and the efficiency of hiring manager’s teams will suffer. Automating candidate search and outreach should not be viewed as disruptive deviations from the familiar but seen as additive tools that improve inefficiencies. It’s time to supercharge the recruiting process. It’s time to automate.