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LeadCandy Recruiting Tool

 

Build targeted prospect lists and unlock common connections with LeadCandy.io

LeadCandy.io is an interesting tool that will allow users to search people by title matches and locations within the LinkedIn network. You can also locate email addresses by name, get company profile information, and verify emails. You can download the provided contact information into a spreadsheet.

The tool can be a little clunky, as it does not always find the email addresses that should be intuitive, we thought it was interesting that some of our tests did not produce the expected results. They offer a 95% email accuracy guarantee, and their network contains over 300 million professionals, with another 100,000 added daily. There are also options to pool your networks with other users to unlock common connections. Curated lead lists are also available for purchase.

If you can’t buy LinkedIn Recruiter, this could be a good tool to start with instead. There is a free trial available, offering 5 free credits. Each credit is used toward a verified email lookup or their Data Enhancement feature.

~ Noel Cocca

Look inside with Dean Da Costa:

 

SmartPDF Chrome Extension Review

 

Convert almost any document to/from PDF format for free with Smart PDF

SmartPDF is a Chrome Extension designed to convert documents from and into PDF format and is the #1 free PDF converter tool extension available.  Ever need to help someone update a resume or edit a contract?  Yeah, us too.

This tool offers quick and easy access to convert your files back and forth between PDF format right in your Chrome browser. It works anywhere and is incredibly simple to use.

The capabilities for converting to/from PDF include the following formats:

  • Word
  • Excel
  • Powerpoint
  • Image formats JPEG/PNG

To use the extension, click the extension button within your browser and choose your desired format. This will open a URL in a new tab where you upload the file, click convert, and it’s done. Quick, simple, easy peasy!

SmartPDF will save you time, effort, and is free for all to use. This tool is a great resource for anyone that works with PDF documents.

~ Noel Cocca

Look inside with Dean Da Costa:

Talent Acquisition Movers & Shakers Sept. Part 1

Talent Acquisition News

 

Feels like Labor Day was yesterday and yet, here we are halfway through the month already. As predicted at the end of August, we’re starting to see another uptick in announcements as many companies get ready for the fall conference season, with several international players entering into the mix. And we’re not talking just talent acquisition either, with news coming from ends of the HR technology space these days. Here’s what we’re tracking: 

Lots of new research for starters – some good, some unsettling. Let’s start with the latter. According to a new study coming out in the journal Organizational Dynamics, men are struggling in the wake of the #MeToo movement, particularly when it comes to interacting with female colleagues. The report shows 27 percent of men avoid meeting one-on-one with female coworkers, while 21 percent said they would be reluctant to hire women for a job involving close interaction like business travel. These numbers are up over 2018. 

At the same time, the Washington Post published a piece indicating that there’s a surge of minority women entering the U.S. workforce. The uptick helped flip the switch on historic hiring trends, with most new hires of prime working age (25 to 54) being people of color. It sounds like the call for increased diversity might be starting to take hold. 

Vendors got in on the action too. Data and analytics firm Qlik revealed that enterprise organizations value practical data skills over formal degrees, citing the ability to upskill employees as needed. Says the research, some 59 percent of global enterprises rank prior experience or a case study interview as the top indicator of a candidate’s data literacy. Only 18 percent see a relevant degree as the most important factor in hiring. 

Meanwhile, the folks from Kronos and Future Workplace, operating as The Workforce Institute shared findings on the “Global State of Managers.” This research includes a manager report card, calling out generational differences, a global breakdown, and some overall thoughts about the effectiveness of bosses. Notably seven out of 10 people think they can do their boss’s job better. 

Continuing to pull on the generational thread, performance management solution 15Five released “The Next Generation Workplace,” looking people management, work-life balance and changing employee expectations. This research found that 48 percent of employees believe they could do a better job than their manager and that a lack of confidence in their boss inspires 20 percent of employees to leave within six months. 

Capital Investments, Mergers, & Acquisitions

The people and culture platform, CultureAmp raised $82 Million in Series E funding, which it intends to put towards ongoing global expansion and product development. The company acknowledges the timing of its success sharing, “We’re living in a world where more people than ever are starting to understand and embrace the importance of people and culture at work.”  

Across the pond, graduate recruitment and career guidance platform, JobTeaser announced $55 M (£45 M) in Series C funds. JobTeaser shares that funding will go toward expanding the company’s career service and partner network of schools and universities across the U.K. and Ireland. 

On-demand talent platform, Stoke, out of Tel Aviv, pulled in $4.5 M for its seed round. The company aims to solve for the everyday challenges of hiring freelance talent, creating a unified interface that integrates with popular online marketplaces while providing the tools to onboard and manage other external talent populations. 

HCM technology giant Ceridian announced its intention to acquire RITEQ, an Australian provider of enterprise workforce management solutions. RITEQ currently operates in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, New Zealand and the U.K. This is Ceridian’s second move down under in 2019, launching its Dayforce Payroll solution to the Australian market back in April. 

Upcoming Events & Conferences

Other recent highlights:

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

If Soft Skills Are So Critical

Soft Skills Assessment

 

Every year, LinkedIn does an annual ‘Global Talent Trends Report’ that is widely read across the industry. The biggest talent acquisition problem that the 2019 report published earlier this year calls out is one that the industry has known for years – soft skills assessment. 92% of the polled 10000 recruiters say they matter as much or more than hard skills, but only 41% even claim to have a proper methodology in place to assess soft skills. 

As LinkedIn puts it:

“This growing disconnect between the demand for soft skills and the inability to identify them is reaching a tipping point.”

The big questions that arises is: if psychometric assessments have been mainstream for at least 50 years and behavioral interviews are the norm, then why do we have this glaring gap?

Three words. Cost. Experience. Trust.

Psychometric assessments are expensive, the ones that actually work cost anywhere between $50 -$1500 per assessment. The company that gets 50000 applications per year will now have to spend $2.5 million if it wanted to assess every incoming candidate. There is just no practical way for many to consider the option. Behavioral interviews have no direct cost, but the sheer number of hours that they require make them an impossibility at scale.

Also, traditional psychometric assessments are long. The ones that actually work usually take 60-90 minutes. It is one thing for a candidate to be asked to take a test when she has gone through multiple rounds and is in the final shortlist. It is an entirely different thing if a candidate is asked to take a similar test right at the start of the process when she has a very small probability of even making it past the initial screening. Organizations are reluctant to do anything that can impact the candidate experience negatively. 

Combined with the impractical costs of such an exercise, soft skill assessment at scale becomes a non-starter. Just as Linkedin has called it out in its report. 

Gamified assessments are a step in the right direction as they reduce the assessment time to 15-30 minutes (or sometimes less) while also ensuring that gamification enables a positive candidate experience. They have started to see some success, especially for campus or junior roles hiring where the candidate is open to playing a game right at the beginning of the process. 

However, for managerial and other senior roles, organizations have concerns with asking senior candidates to play lightweight games and that rules out such assessments as a viable option for such roles. Gamified assessments have also lacked behind on building scientific validation with the I/O psychology community for their methodology, further making it hard for organizations to build an acceptable level of trust and adopt them universally.

Video assessments also face almost an identical set of challenges.

The other option that organizations are actively beginning to consider is the one that Josh Bersin and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic have referred to as ‘candidate data mining’ in their MIT Sloan Management Review article aptly titled ‘Three new ways to gauge talent and potential’.

It would be better described as instant assessment or perhaps as zero-effort assessment. 

The instant assessment providers rely on recycling existing data like what is there in the resume, her Linkedin profile or any other information already provided by the candidate. 

The implication of this technology is that it does not require the candidate to take a test at all, which, as a concept, is revolutionary for the talent acquisition community. There also seems to be a higher focus on proving scientific validity – IBM Watson has voluntarily shared some of its studies and it has also been taken up for studies by the I/O Psychology community, with positive results. However, instant assessments need to make sure that they are addressing questions around privacy and bias and sharing enough details about their technology so that it does not become blackbox AI for its potential users.

It is quite possible that a potential solution to the biggest talent assessment problem might include a combination of all three approaches – gamified assessment for campus and another junior hiring; instant assessment for large scale hiring for all managerial and leadership roles; and traditional psychometric assessment for re-validation and role-specific assessment for a select few critical roles.

One thing that is certain is that winds of change are on the horizon and we might finally be entering the endgame stage for the biggest problem facing talent acquisition.

 

Linkedin Loses – But Who Wins?  

On Monday, September 9, Microsoft’s LinkedIn lost in federal appeals court. The ruling announced that afternoon, rejected the company’s attempt to stop hiQ Labs from leveraging data from publicly available member profiles. This move marks what’s sure to be the next phase in an already drawn-out legal battle between LinkedIn and the San Francisco-based hiQ.

The bad blood started years ago at this point, with Monday’s news from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholding an August 2017 decision. Back then, the courts ordered LinkedIn to stop blocking hiQ, a talent management algorithm that analyzes workforce data scraped from the professional networking site. LinkedIn doesn’t like this and tried just about everything it could think of to get hiQ to stop: sending a cease-and-desist letter and installing technical blocks before suing and then dragging out the matter.

Asked about this week’s John Sumser, principal analyst at HR Examiner, commented, “The sad part about this case is that it was a bullying tactic designed to limit hiQ’s market effectiveness. Years of courtroom time drained the company of resources. There should be a real celebration for their victory, but it isn’t the end. My bet is that this will be a Supreme Court case. That will take more time and resources.”

This echoes LinkedIn’s official statement from Monday, which indicates that the company is disappointed in the outcome and exploring additional appeals options, going so far as to claim it will “continue to fight to protect our members and the information they entrust.”

The irony of this being that Sumser pointed to a 2014 article on virtually the same topic, by attorney Heather Bussing. In it, Bussing said, “The real problem is that Linkedin is mad that someone copied information from its site. Linkedin claims its priority is “Member’s First,” and that it’s just protecting its members’ information. Nobody joined Linkedin to keep their information private. Not ever. Linkedin is all about finding people and being found.”

That’s what the judges thought too, ruling 3-0 against LinkedIn, with Reuters citing the following sentiment from Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon:

“LinkedIn has no protected property interest in the data contributed by its users, as the users retain ownership over their profiles,” Berzon wrote. “And as to the publicly available profiles, the users quite evidently intend them to be accessed by others,” including prospective employers.

She also said giving companies such as LinkedIn “free rein” over who can use public user data risked creating “information monopolies” that harm the public interest.

And while there’s no doubt that most LinkedIn users build out profiles for professional purposes, expecting others to connect with them. The decision, in this case, puts data scraping at the forefront of a larger debate about the “open internet” and net neutrality.

Bussing explained, “Member information does not belong to LinkedIn. Under LinkedIn’s own terms and conditions, the content that a member puts on LinkedIn belongs to the member…But LinkedIn does not own the information or even have exclusive rights to control the information on its site. Legally, no one owns facts about people such as their names, contact information, and work history. Facts are in the public domain.”

So LinkedIn’s argument was that hiQ violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, by scraping public information without their knowledge. This isn’t the first time LinkedIn pointed to CFAA, but the three-judge panel quickly found the company’s take bunk, because of the simple fact that the law was enacted in 1986, meaning “None of the computers to which the CFAA initially applied were accessible to the general public.

Affirmative authorization of some kind was presumptively required.” LinkedIn tried angle after angle, even saying it could revoke authorization using that cease-and-desist mentioned above, but that didn’t fly either.

Sumser continued, “Microsoft should be ashamed of itself for allowing this sort of nonsense go on. The company is making some interesting efforts to expand its presence in HR technology. These brutish tactics simply don’t serve them well.”

But beyond the overall headache, this caused, there’s another critical component to this case and one that’s likely to impact those in HR technology, particularly in the startup category. Both courts, trial, and appeals banned LinkedIn from interfering with hiQ during the litigation process. That means that for the foreseeable future hiQ will stay open for business, able to use public profile information to uphold its client contracts, even if it faces another appeal. But taking on LinkedIn and in turn, Microsoft, is no easy feat and though hiQ won rounds one and two, who wins the war remains to be seen. This case is a cautionary tale for a space that runs on innovation, with countless others out there employing data scraping to fuel their technologies, for now.

TA Tech Selection: What to Know and What to Ask 

 

Talent Tech Selection

 

When it comes to buying new technologies, there is any number of questions you need to ask. When it comes to buying a new talent acquisition technology, the list grows even longer. You have people considerations, process factors and likely some existing product to contend with – and that’s before you even start to think about pricing. But fear not, there’s a simple way of going about the selection that will keep you calm and ensure the right results. Here’s how to get going: 

1. Get organized

– First things first. You need to define your goal. Like really define it. Sure you might think you need a new ATS but why? What’s the problem with your existing solution? What are you trying to solve? Without this level of insight, you risk ending up with a technology that’s no better than what you have currently. So put pen to paper and describe your objective, along with what you’re hoping to achieve post-implementation. It always helps to have a project plan to refer back to in the weeks and months to come.  

2. Differentiating features

– Many vendors inside the space tout the same functions to the point that some even use the same language as their competitors. Frustrating but true, this is made even more challenging by slick websites with little to no substantive content. As you start to sit through demos and talk with reps, keep an eye out for what’s actually different, how and why. Dig deep into the product, find out how it’s built and what’s on the roadmap. Going under the hood will help you identify who is legit and who is just talking the talk. 

3. Ease of use

– There are more than a few clunky products on the market, especially when it comes to a few massive platforms. Even with ongoing updates, ease of use remains a huge factor for both recruiters and their candidates. No job seeker wants to parse their resume in after being asked to connect their LinkedIn profile. That’s madness. Take your top picks for a test drive and see how it feels to use the technology as a recruiter, hiring manager, and candidate. Don’t forget to learn about integrations too. You want a full 360-degree view before making any decisions. 

4. Safety and security

– In the age of GDPR and data privacy laws, this one is a must. You already know the type of information you’re collecting, but how is the vendor going to store it? What kind of encryption do they use? What’s their backup or contingency plan in case of an outage? How do they dispose of data? Cybersecurity is no laughing matter, especially when you’re the receiving end of a breach. And after seeing the damage done by recent attacks, you need to be better safe than sorry – especially when it comes to applications and employment files. 

5. Defining success

– What does hiring success mean to the vendor and their existing customers? They’re probably playing up some advanced data and analytics, but what does that mean for your needs? You need concrete details about the product is really going to do once it’s in place, and how you’ll be able to track that progress. We’re talking clear, consistent reports that supplement your efforts without adding any more to your plate. Let the solution do the analysis, while you tackle the more strategic work. 

6. Look beyond

– From start to finish, you need a vendor who will partner with you and provide the tools, resources and help needed to get you up and running. Implementations are never easy, and chances are you’ll encounter an issue or two along the way. As you review technologies, make sure to learn about the vendor’s ability to tailor and customize the product, as well as the accessibility of their support team, training options, potential use cases and any available client testimonials (if not, find practitioners who use them). You need to dig into the details and take a meta-view at the same time. 

Selecting talent acquisition technology is about what’s in it for you and your organization. By putting your needs first, above all else, you’re setting the stage and letting solution providers know where you stand. Don’t kowtow to the sales pitch. You already know what’s coming. Go in prepared to discuss the nitty-gritty, with a list of questions, ranked and filed according to priority. Tech innovation is moving at a rapid pace, but whatever you choose, will likely stay with you for the foreseeable future. Use those recruiting skills to recruit the right technology and left no ask to go unanswered.

The underused metric that can help you improve the ROI of your recruitment activities

Recruiting Silver Medalists

 

Despite the high cost associated with recruitment, too often hiring decisions are made on gut feel. Top organizations are leading the way by leveraging data and metrics to improve ROI, optimize the recruiting process and improve the candidate experience.

We’ve all heard about time to hire, cost to hire and quality of hire – but these don’t always offer the insights we need to make informed insight-driven decisions. The challenge for many organizations is drilling into recruitment data to determine not just what’s happening, but why it’s happening.

According to recent PageUp research, there are five recruitment metrics all organizations should be tracking, but which many aren’t using. One of these is the candidate to hire rate: a commonly-overlooked metric that tells an important story about the effectiveness of your recruiting practices.

What is “candidates to hire” rate?

The candidates to hire rate refers to the percentage of job candidates who successfully land a role. In this context, ‘candidates’ refers to everyone who matches the role requirements and has the experience, skills, and behaviors that indicate they may be a good fit for the organization. This is different from the applicant to hire rate, which includes everyone who has applied for a role, regardless of whether or not they meet the role requirements.

Out of a typical pool of candidates, an average of 9% successfully land the job, according to PageUp research. While these figures vary from industry to industry, on average out of 100 candidates, only nine are hired – and 91 are unsuccessful.

What does this mean?

Low candidates to hire rate can cost an organization hundreds of thousands of dollars in recruitment fees. When the candidate to hire rates are low, it means an organization is taking a high volume of unsuccessful candidates through the recruitment process. This can be extremely time and labor-intensive for organizations and can raise the cost of recruitment significantly.

A low candidate to hire rate can also do considerable damage to employer brand – maintaining a high-touch approach and adequate candidate care is difficult across large cohorts. Candidates now expect a consumer-grade recruitment experience, and it’s becoming common for jobseekers to rate companies based on their hiring processes on websites such as Glassdoor. A candidate’s negative recruitment experience can be easily shared online and found by a prospective applicant – who will likely choose to apply elsewhere.

This presents an opportunity for forward-thinking HR professionals to gain a leg up on the competition. Every aspect of your recruitment – from your careers site branding to mobile functionality and candidate communications – should showcase what makes your organization a great place to work. When your recruitment process is an extension of your employer brand, you can enhance the image of your organization, showcase your culture and attract top talent.

Engaging ‘silver medallists’ to optimize your processes

To address a low candidate to hire rate, you need to start at the beginning. Robust screening processes that identify highly suitable candidates from the outset can cut downtime and cost to hire and maintain hiring manager engagement.

It’s also a necessity to cultivate a strong pool of talent to leverage when needed. Talent pools provide a valuable source of qualified candidates, but PageUp research shows that only 42% of organizations have well-established pools equipped to meet the future needs of their company. Here’s where your ‘silver medallist’ candidates come into play. These are the people who got to the last stages of the recruitment process in the past – the candidates who were a great fit, but who just missed out on a role. Keep these candidates in talent pools where you can nurture and actively engage them. This will keep your organization top-of-mind and gives you an interested pool of star candidates when needed.

Knowing which recruitment metrics to track helps you identify the most effective ways to attract the best talent.  By tracking candidate to hire rate, you can optimize recruitment processes, improve ROI, and ensure your organization is attracting top talent with an engaging candidate experience.

 

 

Hitting Refresh: The Secret to Email Outreach Success

Email Outreach That Works RecruitingDaily

 

Gather round the campfire, kiddos, and let me tell you about a time, not too long ago, before email took over. A time when if you wanted to reach someone, you had four or five options: a phone call, a page, fax, snail mail or a good old fashioned, in-person drop by. That’s right; people used to arrive on your doorstep – sometimes unannounced! Oh, the horror of it all. Luckily, we advanced way beyond that primitive form of living to where we are today – inundated with email, text messages, DMs and an endless stream of data and notifications coming at us from all angles. It’s a lot, and recruiters deal with more of that than most, both sending and receiving.

On the flip side, where would recruiting be without email? It gives you a way to contact multiple candidates in a day, forge and maintain relationships and boost your productivity in general. It’s terrifying to imagine recruiting life without email. Still, because of its prevalence – that’s upwards of 269 billion emails sent every day – you have to make it work. So let’s get back to basics, shall we?

Know Your Goal

Sure, this one sounds like Business 101, but how often do we operate without a clear plan in place. Probably more than any of us are willing to admit. And that’s fine for the one-off, quickie response emails but not if you’re trying to woo passive candidates away from their potentially lucrative, possibly comfortable current positions. You need a strategy! Or at the very least an idea of what you’re hoping to accomplish. Maybe you’re looking for more opens,  or maybe you want a higher click-through rate. Whatever the case may be, define your goal and refer back to it throughout the process.

Go in Hot (Even When You’re Cold)

Ten years ago, all we used to talk about was subject lines, seeking to identify the ideal character count. That’s not the case anymore, especially since many email clients now support emojis. Honestly, it’s too tough to say that 15 carefully chosen characters will entice candidates more than a witty greeting and smiley face wearing sunglasses. It’s all contingent on the candidate you’re contacting. And while it’s impossible to know each one right off the bat, you should strive to make your opening feel personalized (at a minimum). {FirstName} isn’t always foolproof, folks.

Mobile Forever

Like email, mobile is here to stay. Seriously. Says HubSpot, 35 percent of “business professionals” check email on a mobile device and mobile opens account for 46 percent of ALL email opens. So yeah, about that formatting – you’re going to need to test your emails in every client under the sun to ensure everything displays accurately. Skip the heavy images and GIFs in favor of well-crafted copy that gets to the point – and quickly. Teeny tiny screens sometimes lead to lower attention spans since scrolling gets boring fast. Keep your messages short, sweet and mobile-optimized always.

Keep Up the Pace

Look, your first email might not get opened. Same with the second. Heck, even the third might go overlooked. The fact is, successful email outreach requires patience, persistence, and timing. In planning your messages, don’t forget to consider your cadence. Have each version drafted and ready to go before releasing that first email, so your follow-ups will deploy smoothly. Consult a calendar to ensure your schedule doesn’t overlap with any weekends or holidays, and always double-check the difference in time zones before hitting send.

Make it Actionable

Even though passive candidates may not react immediately, you need to give them the option. After the personalized greeting and meaningful body content, close with an action item – but make it easy. That might mean hit reply, set up a call (through a calendaring link), schedule an interview or even, disconnect. If they’re interested in what you have to say they’ll take the next step, if you’re wasting your time, give them the chance to let you know. Either way, outline the next step in the process and demonstrate your eagerness for their reply. Not in a “clearance sale, everything must go” sort of way, rather, in an “I’m sincerely interested in you and would like to further our conversation.”

One final thought: When it comes to email, you’ll hear plenty of people tell you to think like a marketer. Though that’s not entirely off base, it also helps to think about how you’d like to get recruited. Ask yourself what it would take someone to engage you over email – and look at your inbox from the outside in before sending emails from the inside out. And while no one wants to be the email equivalent of the unannounced guest, it comes with the territory, so make your visit a pleasant one.

Here is a Free Webinar on the topic coming up:  https://rdaily.co/emailmarketingwebinar

4 Way For Recruiters To Assess Soft Skills In Recent Grads

soft skills assessments

Recruiters Fail At Soft Skills Assessments for Recent Grads.  But it can be fixed…

Soft skills rank at the top of the list for in-demand, entry-level professional roles. Seven of the top eight career-readiness competencies defined by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) were soft skills. Despite this, employers find most recent college grads are lacking in the soft skills that help define career readiness. While colleges, in turn, get a bad rap for failing to understand the needs of employers, the reality is that many employers do a poor job articulating the real competencies they’re looking for, and use recruiting processes that don’t align with those needs. No matter where you point the blame, recruiters struggle to evaluate soft skills of recent graduates as much as the candidates struggle to demonstrate them.

Before I suggest some solutions, let’s unpack soft skills. First, referring to skills such as work ethic, teamwork, and critical thinking as “soft” devalues them. Instead, we should think of these competencies as “Core Skills.” Second, while it seems like new HR technology tools hit the market every week, we haven’t significantly changed hiring practices. Even with the use of AI, online portfolios, and video interviews, employers wind up limiting their candidate pools based on criteria not aligned with their needs, and spending massive time getting to know candidates only at superficial levels. So, it’s no surprise that employers struggle to assess these skills in a meaningful way to determine candidate potential.

Four Low-Risk, Straightforward Strategies for Assessing Soft Skills

Recruiting teams can start by evaluating Core Skills throughout their recruiting process. Many companies focus on processing entry-level applicants based on the “right” academic pedigree, GPA, and major, with the assumption that these individuals also will have the skills needed to be successful in the workplace. Unfortunately, determining candidates based only on these factors doesn’t predict success and ends up crippling diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, all while leaving an organization with new hires lacking in core competencies.

Below are low-risk ways to give recent graduates more opportunities to demonstrate soft skills throughout the recruiting process, so you can evaluate them before hiring.

 

  1. Incorporate Case Study Interviews and Assignments – Typically seen in the consulting and finance worlds, case studies can be utilized across industries to assess candidates’ knowledge and skills. With this approach, candidates are presented with an actual business challenge or scenario, and is given time to perform basic analysis and craft a solution. Depending on the role, you may: ask candidates questions about their thought process to evaluate critical thinking; ask how the solution may be implemented to assess the candidate’s understanding of teamwork and flexibility; or ask how a change in the business could affect their solution to evaluate adaptability. Such case studies offer insights beyond those of traditional interviews, but do require a significant additional time commitment.
  2. Work Directly with Hiring Managers – Most university recruiting processes keep candidates separate from hiring managers until the recruiting team deems a candidate ready for a face-to-face interview. However, many hiring managers are open to meeting with candidates sooner, provided they can make the time productive. Micro-internships – short-term, professional, paid roles often done remotely – are an effective tool that  hiring managers can leverage for immediate support on short-term tasks. And, they allow recruiters to secure real-time performance feedback on candidates prior to committing to internships, full-time roles, or even a day of interviews. Entry-level projects such as research, content creation, and data analysis help companies assess core competencies including attention to detail, flexibility, integrity, organization, and problem solving. Moreover, micro-internships remove background noise created by assumptions and biases, helping hiring managers focus instead on work output.
  3. Partner with Professional Associations – Many professional associations offer discounted student memberships that introduce entry-level talent to best practices, and offer meaningful experiences to build skills. Groups such as the American Marketing Association connect student members with professional members for paid, short-term projects in which students can demonstrate their skills. Such programs allow professionals to secure low-cost support while connecting directly with college students hoping to break into the industry. Whether or not the short-term project leads to an ongoing opportunity, employers benefit from knowing students had an opportunity to work with and learn directly from professionals.
  4. Engage Early Career Professionals – The new tools colleges and universities are implementing to help students engage with alumni also deliver an opportunity to get your early career professionals involved in the recruiting process. For example, when mentoring a student from her alma mater, your employee can assess skills such as intellectual curiosity, communication, and professionalism based upon these interactions. Non-profit organizations such as University Innovation Alliance collaborate with colleges and universities to support such engagement and help students hone Core Skills.

 

Regardless of your organization’s recruiting process, any of these solutions can be integrated easily and seamlessly as a compliment. Recruiters can use these tools immediately without disrupting existing systems, and with minimal investment. Furthermore, given the importance of soft skills and recognition that diversity is vital to having a breadth of competencies, the immediate and long-term positive impacts will be meaningful.

 

The Long Reel Ahead: What’s In Store for Video Interviewing

what is next in video interviewing

 

While the roots of video interviewing extend further back, it’s generally accepted that the practice began around the early 2000s with the rise of video teleconferencing. While this innovation took place outside of HR technology, inside the space vendors took note, recognizing video’s ability to revolutionize the traditional interviewing model.

Fast forward to 2019, and that revolution continues. See, as the development, implementation, and use of these interviews progressed so too did the technology powering these platforms. Recently, that’s led to an in-depth discussion about the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in video interviewing, and how advancements serve the process and support hiring outcomes. And while we’re only starting to see AI in action, there’s undoubtedly more invention to come over the next 18 to 24 months. Here’s what that next iteration of video interviewing might entail:

Diving into Decision Science

Let’s start with why Wepow joined forces with OutMatch and our thesis behind that move: the combination of decision sciences that’s been fostered through assessments working with video interviewing. We mentioned this back in January when announcing the acquisition, specifically emphasizing that together, we’ll focus on humanizing recruiting in new ways through the convergence of data and technology. Knowing that video interviewing excels at bringing engagement and efficiency into the hiring process, we’re now adding competency-based questions, evaluation forms tied to job profiles and other piece parts from assessments. In blending the two, we’ll be able to take interviewing a step further and help improve the validity of the hiring team’s efforts.

That’s happening right now, and we expect it to take hold in the immediate future as companies continue to adopt the approach. As a result, we see video interviewing becoming increasingly effective at helping organizations ask the right questions to get to know their candidates better.

Machine Learning in Experience

Machine learning, like AI and decision sciences, will also factor into the experience, helping find fit and connection. That doesn’t necessarily mean in terms of facial recognition or flying cars, but everyday applications that reinforce our understanding of candidates’ skills and abilities. We see some of this today, with machine learning working to uncover patterns and build predictive models based on successful interviews and performance data from the recruiting lifecycle. The more information collected, the more accurate machine learning becomes, enabling smarter, faster interviews and empowering the hiring team’s analysis.

Convenience aside, machine learning will play a significant role in fine-tuning video interviews going forward. Over the last few years, we’ve seen a push toward individualization and personalization across talent acquisition, and machine learning is set to expand that trend. As recruiters receive more profound insight into video interviews, particularly around how candidates interact with the technology and respond to certain questions, they’ll have the chance to refine the process and in turn, the experience.

Becoming a Candidate Resource

As we move a little bit farther out, there’s going to be a big sway when it comes to video interviewing helping candidates more. This might mean creating tools that teach candidates how to sell themselves during an interview or tell their story in a way that resonates with recruiters and hiring managers. Maybe candidates will have the ability to turn around and ask questions of the organization during the interview, so it’s not just the hiring team interviewing the candidate but vice versa.

There’s also the opportunity to develop more candidate-facing interviewing products, something that’s been tried before, though the technology is in a different place now. In this instance, candidates would actually drive the video interviewing process to some degree, putting themselves in front of more people. By taking ownership of the interview, candidates would get to know the organizations that are out there hiring in order to determine their fit.

Making It Happen

Video interviewing is exciting for many reasons, mainly because while the concept of the interview dates back in time, the technology is newer. As such, vendors, with input from recruiters and candidates, are continually shaping and directing where the future lies. And as our understanding of work changes, we’re opening up a wide range of possibilities. How far that goes remains anyone’s guess, though we’d like to think it’s limitless.

From where we stand today, video interviewing simplifies recruiting, offering features and functions that promote increased collaboration and understanding of candidates and hiring as a whole. With that in mind, tech innovation and invention will lead interviewing forward, provided we take into consideration what those involved are learning and experiencing. Some ideas will work out flawlessly; others will require refinement. Either way, the road is long, and video interviewing is well on its way.

 

16 Quotes & Words On Work For Labor Day

16 Quotes & Words on Work For Labor Day

 

Work.  Labor.  Talent Acquisition, Recruiting, Sourcing, Human Resources, and the related technologies are involved in a constant effort to improve, add value, and impact this one marriage in our lives.  Our work is the one thing that we sacrifice family, love, comfort, and our very precious time for year after year.  We participate sometimes regardless of the fruits and sometimes the peril.  The striving to improve work is and will always be of utmost importance as we spend more time in it than anywhere else in many of our lives.  It impacts our financial security, our families, our health, and our state of mind more than most other things that we encounter.  We must always continue to honor labor and the work we all do, with equality, diversity, respect, and honor, and with constant and consistent passion.

Some of the best words from great minds regarding Labor and Labor Day:

All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.     -Martin Luther King, Jr.

The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand. –Vince Lombardi

A hundred times every day, I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.  – Albert Einstein

If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all. – Michelangelo

Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work.– Booker T. Washington

Work is no disgrace; the disgrace is idleness. – Greek Proverb

Labor Day is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race or nation. -Samuel Gompers

Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.     -Elbert Hubbard

Without labor nothing prospers. -Sophocles

Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life. -Confucius

Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work. -Aristotle

A mind always employed is always happy. This is the true secret, the grand recipe, for felicity.  -Thomas Jefferson

Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.     -Madeleine L’Engle

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. ―Mahatma Gandhi

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the lines between work and play. –Arnold J. Toynbee

According to the United States Department of Labor website:

The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. The Central Labor Union held its second Labor Day holiday just a year later, on September 5, 1883.

By 1894, 23 more states had adopted the holiday, and on June 28, 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed a law making the first Monday in September of each year a national holiday.

Happy Labor Day.

Plagiarism in Recruiting: The Overlooked Bug in Technical Assessments

Plagiarism in Recruiting

 

Most companies struggle to attract and hire technical talent. While much of this is due to a shortage of capable coders, software developers also possess a unique skill set that is difficult for recruiting teams to screen.

Very few recruiters know how to code. To adequately gauge candidates’ abilities, most technical recruiting teams are left with one of two options:

  • Involve hiring managers early in the hiring process.
  • Leverage some sort of technical skills assessment.

The first option is unrealistic. Technical hiring managers’ time is expensive. You shouldn’t expect them to spend hours reviewing resumes or conducting phone screens when they could be managing teams and shipping product.

This is why many organizations turn to the technical assessment. Technical assessments – usually in the form of coding challenges – are designed to test the skills and competencies required of capable developers. That said, the proliferation of coding challenges (and the lucrative nature of programming jobs) has led to an increase in the number of candidates who attempt to game the system.

Plagiarism in Technical Assessments

Computer programmers are constantly solving a vast array of technical problems. Often, there are multitudes of solutions posted online for any given programming problem and no particular solution is the best for all potential applications of that code.

During real-world software development work, it is expected to do research on existing solutions before tackling the task at hand. It is absolutely normal for a software developer to use others’ solutions that are readily available online when considering a problem. Doing so both reduces development time and increases reliability since solutions do not need to be developed from scratch.

Unfortunately, this approach is not helpful when the goal is to understand a candidate’s coding proficiency and problem-solving skill in a technical assessment.

Plagiarism in this context can actually be counterproductive since it is impossible to distinguish between candidates who understand how the code works and candidates who simply copied someone else’s solution.

This puts hiring teams in a pickle. If the assessment can’t distinguish between capable candidates who know what their code does and those who copied it without understanding it, the burden of screening candidates gets pushed back to hiring managers. Again, technical hiring managers’ time is some of the most expensive time in the organization.

5 Ways to Combat Plagiarism in Recruiting

So, if plagiarism can have such a negative impact on hiring manager time, how can we go about combatting it? Below are five methods you can use – both in and outside of the technical assessment – to deter and detect it.

1) Establish What Qualifies as Plagiarism

As mentioned above, copying and re-using code is an expected and encouraged practice in software development. When it comes to hiring, most managers have different ideas about what constitutes plagiarism. Even in the same organization, different hiring managers may have radically different ideas around copying code in the assessment process.

If your organization is using technical assessments, it is critical for recruiters to sit down with individual hiring managers and discuss their views on plagiarism.

2) Set Expectations with Candidates

Once recruiters have established the hiring manager’s perspective, that information needs to be passed to the candidate before they start their assessment. That hiring manager’s definition of plagiarism shouldn’t be assumed as universal.

If you don’t establish the parameters for what constitutes “cheating” during the assessment, you’re not being fair to the candidate and may pass over candidates who perfectly understand the code they copied.

For example, you might tell candidates that you expect them to build their solution within the assessment platform (compared to in an external development environment), or discourage copying and pasting, if these are the criteria you decided on with hiring managers.

This is also a good opportunity to establish some ground rules. If you tell a candidate that you’re more interested in how they solve a problem, versus a “perfect” answer, they’ll relax and be less likely to plagiarize that perfect answer.

3) Use Software Similarity Scoring to Compare Submitted Code

Some technical assessments automatically compare a candidate’s submitted code to code previously submitted by other candidates. HireVue uses Measure of Software Similarity Scoring (MOSS) to flag likely plagiarists.

High code similarity is an indication of suspicious activity. That said, it should not be used in isolation. Recruiters should, as a rule of thumb, assume benign intent. It’s a starting point, a flag that a recruiter – possibly in conjunction with a hiring manager – should look closer at a candidate’s solution.

4) Evaluate How a Candidate Codes their Solution

Technical assessments should also provide an easily digestible timeline of a candidate’s activity while they completed the challenge. For example:

  • Time spent in another browser window (loss of browser focus);
  • When content is pasted;
  • When code is tested successfully;
  • When code is tested unsuccessfully
  • When candidates are inactive.

With this data in hand, recruiters can often deduce if candidates are plagiarizing. A typical plagiarism pattern looks like this:

  1. Candidate does nothing at the start (inactive – reading the challenge details).
  2. Browser focus goes away for a period of time (searching for an answer).
  3. Candidate pastes a large amount of code.
  4. Candidate quickly passes tests without editing the code.

Again, this method is not entirely foolproof. While the pattern above is common with plagiarists, it is also the pattern we would expect if a knowledgeable candidate simply coded their response in another window or development environment.

This is where the final, and strongest, method of detecting plagiarism comes into play.

5) Validate Understanding with Follow-Up Video Interview Questions

The most powerful method of validating candidate understanding is simply to ask them questions about their solution. On-demand video interview questions delivered as a follow-up to the coding challenge turn the challenge into a conversation piece.

If a candidate can walk you through their thought process, the choices they made, the approaches they took, and the solution alternatives they considered, chances are they constructed the solution themselves.

If a candidate copied their solution without understanding it, their response usually makes this very, very obvious.

Plagiarism: Means Different Things to Different Managers

Plagiarism can be a touchy subject in technical hiring. Ultimately, the best way to deal with plagiarism involves both out-of-assessment communication (setting expectations with hiring managers and candidates) and in-assessment features (similarity score, activity timelines, video interview questions, etc.).

At HireVue, our technical assessment solution doesn’t attempt to define what plagiarism is. Instead, we give you the tools to look at how a candidate solved their solution, and leave it up to you to decide if a candidate’s solution constitutes plagiarism. We try to empower hiring teams to understand what really matters: if a candidate is capable.

 

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

Talent Acquisition News

 

While activity continues across the space, we did notice a perceptible shift the second half of the month, with fewer announcements than earlier in the summer. Likely this directly correlates to the fall conference season, which is about to kick off in the next few weeks. The months of September and October tend to attract the biggest news of the year, with many companies timing their big launches with the call for booth traffic. We’ll have to wait and see what the vendors have in store, but in the meantime, here’s a sampling of what happened these last two weeks: 

Perhaps the biggest shock of them all was the recent announcement that Hire by Google will shut down as of September 2020. The short-lived experiment published some really great content and launched an effective ATS. The company’s official statement reads, “While Hire has been successful, we’re focusing our resources on other products in the Google Cloud portfolio.”

Timed with the recent Black Women’s Equal Pay Day (August 22), LeanIn.org released new data spotlighting the gap. Notably, Black women in the U.S. get paid 39 percent less than white men and 21 percent less than white women. This issue starts from a young age and grows from there, continuing to widen even for Black women with advanced degrees as well as those who ask for promotions and raises. 

Also new in research, Ultimate Software published its 2019 Report on the State of Remote Work, indicating that 23 percent of the U.S. workforce works at least part of the time remotely. The report also shows that remote workers might advance beyond their in-office peers, with 50 percent of remote workers feeling less stressed because of their location, 40 percent being more likely to have been promoted in the past year and 27 percent more likely to feel the opportunity for growth in their current role. 

Continuing with this knowledge theme, Capacity, formerly known as Jane.ai, unveiled a secure, AI-native knowledge-sharing platform along with an influx of funding, coming in at $13.2 Million. The company’s solution works by “capturing tacit knowledge, mining documents, and spreadsheets and connecting to enterprise apps— making everything instantly accessible through a single, automated chat platform.” 

And while we’d usually save this one for the next section, recruitment software provider Entelo is making moves with the recent acquisition of candidate engagement platform ConveyIQ (formerly known as Take the Interview). With ConveyIQ and a fresh round of funding, Entelo sees itself as the “first intelligent end-to-end candidate communication management system.” This news echoes the ongoing consolidation we’ve seen all year, with point solutions merging into platforms. 

Capital Investments, Mergers, & Acquisitions

Industry analyst George LaRocque of #HRWins put together a Q2 report, showcasing all of the venture capital investments in the HR technology space. His research shows $1.448 Billion, with four more mega-rounds of at least $100M taking place, making Q2 2019 bigger than any quarter of 2018. In fact, he shares, we’re less than $1B away from all of the VC tracked last year. 

On a related note, Nomad Health, an online marketplace for healthcare jobs, raised $34M in new equity and debt financing to further its mission of addressing clinician shortages across the U.S. 

Rimeto, a startup that’s reimaging the enterprise workplace directory, announced $10M in Series A funding. The three-year-old company, founded by three ex-Facebook employees, developed a directory solution that sits between other systems that contain workforce details. 

AI recruitment startup, Talview received $6.75M in Series A funding to create its “Instahiring” platform. Targeting the enterprise, Instahiring will combine automation, video interviewing, and assessments with machine learning and advanced data and analytics. 

In acquisition news, Upward.net recently acquired another job site, Proven, which focuses on small businesses. By revamping the Upward.net experience, the company intends to expand its offering to serve more of the SMB. 

Workforce analytics platform PredictiveHR shared its acquisition of the Recruiting Services Division of Method3, a provider of RPO and IT Staffing services. With this move, PredictiveHR will aim to blend its solution and services to help customers tackle their talent acquisition challenges. 

Upcoming Events & Conferences

Other recent highlights:

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

 

The Biz of Employer Branding: New Research Insights 

Employer Branding

 

Have you ever skipped ahead and read the last line of a book before starting the first chapter? Sometimes it ruins the whole experience, and other times, it reinforces your understanding of the story throughout your read. What I’m about to reveal corresponds with this second school of thought. 

In perusing the new Employer Branding NOW report from the good folks at Universum, I decided to go right to the conclusion. Mostly to see if their findings match up with my thinking – and (spoiler alert), they did. Without giving the whole of it away, I’ll start with the following excerpt, “For talent leaders, the challenge ahead lies in confronting issues that are bigger than HR…Building a well-crafted EVP is superficial work unless [the] wider issues are also being addressed.” Bingo. Of course, knowing this begs the question – what are the issues? And what does employer brand do to fix them? 

Well, for starters, you may have heard by now that today’s labor market is a bit…difficult. And according to the 1,600 HR talent leaders that Universum surveyed, at least half see things getting worse before they get better. Interestingly, the small-sized businesses were the optimists of the bunch, with 48 percent expecting the hiring environment to get harder over the next 12 months. Fifty-five percent of medium-sized companies also agreed before that jumped up to 59 percent of the large companies that participated. But the kicker is the 80 percent of “World’s Most Attractive Employers (WMAE)” who see this happening. We’re talking about the likes of Google, Goldman Sachs, EY, Apple and others. 

Changing of the Guard 

The research indicates that there’s a shift taking place, and it’s got layers. It’s a move away from the HR and recruiting strategy of recent years, the one we just mastered after finally figuring out digital transformation, recruitment marketing, and Millennials. Now, we’re tracking the adoption of AI, mission-critical employer branding and Gen Z. We’re at a new crossroads, far from where we were and yet no closer to the future of work (if it even exists). In isolating trends worth watching, Universum calls out the rise of start-up culture, a sounding call for diversity and the move toward localization and personalization throughout the discipline. We need to reflect on what we’ve learned and observed and then, throw that script out the window in favor of what’s to come. 

Reviewing employer value props across the SMB and WMAE, you see some patterns emerge. The most obvious being the need to emphasize “inspiring purpose,” which ranked as the top element included in EVPs for medium, large and WMAE companies. Smaller organizations, including start-ups, are more likely to try and differentiate themselves through “team-oriented work” and “friendly work environments.” Says Universum, these word choices seem tied to the aforementioned younger generations, as does the move away from career pathing and professional development. Even though Millennials and Gen Z account for only a portion of the workforce, research from LinkedIn Talent Solutions helps explain why the EVP focuses here, “Potential candidates under 40 years old are 61 percent more likely to have their job consideration levels associated with employer brand.” 

Marketing these Messages  

With all of this in mind, let’s turn our attention to what happens after to that EVP through employer brand communications. Having considered this in the past, Universum looked at three years of research to see how the WMAE target their messages. 

The results are perhaps best summarized in this quote from Deutsche Bank, “A degree of brand consistency is always important, but effective engagement with the talent we want to attract also requires us to tailor content to the specific needs and interests of different target groups.” That thinking is at least partially responsible for why we see a flood of content over social, with 98 percent of WMAE leveraging LinkedIn for this purpose, followed by 87 percent on Facebook, 78 percent on YouTube, 76 percent on Instagram and 53 percent on Twitter. Likewise, since 2016, the percent of WMAE using video for employer brand leaped from 43 percent to 94 percent. And we’re talking dedicated employer brand communications here.

Less obvious, though is how and where technology fits into these efforts, with only about half of companies using a data-driven approach to employer branding. Not because the solutions don’t exist, but more because of the complexity that people and hiring presents. That could be why some technologies, like chatbots and simulations, rose in use, while people analytics and AI candidate search and selection dropped a bit. 

As far as the story goes, it appears that HR and talent leaders have the awareness and understanding to initiate the conversation, with tools available to help support them in the middle, but it’s the writing on the page keeps changing. And as the research tells us, that’s been the issue all along. 

 

4 Surprises For New Hiring Managers

New Hiring Manager

 

Hiring and interviewing is as much a science as it is an art. New managers will often be tasked with running their own interviews and hiring for their own teams without any formal training or experience. If you’re new to the recruiting world, here are four hard truths to keep in mind when making your first hires! 

1. Your biases creep in the moment you write a job description 

Cognitive biases help our brain quickly process the information in the world around us. They allow us to act quickly, which can be useful in situations when we need to make snap decisions. But what happens when these snap decisions cause us to make unfair judgments? Cue the unconscious bias, which can rear its head throughout the entire recruitment process. 

This can start the moment you write your job description. The language used in a job posting can inadvertently dissuade someone from applying because of their gender. For example, descriptions that include more masculine themed words such as “competitive, dominant or assertive ”, or “guru or ninja”, over feminine themed words such as “supportive, dedicated or sociable” detract many women from applying for these roles. Focus on using language that is more gender-neutral and leverage tools like the Gender Decoder for Job Ads to spot subtle gender linguistic coding. 

Moving on to the resume screenings, “confirmation bias” may lead you to create distinct opinions about someone based on minute pieces of information about them, such as having a typo in their resume, or attending an Ivy League School, before the actual interview even takes place. We can all agree that editing is crucial when job hunting, but maybe that candidate who accidentally wrote “their” instead of “there” is a much better fit for the role than the Yale alumni. 

Heading into the interview, your “similar to me” bias may cause you to disproportionately favor candidates who resemble you in some way, whether it be personality, gender, religion or history. However, just because you like someone the most, doesn’t mean they are the best candidate for the job. 

Our unconscious biases create an unfair playing field for candidates, and this perpetuates inequality in the workforce. While human nature is hard to change, the first step in eliminating unconscious bias is to make yourself aware of your own biases and then challenge yourself to identify when you’re applying your own personal lens to a situation. To better understand your own unconscious attitudes, try the Harvard Implicit Association Test. 

2. Soft skills matter more than you think 

As organizations evolve, it’s the employees who demonstrate a high degree of soft skills, like emotional intelligence, persuasion, collaboration or adaptability that will help elevate the work of a team. In fact, 89 percent of people claim that when a new hire doesn’t work out, it’s because the soft skills were lacking. 

While it’s important to create questions in interviews that assess for technical skills, the soft skills evaluation should not be overlooked. When creating your interview questions, look at the high performers on your team and think about what soft skills they demonstrate. Create a list of both soft skills that make them successful, as well as the technical skills needed for a particular job, and make sure your questions are assessing both areas. Your time with a candidate in limited, so your questions should be targeted to hit the mark!

3. Your candidates should be treated like customers (even if they don’t get the job!)

The candidate experience is extremely important, not just for your talent pipeline, but for your company brand as well. In fact, a bad candidate experience can even cause people to stop engaging with a brand. So what does this mean for you as the hiring manager?

Consider how each of your touchpoints with candidates contributes to their overall experience, from the pre-interview phase, all the way through to the rejection or offer stage. Consider how you can make your candidate feel appreciated for giving you their time, even if they don’t get hired. Small acts like offering them water and taking their coat upon arrival, making sure they know how to prepare, giving them your undivided attention when meeting face to face, and providing them with constructive feedback if they don’t get the job goes a long way.

Imagine your candidates as potential clients in your sales pipeline. Just because they are not a fit today, doesn’t mean they can’t be converted in the future. It just takes one bad review to poison the well, so it pays both for your recruitment strategy, and also for your business, to make sure that everyone leaves your interview room feeling like a million bucks. 

4. You likely won’t find that unicorn, so don’t drag on the process

While you may be reluctant to hire someone who doesn’t meet each one of your criteria, holding out for that perfect candidate could hinder you more than it will help. The top-performing candidates will be gone in ten days. However, the average Time to Fill rate is 36 days, according to the 2017 Talent Acquisition Benchmark Report by SHRM.

Assess the amount of time it takes from the moment you post your job description to the point where you send out an offer, and see if there are any barriers that can be removed. For example, making a candidate go through multiple rounds of interviews on different days might discourage them from considering you as an option, as it may require them to take too much time off from work. Remember that while a great candidate might be considering your organization, they are probably considering other companies as well. 

If you’re passing on or moving too slow with great candidates because they don’t meet your lengthy list of requirements, it may be time to re-evaluate whether you’re being realistic in your approach. 

The best candidates understand that interviewing is a two-way street. As a hiring manager, you should do your best to assess the right candidates using meaningful criteria, and make sure you’re going that extra mile to ensure the process is as easy and humane as possible for potential new hires! 

Resources:

https://empiric.com/blog/unconscious-bias-in-job-descriptions/

https://harvardbusinessreview.submittable.com/submit/127824/submissions-for-harvard-business-review-or-hbr-org