With the increase in difficulty to hire within our own teams, our focus for this event was how to find and hire for talent acquisition professionals.

We put together a team of 24 rockstar recruiting and sourcing experts and came up with 12 different requisitions for varying levels of TA roles.

Their job was to first show their approach on how to find candidates for this role, live sourcing on screen to show their strategy and approach. They then paired up with the other trainer with the same requisition to show how they engage and hire candidates as recruiters.

For the role play sessions, trainers took turns acting as both recruiter and applicant to offer unique perspectives or highlight what they would have done differently. Brian Fink and Craig Fisher joined them on stage to moderate and field questions from the audience.

We ended each day bringing the role-play moderators and Shally Steckerl on the main stage for a discussion and analysis of each day’s events.

You can check out the recordings for this event here. For an overview, highlights, and takeaways…keep reading!

The Trainers

Mike Wolford and Pete Radloff kicked off day one’s live sourcing in search of campus recruiters, while Shawna Lawson-Flintroy and Dean Da Costa sourced candidates for a junior sourcer position.

Later, Jonathan Kidder and Kevin Walters sourced for a diversity recruiter, with Jenna Aronow and Junius Currier pursued a technical recruiter position.

Steve Levy and Bret Feig sourced for senior sourcer roles, while Steve Rawlings and Vanessa Raath looked for recruiting operations specialist candidates.

Day two brought us into the higher level roles for hiring within Talent Acquisition. We saw a shift in the methods for both finding and hiring, with a smaller pool of candidates and an increased focus on the recruitment process.

Carrie Collier and Chris Brady tackled sourcing candidates for a recruitment marketing specialist. On the other hand (or screen), Ronnie Bratcher and Sophie Okonkwo sourced a TA technology specialist.

Keirsten Greggs and Glenn Gutmacher sourced for a director of recruiting as Dena Davis and Laura Mazzullo sourced for director of people operations.

Lastly, Alla Pavlova and Patrick Moran looked for a head of sourcing, while Mark Hamel and David Galley worked to find candidates for a head of talent acquisition.

Day One: Thought Leadership

Finding Hidden Talent

Eric Jaquith of SeekOut shared seven strategies that recruiters often overlook while using LinkedIn and other job sites. The first step is to “find the language people are using,” Eric said, while speaking on the need to keep tabs on open positions and look for various job titles. He also spoke about the role technology plays in helping recruiters uncover “diamonds” by using tools like AI-matching, power searches, filters and dynamic email templates. 

Diversity of Talent

Phil Ross of Untapped also spoke about reaching “untapped talent,” focusing on increasing diversity when hiring. Organizations are often stuck in a self-reinforcing cycle where they hire from a group of candidates who reflect the organization’s demographic, though the recruitment funnel and the attrition funnel are vastly different.

While diversity initiatives may seem intimidating, Phil simplified the process by suggesting the creation of sustainable systems. He emphasized the importance of improving employee experience and satisfaction and highlighted the idea of “centering the most marginalized” while designing policies and building and placing a culture that celebrates diversity at the front and center.

Scaling Recruiting Teams

Leslie Loo of Celential.ai shared insights on scaling recruiting teams while leveraging AI. Since hiring for recruiters is increasingly tough, hiring teams can use AI to fill in the talent gap and increase efficiency. He also spoke on how gaining deeper insights into the candidate can increase the accuracy of talent matching as well.

A More Holistic Approach

As we moved closer to the end of Day 1, Spencer Liu of MojoHire tackled the ATS, saying, “The ATS is dead, at least as we know it. Today, it is imperative to track more than just our ‘applicants.’ We can do talent management and talent recruiting in one system.” Building on the importance of adopting an integrated HR approach, Liu discussed how recruiters can begin using holistic talent acquisition and management solutions. 

Day Two: Thought Leadership

Market Research

While we’re talking about data, in Gillisa Pope’s session for HireEZ, we learned how recruiters can tap into market research to inform their hiring decisions. Though you might think that research is time-consuming and tedious, Gillisa took us through the entire process in just under 20 minutes.

She also pressed the importance of understanding market conditions, data-driven multi-source tools, using HireEZ’s outbound platform to identify your total addressable market and generating talent maps to find the right talent.

With the right tools, it will take you only 20 minutes to do all of this and widen your talent pool, incorporate diversity and even detect and address roadblocks before they become a challenge. 

Gender Wage Gap

In honor of Women’s History Month, Natalie Grandy of Gem turned the spotlight onto the gender wage gap with “How Gem Uses Gem: Women in the Workforce.”

Natalie spoke about the challenges women face in hiring, followed by best practices organizations can adopt to improve gender diversity.

For recruiters, avoiding bias is easier said than done. We all fall prey to unconscious biases and noted that even female recruiters can overlook female profiles.

Highlights and Takeaways

The live sourcing and role-play sessions were undeniably the highlights of the event. Despite the similarities in approach, what stood out was how the same tools and methods were used differently.

Bret Feig spoke about using social media and online communities, Carrie Collier found candidate engagement to be the key, and Chris Brady highlighted personalization in the candidate experience.

Role-playing gave the audience insights into what questions to ask, and how to vet candidates while focusing on skills, personality and future plans. It was also remarkable to see how the presenters “engaged” with candidates, retaining the human element of the hiring process.

Mike Wolford and Pete Radloff shared the importance of approaching specialty schools and student clubs for campus recruitment. Dean Da Costa and Shawna Lawson-Flintroy focused on what is essential to the candidate. Alla Pavlova provided insights into the international market, while Keirsten Greggs and Glenn Gutmacher discussed change management.

Dena Davis and Laura Mazzullo spent time on questions the candidate should ask, listening and responding to candidate needs and focusing on HR as a strategic function.

A Thank You

A huge thank you to our attendees for your questions, comments and participation, as well as to each of the trainers, sponsors, moderators and hosts for sharing your knowledge and expertise with the audience.

We’ll be back with another event in June. See you there!

The post #HRTX March 2022: Helping Recruiters and Sourcers Prepare for the ‘Great Rehire’ appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Although the use of video technology is not new by any means, our reliance on it certainly is. AI-based video interview technology has become more sophisticated over the past year, necessitated by need as usage skyrocketed.

As the pandemic nears a hopeful and eventual end, companies world-wide are still adopting remote hiring strategies as part of a permanent strategy after seeing the benefits.

Based on cutting-edge AI technology, video interviews can expedite initial screening procedures, identify relevant and qualified candidates, and help businesses cast a wider net with respect to the talent pool.

Since being a remote solution, remote hiring surpasses geographical limitations, saves time and money. The video interview system can also use data from facial expressions and tone of voice to infer personality, behavioral and communication skills. Such candidate assessments help ascertain the right fit.

AI based systems are also the forerunners in the quest to promote diverse and inclusive workplaces. There are still questions regarding the objectivity of the AI based solutions; however, bias can be eliminated by adopting best practices.

The AI models should be developed in a manner that they only focus on job-relevant information while disregarding information related to race, gender, sexuality, and others.

If you’d like to learn more about how to make the most of AI-based video interviewing, download this Ultimate Guide on how to hire high-quality talent remotely today!

What you’ll learn:

• What video interviewing is by definition and its top five benefits.
• How to utilize AI technology to overcome the current talent shortage while maintaining a quality of hire.
• What you can do to manage and eliminate biases in AI-based video interviewing.
• Plus, a bonus Buyer’s Checklist on how to choose an AI-based video interview solution that’s right for your company’s specific needs.

The post AI-Based Video Interviewing: The Ultimate Guide to Remote Hiring appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Onboarding is an essential part of the hiring process.  Companies have historically struggled to perfect and maintain satisfying onboarding methods even in-office, but now that the workforce is largely remote across the globe, we are met with brand new hiring obstacles. Part of the struggle is measuring virtual onboarding success; much of the struggle is just not knowing where to start or what to expect.

Take a look at this exclusive virtual onboarding checklist for you to keep on hand when bringing on new hires. Even if your virtual onboarding practice is the best around, you may find some interesting ideas we’ve collected from some of the most inclusive onboarding strategies we’ve found.

What You’ll Find Inside

1. A printable download containing each step of the onboarding process, from preboarding until 90-days in
2. Subitems complete with descriptions of each step
3. Creative ideas to enhance company culture, all conscientious of your virtual setting

More, of course. Take a look and give us your thoughts.

The post The Definitive Virtual Onboarding Checklist appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

What is a Recruitment Dashboard?

A recruitment dashboard is a collection of metrics, key performance indicators (KPI), and reports that provide you an overview of the recruitment funnel and process. It isn’t a motley crew of unrelated reports. Recruitment dashboards are built in a way to answer most crucial recruitment questions visually, offering instant insights for future recruitment decisions.

In this article, we’ll look at how you can create the perfect recruiting dashboard tailored to your unique needs.

3 Maxims to Design the Perfect Recruiting Dashboard

When starting out with dashboarding, stick to basics:

1. Less Is More

With the sheer amount of metrics and reports available in recruitment analytics software, it is tempting to include as much data as possible. But to generate actionable insights, choose your data sets wisely. Less is more. It sounds counterintuitive, but the dashboard should be a means to an end, not an end in itself.

If a metric/report doesn’t bring any value to the table, don’t include it in the dashboard.

2. Design for Insights

The purpose of dashboards is to provide actionable insights on the go. A flurry of data or tables is less likely to be helpful. Visual elements such as charts and graphs to make it easy to draw insights. Ensure that the dashboard is primed to help you make better decisions.

3. Make It Easy to Understand

Great design flows. It emphasizes both – the appearance and utility. The dashboard should answer the questions in a sequence. Straightforward navigation delivers Aha! moments throughout the experience because it is built to aid comprehension. Don’t make the user navigate back and forth to thread multiple pieces of information together. Remember the famous Leonardo Da Vinci quote, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

5 Steps to Creating a Recruitment Dashboard

Different organizations have different recruitment needs; therefore, every dashboard will have some overlapping features and a few industry-specific metrics. In this section, we look at how you can create a recruiting dashboard for your organization in five steps.

Step 1: Decide on the Utility of the Dashboard

There will be a vast difference between the information needed by a manager and an executive. Therefore, it is necessary to be clear on the utility of the recruitment dashboard. Generally, dashboards are divided into three categories:

1. Operational: Operational dashboards are useful to provide information for time-sensitive issues. These dashboards may provide information such as the status of the talent pipeline, open positions, job applications received during a week, upcoming deadlines, etc.
2. Analytical: These dashboards help you draw insights from your data. Analytical dashboards help you identify trends and draw comparisons. For example, a pie chart showing the top sources of recruitment or a bar graph depicting candidate experience to help you find out underlying trends
3. Hybrid: You can use elements of both – operational and analytical dashboards to create a composite/hybrid dashboard

Step 2: Ask the Right Questions

Analytics dashboards are personalized depending on the individual or team requirements. The customized dashboard you create should answer questions that are relevant to you or your team. Pick only those questions that matter to you.

We have compiled a set of questions to help you get started:

1. How long does it take to recruit new talent?
2. How many candidates does a recruiter need to interview to hire an employee?
3. How much does it cost to hire a new employee across different departments?
4. What are the best websites and platforms to hire new talent? OR What percentage of new hires come from a particular platform?
5. How many employees leave within a year?
6. How is the candidate experience throughout the hiring process?
7. How many candidates accept/reject the offer?
8. How many candidates apply for a particular job role?
9. What are the current open positions?
10. How many employees are hired by a recruiter/team during a particular period?

So, from the questions above, you can see that some questions tilt more towards operational, while others towards the analytical dashboard.

Step 3: Identify the Relevant Metrics for Each Question

In this step, identify the metrics that answer your questions. You would also need to find out pertinent data points to calculate the metrics.

Let’s pick a few questions from the list above and see how to do it:

Step 4: Integrate Data Sources

Now, it’s unlikely that all your HR data is stored in one place. There are different applications for each function within HR. For instance, you’ll find employee satisfaction data in the employee engagement application or survey tool. For that, you may have to extract key data from the net promoter survey (NPS).

Here is an overarching list of applications an organization may have for its HR function. Make yours as well:

1. Recruitment: Talent discovery platforms, job boards, applicant tracking system (ATS), training and assessment, onboarding
2. Learning and Development: Learning experience platform (LXP), learning management system (LMS)
3. Workforce Management: Attendance tracking, employee engagement, project management
4. Performance Management: Talent management, feedback, appraisal
5. Compensation and Benefits: Payroll, compensation management

Some tools from the HR-tech stack might not integrate with your analytics tool. In such cases, you need to export data in a format (such as spreadsheet files – CSV, XLSX, XLS, ODS) that is compatible with the analytics tool.

Step 5: Compose Your Recruitment Dashboard

Once you have the data compiled, it’s time to create the dashboard. Every dashboard tool offers a set of data representation charts.

Keep the following considerations in mind while designing the dashboard:

1. Visualize the data: We are visual creatures. Aesthetics are important, but they shouldn’t precede comprehension. Use the right chart format to represent data. For example, you can use a pie chart to show the gender ratio or a bar or line chart to show trends
2. Decide the Layout: Compartmentalize the data/charts in grids to bring consistency. People follow the F-shaped pattern while reading the content. Keep the summary at the top to show a snapshot of the data. The layout should use the concept of drill down. Each point of information should build on its preceding data point. Keep in mind the axioms we saw earlier in the article
3. Go Easy With Real-time Data: Real-time data can be distracting and anxiety-inducing, therefore, you can update your dashboard on an hourly basis, but be sparing when including real-time data on a recruitment dashboard.

Tools You Can Use To Create a Recruiting Dashboard

There are three categories of tools you can choose from to create a recruitment dashboard. Let’s take a quick look at each:

1. Spreadsheet Programs

Most spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice Calc, or Google Sheets come with data visualization capabilities. You can either download free/premium off-the-shelf dashboard templates or go about designing your own. You need to populate the sheet with data to view its visual representation in the dashboard.

2. HR Software

Cloud-based HR applications like ATS, attendance tracking, employee engagement tools, etc. come with an analytics feature that allow you to build nifty dashboards using available data. A major shortcoming with these applications is, you won’t be able to get a comprehensive overview of the recruitment process unless the software offers integrations with other tools in your stack.

3. Business Dashboard Software

Business dashboard tools are perhaps the most powerful in this category. Software such as Smartsheet, Klipfolio, Zoho Analytics, Tableau, and Datapine can help you analyze heaps of data by integrating multiple data sources. However, some of these applications can be quite expensive and require an expert to set them up for you. Also, operationalizing these tools come with a steep learning curve.

3 Best Practices for Better Dashboard Design

Keep in mind the following tips for designing a recruitment dashboard primed for comprehension:

1. Choose the Right Chart Type

You’ll find plenty of options when choosing a chart type to represent data, and it can get confusing. Here is a simple guide to help you choose the right chart type:

1. Uncover relationships in the data: Scatter chart, bubble chart, network diagram
2. Compare different elements/values or identify trends: Column chart, bar chart, line chart
3. View composition of a data point: Pie chart, heatmap, area chart, stacked column chart
4. Distribution of data: Bell curve, scatter chart

2. Maintain Consistency

Here are three areas where you need to maintain consistency:

1. Follow a uniform nomenclature, data, and font formatting
2. Keep the layout symmetrical. Place the widgets in a way that’ll balance the grid. Follow a hierarchy while placing the widgets
3.  Data alignment in tables should be uniform throughout all widgets

3. Use Fewer Colors

Stick to three or four colors to visualize data. While most tools have in-built color palettes, if you are designing a custom color palette, keep in mind the color theory to know how to use analogous, monochromatic, complementary, shades, tints, and tones of the chosen color. There are online color palette generators that can help you with a color palette for various colors.

Finally, know how to use contrast to highlight inconsistencies, trends, or outliers in the data.

3 Best Practices for Effective Data Management

The success of data-driven recruitment lies in the accuracy and quality of data. Follow these three data management practices to ensure that the dashboard provides an accurate picture:

1. Simplify Data Access

Data should be readily accessible to the concerned team members. Each team member should have a separate login/access to the relevant HR tools and data sources. Considering the data security issue, set up hierarchical data access rights. For instance, only executivescan have admin rights, while the mid-level management will have fewer rights.

2. Address Data Redundancies

The growing volume and avenues of data imply that the same data will be available across different applications and sources. Duplicate data will give you an inaccurate picture and introduce errors in your recruitment dashboard. To minimize this, decide the data points you want to include and their respective sources while designing the dashboard. If you find one data point having multiple sources, choose the source that provides multiple data points. The aim is to rely on fewer data channels to avoid confusion.

3. Prioritize Data Quality

The data needs to be updated periodically to get accurate insights. Sometimes, you may have to import data into the visualization tool manually. In such cases, make sure to export the latest instance of the data from the source.

3 Examples of Recruitment Dashboards

To help you get started with designing a recruitment dashboard that works for you, here are a few examples:

1. Recruitment Dashboard – Overview

The template above provides a macro perspective of recruitment activity. The top row provides a summary of key recruitment metrics. The rest of the widgets drill down into each part of the recruitment funnel and its sources.

2. Candidate Summary

A candidate summary dashboard provides you with an in-depth view of the talent pipeline. You can see how many candidates have passed through each stage of the funnel. Along with the pipeline, the dashboard also shows the number of active and passive candidates in the pipeline, along with the salary range.

3. Job Board

Closing Words

The first step of data-driven recruitment is knowing how to use data to your advantage, and the first step to it is setting up a recruiting dashboard. As said earlier, you can find plenty of dashboard examples online that you can download to get started.

But if you are new to analytics and have very specific/niche requirements, then creating a recruitment dashboard could pose a challenge. It helps to involve an analytics expert to set it up for you because their methodical approach will help you design and optimize the dashboard.

In the end, brainstorm and experiment with multiple dashboard ideas on the side to see which one works for you.

If you have any questions about creating a recruitment dashboard, ask away in the comments below!

The post How to Create the Perfect Recruiting Dashboard appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Employer branding is quickly emerging as a top priority for organizations in a post-pandemic world. At a time when global businesses are preoccupied with surviving the COVID-19 induced economic slowdown, employer branding has suffered. Furloughs, layoffs, and rightsizing have been dominant themes across the employment market. And have done little to build confidence amongst jobseekers.

However, the situation is getting better. During recent BLM protests, we saw employers taking accountability for their D&I initiatives and stepping up to express solidarity with the underrepresented. Organizations also publicly acknowledged that their diversity and inclusion strategies needed realignment and promised to work on it.

Hiring will resume as the economy reopens, and people return to work. While the job market is likely to remain employer-driven temporarily, the best candidates will still be picky about where to work. And that’s where organizations have the opportunity to rethink how they approach and engage talent.

Employer Branding in a Post-COVID World

One of the biggest problems with employer branding is that it is often associated with superficial perks and benefits, instead of being aligned to core business goals and the corporate brand. Free lunches, bring-your-pets-to-work, and in-house masseuses are all nice to have. But, do they really drive your competitive advantage as a business?

Economic volatility, uncertainty, and shorter shelf life for knowledge have placed a premium on professional development opportunities. According to Gallup, jobseekers care deeply about their development when looking for jobs. An astounding 87 percent of millennials rated “professional or career growth and development opportunities” as important to them in a job.

Gallup also found that “opportunities to learn and grow” is one of the top three factors in retaining millennials. And is the only aspect of retention that separates millennials’ needs from those of non-millennials.

So, it seems pretty cut-and-dry, right? Employers must offer L&D opportunities to hire better talent and improve their employer brand. However, it is easier said than done. Talent acquisition leaders and the C-suite need to focus on building the employer brand organically.

L&D programs have been a mainstay for organizations for a while. So, delivering opportunities for new talent is not a significant challenge.

The real challenge

The real challenge is delivering opportunities that enable the organization to build a new talent dimension. Which is key to the company’s corporate brand. Here is where TA and functional leaders must ask themselves: “What will drive our competitive advantage over the next five years?” Is it going to be leadership skills, digital competence, or a combination of both?

For businesses looking to thrive in a post-COVID world, technical excellence must be supplemented with skills like teamwork, empathy, and customer-centricity. Organizations must also re-examine key individual and team behaviors that are desirable in a post-COVID world. For instance, contribution could make way for commitment. And employees must learn to focus on relationships, rather than just communication.

Developing an employer branding framework that helps you answer critical questions about your capabilities as a business, candidate perception, and organizational values are essential. And here’s where digital coaching platforms promise to transform the way you look at professional development as an extension of employer branding.

“Employees are attracted to organizations that build cultures that they want to be a part of.  This means cultures that are inclusive, flexible, authentic, and successful.  When organizations invest in their people, those kinds of cultures follow as a natural outflow,” says Alexandra Connell, CEO, and founder of digital executive coaching platform, Pluma.

Executive Coaching and Employer Branding: A Match Made in L&D Heaven?

A big part of measuring the success of an employer branding strategy is learning how it resonates with potential hires and employees. “We work closely with a lot of our HR partners to help them find ways to let employees know about the fact that they’re offering Pluma. And give people at all levels opportunities to apply or be nominated for the experience so that distribution is equitable and noteworthy,” says Alexandra.

A great way to obtain candidate feedback is through surveys. and work with recruiters to get their assessment of candidate responses. This should help you understand ground realities and plan future upgrades on your branding strategies. Using insights from candidate feedback, you can keep refining your talent development framework to focus on more relevant capabilities.

Now, coming to the question of how digital coaching platforms could fit into your larger talent attraction and retention strategy. They offer a personalized and scalable alternative to traditional, expensive, one-size-fits-all coaching practices. It follows a natural evolution of on-demand learning for a generation of post-COVID workers.

Human Skills

As AI and allied technologies become more capable of performing routine tasks, the need for human cognitive skills will continue to increase. High-performing organizations of the future will be the ones that adopt a culture of lifelong learning. And facilitate opportunities for employees to develop new skills continuously.

Alexandra believes digital coaching platforms can help unleash employee potential in a way that was impossible before. She says, “The workplace is ever-shifting, and people learn better when they can interact, reflect and confide in someone that they find credible. It’s only natural that that practice would be over a period of time and oriented around establishing a real relationship and accessing your coach as-needed.”

“I think the demand we see for Pluma, a scalable but personal and people-oriented solution is a natural outgrowth of the business environment we see today. As is the desire for things that are on-demand,” she adds.

While most organizations have had some leadership/management development programs in place. They’ve typically catered to a select few within the company. The exclusivity of traditional coaching programs makes them ineffective for meeting the demands of the current workplace. Additionally, a candidate interviewing for a mid-level position will not be sold on your promise to make coaching available five or ten years down the line.

Digital Coaching Platforms

As candidates increasingly place professional development as a top priority when assessing career opportunities. Digital coaching platforms serve to democratize knowledge and skills previously restricted to senior executives within organizations.

Speaking about the limitations of traditional training programs, Alexandra says, “Mainly just that they don’t reach broadly or deeply enough.  The programs are usually excellent, but they tend to touch maybe 0.1 percent of the population. It’s not adequate reach for a meaningful culture shift, retention impact, or succession planning. Pluma allows organizations to provide all the benefits and impact of traditional coaching. A six month, 1:1 relationship with an experienced executive coach, for less than what they’d spend per head on a half-day off-site. This means organizations can coach hundreds rather than a handful. And impact their organizations at a deep and meaningful level.”

However, positioning your company as a learning organization involves more than just purchasing a coaching platform. It requires a cultural shift in terms of how learning is viewed within the organization. Your commitment to supporting professional development for employees should clearly come across in your employer value proposition, career site, and job descriptions. It also needs to be embedded in the business. This means securing C-suite buy-in and incentivizing the right behaviors.

HR leaders need to make professional development a part of employees’ regular flow of work. By breaking down barriers to participation and encouraging leaders to join coaching programs can help you ramp up adoption. And, in the long run, build a larger repository of skills within your organization.

Alexandra shares three tips for organizations looking to build a culture of continuous learning:

• Make it part of people’s day-to-day. Avoid programs that create extra homework or extensive time away from their teams. Look for options that allow people to experiment in their daily work and create dialogue around that.
• Scale it as much as possible. If you have a 200,000 person organization with 30 high potentials (hi-po) in your hi-po program. You simply aren’t reaching enough people. Find solutions that make sure to address a broader base of employees.
• Support learning in your culture. It’s important that the C-Suite and other senior leaders make time for their teams to commit to learning. And that they themselves model that kind of behavior. Having key senior personnel join kick-offs and events is a powerful way to say this matters, and we care.

The HR team will lead this initiative. But to make it stick, it must be owned by the C-suite. As any good leader will tell you, the most important job is attracting, retaining, and advancing the best people. Integrating talent into the center of the corporate brand, rather than spinning out a series of cosmetic benefits, is the best way to do that.

Tying it All Together

Building a great employer brand is more than just shiny marketing strategies and gimmicky perks. It is rooted in a clear corporate purpose and set of values that help you attract candidates who share those fundamental beliefs.

Digital coaching offers an opportunity for organizations to bridge the gap between what they promise and what they can deliver. In terms of employee experience and professional development. In the current environment, particularly, organizations must offer a tangible, lasting benefit to candidates seeking to work for a future-ready company.

You may not be the workplace of the future today. But if you can successfully demonstrate your intention of getting there, it should certainly be a part of your positioning. By offering a combination of aspirational elements in your employer brand, you can breathe life into what would otherwise be a bland collection of promises. That will do little to compel candidates to look closer.

Given our new world of work, employer reputation will ultimately boil down to consistent values and validity of their organizational cultures. And professional development as a value proposition serves as a clear and accountable employer branding metric. One that will continue to drive your competitive advantage for years to come.

The post Why Professional Development Must Be A Core Element of Your Employer Brand appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

When the world is still coming to grips with the impact of the pandemic, it might be contentious to begin discussing talent acquisition.

However, given the current situation, business resilience, and continuity in a post-covid world is quickly emerging as a key priority for leaders across the board. Despite ongoing cutbacks and layoffs, businesses will continue to rely on talent to survive and thrive.

As the world returns to work, now is the time to build a talent strategy that helps you do more with less. Building a successful candidate pipeline for critical roles can take years of work. And a good amount of trial and error. The good news is – we have some time until business gets back to normal.

So, HR and talent acquisition professionals are uniquely positioned to leverage this time to plan and develop the right capabilities to steer the ship forward.

Let’s look at how you can put the lessons learned over the past few months to achieve recruiting zen with a pipeline of qualified candidates.

What is a Talent Pipeline?

A talent pipeline is a set of stages that a candidate moves through. As they progress from a lead to an employee. Once each pipeline stage is completed, candidates advance to the next stage. Like most modern recruitment practices, talent pipelining has been derived from proven sales and marketing strategies.

Talent pipelining is proactive recruitment at its best. Building it will help you fill positions faster than Chinese firms can erect skyscrapers.

What’s more? You don’t have to settle. You can choose your pick from a highly qualified group of candidates who’re already familiar with your organization. The essence of a building a successful talent pipeline lies in candidate relationship management because you are no longer looking to fill open roles. But thinking about meeting future talent needs.

Every organization, regardless of size or the industry, stands to benefit from building a sustainable talent pipeline. In addition to better candidates, talent pipelining allows you to diversify your talent pool, deliver personalized candidate experiences, and improve your overall employer brand.

Organizations have had to make difficult decisions over the past few weeks. Especially in terms of headcount and budgets. As a result, candidate perception of organizations has also taken a beating. While the overall candidate sentiment is likely to be negative at the moment, talent acquisition teams have an opportunity to rewrite the rules of engagement with talent planning.

5 Steps to Building a Successful Talent Pipeline

A successful talent pipeline is often the result of strategic talent planning combined with employer branding. If you already use an applicant tracking system (ATS) or an integrated talent acquisition suite, you have a head start.

This five-step guide will take you through the fundamentals of building an effective talent pipeline:

Step #1: It All Begins With Your Employer Brand

At its core, talent pipelining is about influencing candidate behavior. More than anything else. How do you get talent interested in your organization? What sets your company apart? Why should candidates choose to work with you?

The answer is your employer brand. Your reputation as an employer will attract high-quality candidates. Even in a market that’s reeling from the effects of a global pandemic and calls for increasing racial diversity. Your brand reflects your organization’s core values, culture, and vision.

And it is set to become even more critical in a post-covid world. Where candidates can witness how organizations reacted to the crisis. It is not what we say, but what we do that defines us.

Some of the “best places to work” were also some of the earliest companies to announce furloughs and layoffs when business was slow. It just goes on to show how awards and titles can mean very little when the rubber hits the road.

Add to that the recent events that rattled our collective consciousness and significantly changed our perception about racial equity. This has also put organizations on the spot. Candidates and employees are watching keenly as organizations and HR teams respond to the unfolding crisis.

At a time when candidates can quickly look up information about your organization. From compensation and benefits to the work culture and advancement opportunities. Building a strong employer brand is no longer optional.

So, how do you position yourself as an employer of choice in an increasingly competitive talent market? Here are a few simple steps that can help you get started:

1. Career Sites

Most candidates will land on your career site through social media, job boards, or organic search. In a way, your career site is their first impression of your organization. Once they are on your career page, they’re looking to learn more about what you have to offer. And what makes you unique.

Use your career site to showcase your values, culture, and give them a glimpse of what life in your company looks like. This is where you show candidates instead of telling them the values you cherish as an organization.

Ensure that the messaging on your careers site is consistent with that on your social handles, website, Glassdoor pages, and company literature.

Check if the site is mobile optimized and supports popular internet browsers. Best-of-breed ATS and recruitment marketing solutions offer dedicated modules for career pages and easy integration.

2. Glassdoor Page

One of the most popular employer review platforms. Glassdoor is a go-to resource for candidates looking to learn more about an organization. With detailed reviews on everything from the interview experience to salaries and culture, Glassdoor is undoubtedly one of the most potent branding channels available to employers.

Setting up a company profile and encouraging employees to post their experiences can help you project an authentic employer brand. While also revealing shortfalls and potential issues across the candidate and employee experience.

3. Social Media

Social media has quickly become the dominant marketing channel. Recruitment is not an exception. According to Glassdoor, 79 percent of job applicants use social media in their job search. So, projecting a positive employer brand on social media is key to attracting the best candidates.

Most recruiters typically use social media for posting jobs. However, this doesn’t contribute to employer brand building. The best way to use social media for brand building is by promoting authentic conversations about life at your organization.

Celebrate employee achievements. Share real-life stories. Post photos and videos to show potential candidates what it is like working with you.

Example 1: Kronos successfully demonstrates the values it stands for through this post 

Example 2: Netflix does a wonderful job of tapping into the power of diversity with this video

4. Employee Advocacy

Building on your social media strategy, you can also look at employee advocacy as an effective branding tool. Employee advocacy is the word-of-mouth marketing equivalent for recruitment.

Identify employees who can act as your brand ambassadors and share the perks of working with your organization a wide audience. Candidates are three times more likely to trust your employees over recruiters to provide credible information about your work culture.

5. Keep Listening

One of the biggest mistakes an organization can make in branding: not listening to what people are saying. While we all love glowing reviews and positive testimonials, candidates are bound to have varying opinions about their interviews or their overall experience.

Instead of ignoring comments or reviews that are critical of your organization’s process. Respond to candidates with empathy and grace. This is your opportunity to show candidates that you truly care about their experience, and you would still like them to consider your organization in the future.

Step #2: Identify Critical Skills Gaps and Future Talent Needs

It is well documented how companies like Yahoo, Blackberry, and Kodak failed to keep up with the times. In a world marked by disruption and increasing competition, success is a result of organizational agility. In the people context, agility refers to an organization’s ability to align its leaders, workforce, and processes to meet the market’s changing demands.

Leaders today need to anticipate shifts in the economic landscape and respond by delivering the right skills in the shortest time possible. However, it is tough finding great talent unless you already know them. This means having a pipeline of qualifies candidates ready to fill your organization’s skills gaps.

But first things first. How do you decide the skills you need in your pipeline? Here’s where strategic talent planning comes into play. Strategic talent planning can help you assess the state of your current workforce and anticipate future talent needs.

Here are some questions that can help you get started with talent planning:

What are your short- and long-term business goals?

The first step in talent planning is understanding where your company is headed in the short- and long-term. Once you know where you are headed, you can begin acquiring the skills to help you get there.

For instance, if your organization is looking to expand its product portfolio, then you know that you’ll have to hire more engineers and product marketers over the next few years. On the other hand, if your company is looking to enter new markets, you’ll likely need more salespeople.

What skills do you currently have?

Before you begin hiring new talent, take stock of the people and skills you already have in your organization. You can perform a skills gap analysis to get an overview of your entire organization and plan your pipelining strategy.

Get all stakeholders on board. Including the C-suite, line managers, hiring managers, and employees. Determine what skills are missing at the team and individual levels. Line managers can fill you in on the current skills gaps in their teams.

You can also conduct organization-wide skills assessments, surveys, and interviews with employees to uncover skills gaps. If you have a workforce analytics solution, you can use it to get a consolidated view of your organization’s current skill sets and employee performance levels.

Additionally, you’ll also be able to analyze your turnover rates, new hires, and internal movement to optimize your talent pipeline. Once you’ve analyzed your current skills and underlying gaps in your organization, you can move to the next stage. Identifying future talent needs.

What skills will you need in the future?

Industry 4.0 and Digital 2.0 are set to bring massive changes across businesses. This means you will need to hire not only your current skills gaps but also your future work. Regardless of the industry you operate, you will need advanced analytical skills across critical business functions. Such as marketing, finance, human resources, and operations.

As artificial intelligence and machine learning become key drivers of the new world of work, your organization will need IT talent and processes to thrive in such an environment. To identify skills you will need in the future, begin by tracking your industry trends and collecting feedback from functional heads.

As a result of increasing automation, some jobs may become redundant in the future. In such scenarios, consulting with your learning and development (L&D) team on reskilling or upskilling initiatives is a good idea to broaden your talent pool. By now, you should have a list of skills ready for your talent pipeline. Both current as well as future skills.

Next, you need to source candidates to fill your pipeline.

Step #3: Design a Talent Sourcing Strategy

The objective of building a talent pipeline. This is not only to fill open positions, but also to improve candidate engagement, and increase conversions. Designing a comprehensive sourcing strategy will help you cast a wider net and enhance the quality of hire.

While you may already have a sourcing strategy in place, we’ve put together a few best practices to help you optimize your process and hire better.

Define your candidate personas.

A candidate persona is a research-based representation of your ideal candidate. It describes their traits, skills, age, and experience. Defining a candidate persona helps you tweak and optimize your sourcing strategy to find a near-perfect match.

The best way to build a candidate persona is by using historical data to unravel the key traits of high-performing employees at your organization. Workforce analytics solutions and feedback tools are your best bet at gathering this data.

If you do not have access to these tools within your organization. Good old-fashioned interviews and surveys can also get the job done. You can further enrich your data by collecting manager feedback on qualities/skills they feel are most valuable for particular job roles.

Approach internal as well as external talent

The current economic conditions are perfect for recruiters to begin experimenting with sourcing. Like businesses, recruiters will also need to do more with less. Shrinking budgets mean that TA teams can no longer rely only on external talent to fill skills gaps.

Identifying and training existing employees to take over managerial roles is much cheaper. According to the Saratoga Institute, the cost of internal hiring is 7 times lower than external recruitment.

What’s more? Your existing employees become productive far more quickly than new employees. They are already familiar with the organization. Managers also have a fair idea of their unique strengths.

As a recruiter, you cannot afford to ignore internal talent when designing your sourcing strategy.

Identify the right sourcing channels

Sourcing channels are the lifeblood of every successful pipeline strategy. They improve your chances of identifying good potential hires and building your A-team. Social media platforms, job boards, and online communities are all great places to connect with passive candidates.

You can use a combination of these channels to populate your talent pipeline. However, the key is knowing where to look. For instance, if you are looking to connect with product developers. You will have better luck on platforms such as AngelList, GitHub, or StackOverflow instead of Monster or LinkedIn.

However, for sales and marketing talent – job boards and LinkedIn will be a better fit.

Your candidate personas should tell you where your ideal candidates reside. How do they search for jobs? Do they use social media in their job search, or are they more likely to come via referrals? Answering these questions will inform your choice of sourcing channels.

Internships

Internship programs are certainly not a new strategy for talent pipelining. However, these programs are set to become more important than ever before. Especially for recruiters looking to build a diverse pipeline of candidates.

Recruiters can leverage internships strategically to deliver on diversity goals by making concerted efforts to engage with schools. As well as communities that work with underrepresented groups in the corporate landscape.

You are often likely to find communities that have their own programs to encourage growth, and teaming up with those initiatives is a great way to give back. While also benefiting from new and diverse talent.

Personalize your message

The next step is to match this information with your candidate persona to craft your message. Drip email campaigns and direct messages on social platforms can be useful for driving brand awareness and relationship-building.

Premium ATS systems and candidate relationship management (CRM) solutions feature dedicated messaging or campaign creation modules that can help you design drip and social messaging campaigns. Given the present situation, it is crucial to assess how your candidate communication strategy aligns with your pipeline goals. Like diversity.

If your organization has been struggling to find diverse prospects, launching targeted digital campaigns to engage with such candidates is a great way to build awareness and attract candidates who’ve slipped under your radar. Your messaging strategy should ideally be rooted in your careers page. And can be subsequently fleshed out across candidate touch points like social media and email.

Atlassian does a fantastic job of driving home the message with consistency:

Example 3: Atlassian’s LinkedIn post builds on its core message following from its careers site

Step #4: Engaging Your Pipeline

Once you’ve identified candidates for your pipeline, the next step is nurturing your relationship with them to build meaningful engagement. And engagement follows from a compelling candidate experience.

Every stage of the candidate experience journey needs to be seamlessly integrated. From the candidate perspective into an ongoing relationship. This is the foundation of a successful talent pipeline.

The candidate engagement journey defines how the value exchange between organizations and candidates develops over time. It ensures each touchpoint rewards the candidate by delivering experiences that are recognized as valuable by the candidate. Based on their interests, professional aspirations, and goals.

When adopting a candidate journey approach, recruiters often begin by mapping out all of the different touch points. And then define how the organization seeks to influence the candidate at each of these points.

However, this is a very employer-centric approach and doesn’t necessarily reflect the needs, expectations, and aspirations of the candidate as to how they see the relationship developing. So, how should you proceed? Segmenting candidates based on the stage of their journey with your organization can help you provide relevant, in-time content. That results in more applications.

Your employer value proposition (EVP) should ideally be a common theme across segments. However, the way you present it and the content formats that you use will vary based on the stage of the candidate journey.

Let’s take a quick look at the key stages in the candidate journey and the content you deliver at each of the touch points:

Image 2: Stages of the Candidate Journey

While the touch points listed above are certainly not exhaustive. They are some of the most significant factors influencing candidate decision. As we’ve mentioned repeatedly, talent pipelining is a long game and offers considerable room for experimentation.

Once you get the basics right for engagement, you can begin to tweak your approach. Or dabble with multiple content formats like webinars and virtual hiring events to improve recruiting outcomes.

Step #5: Choosing the Right Tools

This is the final step and, arguably, the most difficult decision for TA leaders. If you’re wondering whether your current ATS system offers targeted modules for talent pipelining and engagement, you’re not alone. Most ATS solutions offer excellent features for application management and career site integration.

So, you don’t need to overhaul your entire recruiting tech stack when building a successful talent pipeline.

You can invest in specialized talent engagement or candidate relationship management (CRM) platforms and integrate these with your existing ATS system. That’s the easiest fix. Solutions like Beamery, Symphony Talent, and TalentLyft offer a comprehensive suite of features and capabilities designed to engage with candidates at every step of their journey.

However, we’re also aware that a lot of TA teams might have limited budgets to work with due to the prevailing macroeconomic conditions. If you’re looking to do more with less, our suggestion is to use a combination of ATS, email, and social media tools to improve employer brand visibility. For employer profiles on platforms like Glassdoor, you will need to monitor them regularly yourself.

The two major potential problems with this approach are the lack of automation and managing multiple data streams from disparate systems. Nonetheless, this is also a terrific opportunity to get creative in the way you leverage content and each of these tools.

So, until business recovers, and it will, a bolt-on approach to talent technology can also serve you well.

Conclusion

Ultimately, building a successful talent pipeline boils down to how you plan, strategize, and leverage technology to support long-term business needs. As the demand for the best candidates is only set to increase, getting ahead of the curve will allow you to hire better talent.

This is an important time for recruiters. The landscape for candidates today is drastically different from the past years. Empathy, flexibility, and understanding will go a long way in building lasting relationships with candidates and successfully adapting to the realities of a post-covid world.

Business continuity is likely to be a top priority for you and your organization at the moment. Still, the relationships and the talent that you retain now will reward you with loyalty down the road.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Building a Successful Talent Pipeline appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

The unemployment rate for technical talent in the U.S. hit a 20-year low of 1.3 percent in 2019. According to a recent study by ManpowerGroup, IT roles are the second most hard-to-fill positions in the U.S. It is hardly surprising then that recruiters hiring for technical roles are having a tough time.

Thankfully, there is an upside for recruiters. A 2019 study by Stack Overflow that surveyed 90,000 developers from around the world found that while 16 percent of developers were actively looking for a job, a whopping 75 percent of developers were interested in hearing about new job opportunities.

This means the tech talent market has a high concentration of passive candidates. It also means that you are unlikely to come across tech talent on traditional job boards. So, as recruiters, how do you go about sourcing and hiring technical talent?

Technical Talent Sourcing: Getting the Basics Right

Whether you are a small 10 person organization looking for your next strategic hire or a large multinational hiring 30 developers for offices around the globe, the best practices for sourcing tech talent remain largely unchanged.

So, let’s look at some of the preliminary steps involved in your quest for top tech talent:

1.    Develop a Hiring Roadmap

Recruitment may be one of the more creative processes in HR. But, organization and planning also play a crucial role. Particularly when hiring for hard-to-fill roles like IT and product engineering. Mapping your existing talent with your future talent needs can provide you with a better understanding of what you are looking for and where you’ll find talent.

Project management or productivity analytics tools can help you understand how your current employees are performing. You also get a better sense of who’s doing what. Tools like Asana, Basecamp, Trello, or Google Sheets should ideally help you identify key skills and expertise gaps within your organization. A central repository of employee job roles and functions will provide you with a much better view of your current talent capabilities.

Now, once you have all of this data, you should be in a better position to predict your future talent needs.

Most organizations perform a strategy-planning exercise as a part of their annual budgeting every year. Unfortunately, talent acquisition leaders or HR teams are seldom a part of this discussion. HR teams are usually handed a fixed budget every year that rarely reflect market realities. Getting a seat in the annual budgeting discussion is key to building a successful hiring roadmap for tech talent. HR leaders looking to become a strategy insider within their organizations must be able to demonstrate the value talent brings to the organization. It here that you can lay down your goals, initiatives, and investments needed to rope in top technical talent.

2.    Determine the Scope of a Role

Once you have built a hiring roadmap, you have a better understanding of your tech talent needs for the year. You know what positions you’re looking to fill and timelines for each hire. The next step is to define what these roles look like and the value these hires will bring to your organization.

Job descriptions

A job description is your first opportunity to make a good impression on potential hires. Most organizations take a one-size-fits-all approach to creating job descriptions. Unfortunately, this practice is not effective when looking to attract top technical talent. Technical candidates often have very different job search criteria than their non-technical counterparts. Additionally, you may have roles that are completely new to your organization or unique to your line of business. Tailoring descriptions adapted to the context of your organization is crucial to ensuring the right match. You must define core tasks that the job entails and highlight any ancillary skills needed for product creation or special projects.

Most technical positions require some level of familiarity with the latest tools and technologies. It is important to keep in mind that while keywords are recommended, using too many buzzwords or jargon can distort clarity. Try to emphasize the specific tools and technologies that will be used in your organization and also mention in-demand technologies that are being used in your industry. Technical candidates tend to pay a lot of attention to the marketability of their skills when choosing employers, so, being offered the opportunity to learn new skills at your organization is bound to pique their interest.

Finally, cultural fit is essential for technical teams to succeed. Factors like diversity, inclusion, and equal career advancement opportunities are key considerations for potential employees. Highlight how technology teams collaborate to solve problems in your organization and be sure to mention core values such as innovation, learning, and transparency.

Identify your challenges

Get hiring managers and functional heads onboard the recruitment process and ask them to outline their biggest challenges and how they expect potential employees to solve them. Refer to your hiring roadmap and chart out what your short-term and long-term goals are. By understanding the gaps in your organization’s existing skills and expertise, you’ll be able to find candidates who can help you overcome them.

Design a competitive compensation plan

As much as we’d like to think otherwise, compensation is one of the most important factors that influence candidates’ decisions when it comes to accepting a job. Perform compensation due-diligence. Platforms like Glassdoor can provide you with the industry standard for technical roles. Use bonuses and stock-options strategically. It is common practice for technology companies to have arbitrary vesting periods in order to improve retention. This strategy often backfires as employees who are held hostage to their equity, will not be productive and will not put your organization’s interests first. Provide flexible compensation plans that inspire responsibility and compel employees to do their best every day.

3.    Speak the Same Language

A big part of technical recruitment is being able to speak the same language as your candidates. Your candidates have spent a significant time training and learning and they are passionate about their work. As a recruiter, it is crucial that you are able to speak the industry language you are hiring for. If your candidates sense that you have little idea about the job role and what it entails, chances are they won’t trust you with their careers. While you don’t need an advanced science degree or be a coding pro, you do need to be able to connect with them. A basic idea of programming technologies, team hierarchies, certifications, and tools will lead to much more meaningful conversations during initial screening and interviews.

Get familiar with platforms like GitHub and StackOverflow and join the conversation in online forums, community groups, and social media.
A rudimentary understanding of technical skills will also help you sidestep common pitfalls of tech recruitment such as prestige hires. You’ll be able to make more objective decisions based on your independent assessment of candidates.

4.    Use the Right Sourcing Channels

The low unemployment rate in the tech industry means that a majority of your candidates are passive candidates. So, traditional job boards may not prove to be effective for sourcing technical talent. To reach them requires a more strategic course of action and most importantly, the right channels. Let’s take a look at some of the best sourcing channels for technical talent.

GitHub

GitHub is one of the largest code repositories on the web. Developers around the world store their code and projects they are working on. This makes GitHub one of the best databases for developers and tech recruiters. Developers categorize their codes under programming languages they’ve used. You can search GitHub for repositories (projects that a person has hosted on GitHub or copied/forked) using up to three qualifiers: language, location, and followers. For reference, followers on GitHub are indicators of social proof. So, the more the number of followers a user has, the better their credibility. You can then filter the results by choosing Users from the menu and reorder as shown below:

A lot of users list their email addresses on their profiles, making it easier for you to reach out.

Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow is the world’s largest community for programmers, particularly coders and developers. Members on Stack Overflow typically use the platform to ask and answer technical questions and share their knowledge in the community. Users are awarded badges (gold, silver, and bronze) based on the number of answers they’ve contributed to the site. By performing a user search you’ll be able to view their language specializations, reputation, and answers. Stack Overflow also features a paid option for recruiters that allows you to post listings, search candidates, and create a company page to showcase your brand.

AngelList

AngelList is the world’s largest marketplace for startup jobs, particularly technical roles. The platform was launched in 2010 to connect angel investors with startup founders. AngelList has since diversified into a startup resource directory that also matches talent with employers. The platform offers early-stage startups the opportunity to connect with interested candidates and reduce time-to-hire. AngelList allows you to only contact candidates that have expressed interest in your organization which makes the hiring process a lot more faster. Recruiters can create a company profile and pitch their brand to candidates. AngelList remains a largely untapped sourcing channel for most organizations which makes it an even more compelling proposition for startup recruiters.

LinkedIn

While LinkedIn is one of the most popular sourcing channels for recruiters, driving meaningful engagement with tech talent is challenging due to the sheer number of candidates and recruiters on the platform. LinkedIn groups are a great way to break through the clutter and engage with talent. Industry groups on LinkedIn typically feature an active community of candidates and thought leaders eager to share their ideas and expertise. You can easily request to join relevant industry groups to gain a better sense of tech talent available on the platform. Additionally, LinkedIn serves a great branding platform for both employees and employers.

Joining conversations about your company or industry will help you position yourself as an employer of choice.
LinkedIn Recruiter is yet another helpful tool that allows you to access LinkedIn’s entire network of active and passive candidates. You can filter results based on location, job titles, and industries. LinkedIn’s powerful algorithm-based recommendations match you with your ideal candidates instantly. By combining the prowess of LinkedIn groups and recruiting tools on the site, you can narrow your search to the best-fit tech talent for your organization.

Tech Recruiting Events

While digital platforms and channels might help you connect with a larger talent pool, nothing beats in-person interactions when it comes to recruitment. Events for your local tech community such as hackathons, meetups, and career days can be very effective for establishing strong relationships with candidates and learn more about their career aspirations and capabilities. You can use this as a launchpad to build your employer brand and stand out as a thought leader in the industry. The best thing? You don’t need to spend a fortune hosting these events at a hotel or resort, instead, invite candidates to your office and give them a glimpse into what it is like working with your organization.

Referral Programs

Referral programs are one of the most popular and effective channels for hiring tech talent. Employee referrals can dramatically reduce your cost-per-hire and improve new hire performance. Referrers usually look out for their referrals and help onboarding them. However, it is essential to keep a few best-practices in mind when designing an employee referral program. New hires through referrals are more valuable when their referrers are around to familiarize them with the organization, which is why it makes sense to pay referral bonuses over a few months after a person is hired. So, start building your referral program to hire the best in technology.

5.    Measure, Optimize and Repeat

No two organizations are the same. Your workplace culture, practices, and values are unique to your organization. So, what works for some might not work for you. When developing your talent sourcing strategy for technical positions, it is important to measure the impact of every decision or process in your hiring roadmap. Find out what sourcing channels are most effective for your organization and double down on them. Your hiring roadmap and ATS solutions should provide you with the requisite data on the efficacy of your hiring practices. Next, optimize and tweak your sourcing strategy when required. Finally, repeat the steps that brought you the most success.

Talent is the biggest driver of competitive advantage today. How you go about acquiring, nurturing, and developing talent will determine your success as an organization. Put these strategies to use and hire the best in tech.

The post Introduction to Technical Talent Sourcing: The What, Why and How appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

3 Steps to Developing a Successful Retail Hiring Strategy in 2020

With Covid-19 cases growing exponentially in the US, retailers are scrambling to deal with multiple challenges. From plummeting sales and stalling supply chains to keeping employees safe and healthy to ensure they can continue working.

Malls and non-essential retail companies might have temporarily closed their doors until the pandemic is under control. However, grocers, supermarkets, and drugstores are looking for frontline workers to manage increasing demand and fill shortages created due to workers taking leaves for family or health reasons.

Companies like CVS, 7-Eleven, Kroger and many more are looking to hire tens of thousands of employees across their stores.

A recent survey by Renaissance Macro Research found that major retailers plan to hire over 750,000 full-time and part-time workers collectively to meet market demand.

It’s no secret that American retailers have been struggling since even before the coronavirus epidemic. In 2019, store closures in the US reached an all-time high of 9,302. While e-commerce platforms have played a crucial role in changing retail consumer habits, talent or rather, the lack of it in retail has also had a significant impact on the industry. Staff shortages and reducing service levels have become symptomatic of the dying brick-and-mortar retailers. For an industry that employs one in every four people in America, retail is in dire need of a facelift its approach to hiring and retaining talent.

People, not products, are the competitive advantage

We live in a time when customers can buy everything from groceries to car parts online. It’s people, not products that drive retailers’ competitive advantage. The best retail experiences in the digital age are centered on customer service and customer knowledge. That is why retail hiring practices can make or break your business.

Retail is an industry plagued with high employee turnover, cut-throat competition, and volatility. Therefore, developing a successful recruitment strategy is key to profitability. Fortunately, building an effective retail hiring strategy does not have to be expensive or complicated. Here’s a look at some of the essential steps for you to get started.

Target Retail Talent with the Right Job Descriptions

Retail jobs can be very diverse. From sales to customer service and stocking associates, skills required for each of these vary significantly. In detail, outlining the skills needed for performing these roles within your job descriptions are crucial to increasing qualified applicants.

Mention the success factors essential of every role. For instance, a sales associate should ideally possess good product knowledge, have strong interpersonal skills, and have prior sales experience. Similarly, if you are hiring for hourly workers, values and personality traits should be prioritized over experience.

Employee turnover is one of the biggest issues in retail talent management. You can reduce turnover and increase the applications by providing a brief view of the unique opportunities available to employees at your organization. Include information around succession planning or training and development opportunities to attract the best and brightest in retail.

While most retail jobs are entry-level, they don’t have to be dead ends. Telling candidates how they can grow and have a fulfilling career at your company will help you build a high-performance culture and ultimately improve your bottom line.

Build an Attractive Employer Brand

Employer branding is not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about retail hiring. After all, hourly workers make up a huge chunk of all retail employees and wages would determine their choice of employer, right? Wrong!

While the retail sector is wage sensitive, money is not the only thing that drives candidates to your organization. Flexibility, culture, benefits, and learning opportunities are essential considerations for candidates. Horror stories about bad working conditions and discrimination spread faster among retail employees than in other sectors.

Firstly, start by building your employer brand narrative aligned to your values, culture, career opportunities, and additional perks that come as a part of the job. Remember, your employees are your biggest brand ambassadors. Companies like Target, IKEA, and Walmart invested in creating a strong employer brand to position themselves as employers of choice in an industry dominated by minimum-wage jobs.

Social media, career sites, and job descriptions are powerful channels to showcase your employer brand to prospective employees. Inspirational employee stories, learning opportunities, diverse hiring practices are all virtual gold for attracting top retail talent.

For example, check out how Walmart uses Twitter to promote their employer brand across the globe:

“I learned to read, write and speak English at Walmart.” Sabina’s story = inspirational Her joy = contagious Find out why this 20-year associate from Columbia, MO, has us feeling all the feels: https://t.co/KWztdEBVVX pic.twitter.com/RB9UhfeoTn

— Walmart World (@WalmartWorld) February 27, 2020

Leverage Data and Technology to Hire Better

Retailers often receive a high volume of applicants. Thanks to high turnovers, this process is ongoing. Here is where recruiting solutions can become your most valuable ally. Retail-focused applicant tracking systems (ATS) or integrated talent management suites can help you streamline and improve your hiring process. Right from creating candidate personas to advertising and job posting, recruiting solutions help you automate the hiring process.

Solutions that offer artificial intelligence and advanced analytical capabilities also help you drive personalization at scale. Thus, improving your employer brand while broadening your talent pool. Use these solutions to understand where your candidates are coming from. As well as how they are interacting with your recruiting process to optimize your strategy and improve quality-of-hire.

Next, creating and implementing a step-by-step onboarding roadmap is vital to unlocking the potential of new hires. Recruitment solutions can help you bring your new hires up to speed by delivering information, resources, and training courses tailored to specific job roles.

In Closing

In brief, the future of retail is already here. Covid-19 has accelerated the pace of change.

To succeed with retail hiring in 2020, you will need to marry creativity with technology. These three steps will help you get started on your hiring journey and drive business growth in and beyond these trying times.

The post 3 Steps to Developing a Successful Retail Hiring Strategy in 2020 appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

However, that shouldn’t keep you from developing a great recruitment stack. Today, you can put together an incredibly effective recruitment technology stack without shelling out a small fortune every month on expensive software, in-house resources, and change management. If you use the right mix of solutions, you can develop a recruiting stack that meets your needs and addresses major recruiting challenges as you head into the new year.

In this article, we look at:

• What is a recruiting stack
• What does an ideal recruiting stack look like
• Which tools should you consider deploying
• Building a recruiting stack on a budget

So, let’s look at how you can use the most basic, inexpensive or even free recruiting tools to compete for talent with organizations using much more sophisticated software.

What is a Recruitment Technology Stack?

A recruiting stack is a bundle of technologies that recruiters use to find, attract, and hire talent. A recruiting stack will help you improve the business impact of your recruitment activities and allow you to connect and hire more qualified candidates. By using the best recruitment solutions out there you can hope to outperform your competitors in the war for talent.

What Does an Ideal Recruiting Stack Look Like?

An effective recruitment technology stack covers the entire candidate journey from awareness to onboarding. By creating a technology strategy that covers every candidate touchpoint in the journey, you can improve your candidate experience and significantly increase conversions.

An end-to-end recruiting technology stack for an SMB typically includes one or more tools for each stage of the recruitment process:

• Recruitment Marketing and Employer Branding
• Talent Sourcing
• Candidate Screening
• Interview Scheduling and Management
• Employee Onboarding

While an operational website and active social media handles are pre-requisites to deploying most of these solutions, additionally, you might also want to create a Glassdoor profile for your company to help potential job seekers learn more about your culture and employee experience.

Recruitment Marketing Tools

Recruitment marketing plays an integral role for small businesses looking to attract top talent. While some would argue that your employer brand and reputation grow organically, technology can certainly do a lot of heavy lifting for you. Providing a better candidate experience and driving visibility through content marketing and social media are just a few ways in which recruitment marketing tools help you position yourself as an employer of choice. Here are a few budget-friendly tools that can help you boost your recruitment marketing efforts and draw the best talent to your company:

1. AgoraPulse: A social media marketing solution, AgoraPulse offers recruiters a rich array of features to build social engagement, improve branding, and benchmark against competitors. It can be used across all major social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube. Additionally, its social listening capabilities and InboxZero enable you to respond to candidates and prospects proactively at scale. It is the one-stop -hop for all your social recruiting strategies. It also offers a 28-day free trial for users who want to take it for a spin before zeroing in on a subscription plan.
2. Zoho Recruit: The first comprehensive recruitment solution in our list, Zoho recruit features multiple capabilities including a dedicated CRM, career pages, automated job postings across popular job boards, customized email and SMS templates, and social media job postings. Zoho is one of the most affordable solutions in the market, with subscriptions starting at $25/user/month.
3. Freshworks: Freshteam by Freshworks is another end-to-end recruitment platform that offers cost-effective recruitment tools for SMBs. Built around a traditional ATS, Freshteam allows recruiters to create and post jobs, manage all communication in one place, build career sites, and connect to multiple sourcing channels. Like Zoho, Freshteam covers the entire spectrum of recruitment workflows to help businesses hire better. What’s more? Freshteam has some of the most competitive subscription options out there with the Sprout package offered free for businesses with up to 50 employees. For a free plan, Freshteam punches way above its weight, making it one of the must-have solutions for SMBs on a shoestring budget.
4. GoHire: GoHire is yet another excellent product for SMBs looking to get the most bang out their buck when it comes to recruiting. GoHire features advanced employer branding tools such as career pages, job postings, application forms, along with core recruitment modules like ATS, interview management, and talent assessment tools. With special plans for early-stage startups and SMBs, GoHire is very competitively priced with plans starting from $40/month.
5. Breezy: Breezy has emerged as one of the preferred recruitment automation solutions for SMBs for its feature richness and advanced recruitment marketing capabilities. Breezy offers candidate management with pipeline creation, automated job posting across leading job boards, candidate communication suite, and careers sites. It also provides a module for candidate sourcing as well. What makes a great option for SMBs? It offers a free subscription plan that includes a host of features that are typically billed as premium by many recruiting software companies. Paid plans start from $149/month, which include advanced features like mobile apps, task management, video assessments and more.
6. CareerBuilder: A long time player in the recruitment marketplace, Careerbuilder offers a comprehensive recruitment solution that includes modules for recruitment advertising, candidate sourcing and job matching. Best known for its resume database, Careerbuilder also sports some of the best recruitment marketing features as well. From job posting across niche job sites to social referrals, Careerbuilder is a great tool for SMBs looking to land qualified talent quickly.
7. TalentLyft: Geared for SMBs looking to attract talent through content marketing, TalentLyft’s recruitment marketing solution offers career sites, talent networks, career events, and careers blogs. With subscriptions starting at $49/month, TalentLyft is one of the most compelling best-of-breed recruitment solutions out there.

Candidate Sourcing Tools

As the war for talent rages, candidate sourcing has become one of the most important recruitment activities. Sourcing opens up new talent pools you had no access to before and enables you to reach out to not only active candidates but also passive talent who otherwise wouldn’t apply because they aren’t aware of your company or job vacancies. Let’s look at some of the most cost-effective sourcing tools at your disposal today:

1. HiringSolved: HiringSolved is a talent discovery platform that uses AI to automate candidate matching. The solution offers numerous integrations with ATS, CRM, and HCM systems to help recruiters streamline their candidate sourcing strategies. Its powerful search engine scrapes information from social media to provide recruiters with an accurate database of eligible candidates based on skills, talent, experience, education and so forth.
2. Monster: TalentBin by Monster is another database that gathers candidate information from across the web for hard-to-fill positions. TalentBin also automates recruiting workflows to stream your processes and tracks candidate engagement with your jobs. While typically suited for high-volume hiring, TalentBin subscription starts at $249/month which makes it appealing for organizations with 50 – 100 employees.
3. LinkedIn: With more than half a billion members, LinkedIn is easily the largest talent repository available to recruiters. LinkedIn offers two distinct pathways for recruiters to connect with talent – organically (you add them to your network) or by using the Recruiter feature that unlocks multiple tools to help recruiters reach candidates not within their network.
4. Hiretual: Hiretual is an AI sourcing platform that uses context-based data to help recruiters find the perfect candidate. It offers easy integrations with most ATS and CRM systems which helps you consolidate all data in a single place. Pulling in data from over 30 social platforms such as Angel List, Indeed, GitHub, Stack Overflow, and others, Hiretual offers one of the most extensive candidate databases. It offers a free chrome extension that allows recruiters to look up 10 contacts per week. Paid subscription starts from $89/month.
5. Pipl: Easily one of the largest identity directories online, Pipl helps recruiters find and verify candidates’ contact information for further outreach. Pipl charges a per-match fee starting at $0.10 and going up to $0.40. It is an ideal tool for recruiters looking to fill the gaps in their candidate database.
6. Indeed: The most popular job sites in the US, Indeed, has one of the largest candidate databases to help you source the right talent. Sponsored job postings on Indeed start at $5 a day and you have the option to create a budget that meets your requirements. You can also post free jobs on Indeed, making it a powerful sourcing tool for businesses of all sizes.

Talent Assessment Tools

Pre-employment testing and resume screening are time-consuming processes and cause major bottlenecks in hiring. Talent assessment tools and testing software have evolved over the past few years to automate screening and help recruiters choose the right candidates for open positions. However, as technology and skills become more specialized, you might need solutions that cater to specialist positions like a software developer or data architect. Here are a few screening pre-employment testing solutions that can help you asses candidates more efficiently:

1. HackerRank: Designed for recruiters in the technology industry, HackerRank is a technical skills assessment platform that can be used to create role-specific assignments conduct technical interviews. Powered by AI, HackerRank’s database is constantly optimized to help you make more informed hiring decisions. Pricing starts from $249/month which makes it a premium offering in this category. However, for SMBs operating in the software industry, it is a small price to pay for top technical talent.
2. Criteria: As HR leaders look for competency-based approaches to recruitment, Criteria’s aptitude, personality, and skills testing solutions provide a great way to make data-informed hiring decisions. With tests designed to assess cognitive aptitude, measure behavioral traits, and evaluate job-related competencies, Criteria boasts one of the most comprehensive assessment feature lists in the market today. It caters to businesses of all sizes with unlimited tests and assessments.
3. Berke: Similar to Criteria, Bereke is an assessment solution that measures personality and problem-solving traits that provide you with insights into your candidates’ ability to succeed at your organization. It also offers job-specific hiring profiles to help you assess candidates for unique positions at your organization.
4. Interview Mocha: Interview Mocha is yet another assessment platform that helps you hire for technical positions. Covering a wide array of IT skills, coding languages, domain skills and more, it also features easy integrations with leading ATS and HCM systems. With subscription starting from $150/month, it is one of the most affordable technical assessment solutions in the market.
5. Pymetrics: An AI-powered talent matching platform, Pymetrics leverages behavioral data to help recruiters find the right candidates. It provides bias-free and accurate data on your candidates to help maximize your chances of hiring high performers.
6. ClassMarker: Classmarker is an online testing and quiz platform designed to help organizations find qualified candidates easily. Pricing starts at $39.95/month.
7. Quodeit: Quodeit is a technical screening platform for businesses hiring programmers. It offers pre-built tests, a question library, and API integrations with major ATS solutions. It has a pay-as-you-go pricing model which is $5/candidate.
8. Vervoe: Vervoe helps organizations hire better through its dynamic skill-testing platform that supports a large variety of question and answer types, including text, MCQs, videos, document editing and more. It gives recruiters a fair idea of how candidates will perform on-the-job tasks. Vervoe also offers job-specific and soft skills assessments that can be customized and graded automatically. Vervoe is one of the very few assessment platforms out there that has a free Pilot plan for startups and small businesses.

Interviewing Tools 

While job interviews have largely remained unchanged over the past years, the shortage of qualified candidates is compelling organizations to approach interviews in a more structured manner. Moreover, the rise of remote work and the gig economy have broken through geographical barriers when it comes to talent acquisition. Video interviewing tools and scheduling software is driving this transition where employers can conduct structured interviews with candidates who live thousands of miles away. Also, the evolution of AI and machine learning have helped employers understand candidates much better and are empowering recruiters to make data-driven hiring decisions. For SMBs looking to tap into a rich global talent pool, interviewing tools can come in handy. Here are some of the best interviewing tools you can use to hire your next great candidate:

1. HireVue: Hireue is an on-demand interviewing platform that leverages the power of AI to automate interview assessment and predict job performance. It greatly brings down the time needed to conduct and evaluate interviews improving the performance of your recruiting process. HireVue costs between $25 to $175 per interview depending on whether you have a subscription or not.
2. Sonru: The next video interviewing solution on our list, Sonru, helps you schedule and conduct video interviews flexibly. Based on the questions and criteria you set, candidates can respond to those questions in their own time from the comfort of their own mobile devices or desktops. Sonru also provides API frameworks for all major ATS solutions, allowing you to seamlessly embed video interviewing into your recruitment workflow. While Sonru doesn’t have a fixed price subscription model, most small businesses can expect to purchase a subscription starting at about $100/month.
3. SparkHire: SparkHire is yet another on-demand video interview platform that makes hiring easier and faster. SparkHire offers some pretty useful customization options to employers like limiting think time and restricting maximum answer length. Additionally, its video messaging feature provides an excellent way for organizations to boost their employer brand. Plans start from $119/month for a single position to $599 for unlimited positions.
4. Shine: The video assessment platform offers customized assessments and scheduling for organizations looking to improve their candidate experience. It also enables recruiters to hire for cultural fit with its value-based assessment software. Subscriptions plans start from $200/month.
5. ConveyIQ: The company bills itself an intelligent candidate engagement platform and offers a host of messaging, interviewing, and scheduling features. ConveyIQ uses automated messaging to significantly improve the candidate experience and eliminate communication gaps. It also features on-demand and live interviewing capabilities, providing you with more flexibility to conduct interviews. ConveyIQ pricing ranges from $0 to $250 for the basic plan. Advanced features come at a premium.

Onboarding Tools

What does an ideal first day for a new hire look like? A ton of paperwork and a blur of meet and greets with colleagues? That doesn’t sound too productive, right? Employee onboarding has for long been a major pain point for organizations of all sizes. Today, when the workplace is becoming more employee-centric, it is crucial that you develop a structured onboarding process that helps new hires ease into their roles at your organization. Onboarding tools are key to ensure a smooth transition. Here are some budget-friendly tools that can help you deliver a delightful onboarding experience:

1. Namely: Namely’s employee onboarding software helps you streamline the process by centralizing all information in a single place, eliminating paperwork and physical signatures, and easy benefits enrolment. While subscription costs vary by organization size, Namely typically charges $15-$30 per employee per month.
2. Webonboarding: Webonboarding is a mobile-first employee onboarding platform that provides a paperless, hassle-free onboarding experience for new hires. Webonboarding enables new hires to understand the onboarding process and request changes to their contract even before they step into your office, making onboarding a lot faster and simpler.
3. Eloomi: Eloomi is a comprehensive learning and onboarding solution for SMBs. It provides pre- and post-joining onboarding programs that allow employers to design customized onboarding courses or select pre-built programs, conduct compliance tests, create automated learning pathways. Pricing starts from $0.20/user/month.
4. BambooHR: BambooHR is a comprehensive HR solution designed for SMBs with advanced onboarding capabilities. It helps you deliver a great candidate experience through its customized preboarding packages, welcome emails, IT checklists and more. Pricing for BambooHR starts from $6.19/employee/month based on total headcount.

There you have it. By using a combination of integrated suites and best-of-breed solutions, you can build a formidable recruitment technology stack for under $400/month. Depending on your industry the cost could go up if you invest in niche talent matching and assessment platforms.

So, what are you going to add to your recruiting tool stack? Let us know in the comments.

The post How to Build a Powerful Recruiting Tool Stack on a Budget appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Hiring the right candidate involves more than just assessing their technical skills and knowledge. Competencies play a crucial role in determining how successful a candidate will be at your organization. Each candidate brings their own set of traits and behaviors that help them to work effectively within teams and the collective competencies of all your employees contribute to the human capital of your organization.

At a time when organizations globally are struggling to plug their skills-gaps and are sourcing talent from unconventional channels, competency-based hiring is the solution to ensuring you have the right person for the job.

So, what are competencies and how can you identify them to make better hiring decisions for your organization?

What are Competencies?

Competencies are nothing but a combination of skills and attributes that determine how well your potential employees are positioned to succeed in their jobs within your organization. Competencies can broadly be broken down into two components:

1. Skills, knowledge, and qualifications
2. Behavioral characteristics and personality traits

While traditional hiring practices have focused primarily on the first component, i.e., skills, knowledge, and technical qualifications, much of business success today is driven by the right mindset and culture, so, candidates’ behavioral disposition becomes a critical factor for ensuring sustained, long-term performance.

A competency-based approach to recruitment begins with matching job roles (not only job levels) to competencies. This will also help you reveal current skills gaps within your organization. Next, identify competencies that relate to specific job levels – entry-level job competencies, mid-level competencies, mid-senior, and so on. These competencies can further be broken down into personality traits, analytical skills, or leadership abilities. Finally, ensure that your inhouse HR team is well equipped to identify and use competency-based hiring practices to recruit talent. Surveys and training programs can be incredibly effective to drive organization-wide adoption of a basic competency framework.  Focus on training recruiters for creating job descriptions and talent assessment models that comply with your competency framework.

Put simply, a competency-based recruiting system empowers talent acquisition and recruitment professionals to make smarter and better hiring decisions that directly impact the business bottom-line.

Why Do You Need a Competency-Based Hiring Process

There are several advantages to competency-based hiring. Here are five reasons why competency-based hiring is necessary for successful talent acquisition:

1. Competency-based Hiring is More Objective: Competency frameworks make it easier for you to focus on the performance of a candidate rather than perceived indicators of competence like educational levels or years of experience.
2. Reduce Turnover: By identifying the drivers of job success, competency-based hiring can help you identify candidates who are likely to succeed or fail at your organization, thereby, reducing employee turnover.
3. Thrive in an uncertain environment: We live in a VUCA world where vulnerability, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity threaten business longevity. By implementing a competency-based approach to recruiting, you can leverage your employees’ skills and talent in times of uncertainty or unanticipated change. Since competencies are readily transferable across work situations, competency-based hiring can help your organization function effectively even during a crisis.
4. Eliminate Bias: Since you already have a standardized framework of competencies, you focus on hiring candidates who meet your requirements regardless of their age, sex, ethnicity, religion, or other considerations that have little or no bearing on their ability to perform.
5. Reduce Time-to-Hire: By using a standardized questionnaire or framework, you reduce the time you would need to identify the right candidates for a specific role or position.

Let’s take a look at how you can begin identifying the right competencies through your existing recruiting processes.

3 Ways to Identify Key Competencies in Candidates

Now that we’ve established what competencies are and their components, here are three ways to identify candidates’ core competencies in your hiring process:

1. Conduct Structured Interviews: A structured interview follows a standardized sequence of questions designed to assess candidates’ technical, situational, and behavioral aptitude. These questions are typically created by hiring managers and recruiters and are administered to all candidates in the same order. Structured interviews ensure that the hiring process is consistent and there are minimal chances of bias as all candidates are asked the same questions. Additionally, structured interviews also decrease the time to interview, enabling organizations to interview more candidates efficiently.
   Structural interviews are typically designed to reveal abstract attributes like attention to detail, integrity, behavioral traits, critical thinking skills, and coachability.
2. Include Pre-Employment Testing: Pre-employment testing is another best-practice for competency-based hiring. Pre-employment tests are an objective way of evaluating candidates’ capabilities and traits. They yield a standardized score, rating, description or category, informing recruiters of potential fit. Pre-employment tests typically evaluate a candidate’s cognitive abilities, aptitude, personality traits, and technical skills. Pre-employment testing can help you reduce the risk of a bad-hire by applying the principles of data-driven recruiting to streamline and improve your hiring process.
3. Use Feedback from Managers and Team Leaders to Redefine Core Competencies: Your performance management system is a rich data source for identifying what future competencies might look like. Use manager feedback to redefine your organization’s core competencies periodically. Performance management tools and solutions are a great way of gathering your performance-related data in a single place to identify how technological evolution and changing workforce demographics are impacting the nature of your organization’s business. Use this data to create newer, more current competency frameworks to identify the right-fit candidates for your organization.

Recruitment is undoubtedly undergoing a seismic shift. The way we look at talent is gradually changing and a competency-based approach to hiring can help you get up to speed in these changing times. We’re hiring for roles that came into existence a little less than five years ago. As technologies transform business models, the rate of disruption will only accelerate, which makes it crucial for organizations to focus on what really matters – their talent. And identifying the core competencies that will drive your competitive advantage in the years to come should be a significant part of your growth strategy.

Conclusion

To succeed with competency-based hiring, you’ll need as much feedback as you can get on the process. After all, it is iterative and must adapt to changing organizational needs and job roles. If you need help figuring out which competencies to measure for specific positions, seek help from consultants, your skills assessment vendor, and most importantly, your line managers. Managers are best positioned to tell you what competencies to evaluate in each occupational area. Next, set benchmarks using your existing top performers – they have already excelled at their jobs, so, they hold the key to succeeding at your organization.

Regardless of the size of your organization or your business vertical, competency-based hiring is the answer to getting the right people with the right capabilities to further your organization’s growth in a hyper-competitive business environment. Lastly, let technology and data guide your decisions, but remember that recruitment is still a human-driven process, so, use instinct and experience when all else fails.

The post The Recruiter’s Playbook for Competency-Based Hiring in 2020 appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

With 2020 just around the corner, it’s time to think about how you can take your recruitment strategy from good to great.

Designing a bespoke recruitment marketing strategy for your business is a good place to start. Easier said than done? Well, that’s exactly what we’re here to help you with! Our recruitment marketing cheat sheet for 2020 will provide you with clear and actionable insights on building a successful recruitment marketing strategy for the new year.

What is Recruitment Marketing?

Recruitment marketing is a relatively new concept in HR which refers to the application of modern marketing methods to attract, engage, and convert top talent. Recruitment marketing is founded on the principles of digital omnichannel and account-based marketing (ABM) to improve recruitment outcomes. It can be thought of as relationship marketing in the recruitment context.

When used effectively, recruitment marketing helps organizations build talent pipelines, hire faster and better, and realize an excellent return on investment.

Over the past few years, recruitment marketing has evolved from siloed, stand-alone marketing activities to encompass the entire candidate experience. As consumer technologies continue shaping candidate expectations and influence behavior, the right approach to recruitment marketing is more crucial than ever. So, let’s begin by taking a look at the essential components of a successful recruitment marketing strategy.

Deconstructing the Candidate Journey

Recruitment marketing includes multiple moving parts – job advertising, developing an employer brand, building career pages, messaging, email and more. Without a structured approach, it can quickly become a nightmare for recruiters to manage. The first step to designing a successful recruitment marketing strategy is to map the candidate journey. A candidate journey represents the various stages a candidate would ideally progress through before taking up a job offer.

By understanding how they feel at every stage of the journey can help you plan your messaging strategy for each decision point. For instance, if you are targeting candidates who’ve never heard of your organization before, sharing information about the business focus of your company, vision, and values might be a good idea. Similarly, the next step would be providing them a glimpse into what working at your organization entails – your work culture, values and the like. From here on, you can begin personalizing your messaging and guide them further towards conversion.

Mapping the candidate journey makes it easier for you to strategically plan your campaigns and target the right candidates. This way you also end up filtering candidates and are left with the crème de la crème who are genuinely interested in working with you.

A typical candidate journey can be broken down into six major stages:

Recruitment marketing typically involves the first three steps – awareness, interest, and consideration. Here’s a quick look at each of these steps:

1. Awareness: The first step is targeted at job-seekers who’ve never heard of your company. This is an opportunity to build brand awareness and trust in potential candidates. Providing information about your company and making it easily discoverable is a good place to start. Here are a few specific steps you can take to start attracting candidates:
   • Social Media Marketing: Social media platforms and career pages offer an excellent avenue for organizations to use the power of content marketing. Posting regularly on your company’s social pages on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or even Instagram can help you build a loyal following on these platforms. You share posts about your organization’s work culture, pictures, and videos on celebrating milestones or events like your Halloween office party, and real employee stories.

     Figure 2: McKinsey Does a Great Job of Promoting its  Diverse Culture on LinkedIn

   • Content Marketing: On your career page, you can take a similar approach to familiarize potential candidates about what it is really like working at your organization. Storytelling through videos and carefully created content around your key business focus is an effective way to building your employer brand. Netflix’s career page is an exceptional example of branding done right:

     

     It tells potential candidates about what makes it one of the best places to work –  it’s values, technological excellence, and the culture.

     In both the examples above, McKinsey and Netflix successfully leveraged content marketing to build their employer brand, position it, and communicate their employer value proposition (SVP).

     Once you’ve cultivated a group of followers on social media and designed your career page, providing a clear call to action can help you engage your potential candidates further. It can be as simple as asking your career page visitors to sign up for your newsletter or your social media followers to share their stories in comments or using hashtags. This sets the stage for future engagement through emails and dedicated career handles on social media.

   • Word-of-mouth Marketing: Other important channels for projecting your employer brand through content are employer rating platforms like Glassdoor. Candidates are very likely to check what your previous and current employees are saying about your company. Moreover, Glassdoor also provides insights into the candidate experience for applicants. It is crucial that you include an employee advocacy program that encourages employees to share their experience on these platforms and social media.
   • Display Job Advertising: Attracting great talent to your website can be frustratingly slow and difficult in the beginning. Using display advertising is a great way of scaling your recruitment marketing efforts to land top talent. Programmatic display advertising can help you reach a wider pool of potential candidates and increase website footfalls.
2. Interest: Moving on to the next stage. Now your potential candidates are definitely aware of your brand and might have engaged with your messaging in the past. In the interest stage, you want candidates to begin considering you as their future employer. Targeted messaging and communications about your company should provide the push candidates need to start assessing their prospective employment with your organization. Let’s look at some ways you can develop their interest and guide them to conversion:
   • Email and Nurture Campaigns: Candidates who have crossed the awareness stage are likely to have signed up for your newsletter. Adding information in your emails and newsletters about open positions and including a call-to-action will encourage candidates to re-visit your career page and check specific job openings. It’s also a good practice to include a link to your career page or job posting to make navigation easier.
     
     Additionally, creating a personalized nurture campaign is a great way of keeping passive and potential candidates hooked. You can share further details with your candidates after they take specific actions – for instance, if they engaged with a video on your site on preparing for an interview with you, you can then share additional resources with them over email on preparing for interviews, mock tests, quizzes, and more. The idea is to deliver hyper-personalized content that helps candidates consider working with you.
   • Job Descriptions: You also need to look at your job descriptions before you invite potential candidates to learn more about your company. An authentic job description goes a long way towards making you a desirable employer. Using language that demonstrates the objectives, goals, and your values can create a real difference in how candidates perceive your company. It goes without saying that you must avoid language that connotes gender-bias in your job descriptions. Additionally, basic SEO principles hold good for job descriptions as most of your candidates might land on your website through the search engine.

     

   • Targeted Social Marketing: As we saw earlier, social media is one of the most effective channels for reach and candidate engagement. In the post-awareness stage, you can amp up your social marketing strategy through paid promotions and direct messages. Facebook job ads, LinkedIn Recruiter, and LinkedIn contact targeting are some of the most common tools you can use to get started. The objective here is to get candidates to your career pages to discover relevant opportunities.
3. Consideration: By the time candidates get to this stage, they are beginning to seriously consider applying for jobs at your organization. They’re evaluating you against competitors to evaluate the perfect match for them in terms of skills, values, and perhaps compensation. Now, you need to provide candidates with detailed information about the role itself to help them make an informed decision about employment with you. Please make sure that you are no longer selling them your brand or the job, but are providing them with authentic information on what the job entails, the parameters for success, and other specifics. Adding elements like chatbots on your career pages to answer FAQs can also help candidates decide faster. Overall, better transparency around the interview process and the application assessment makes a big impact on candidates’ decision.
   

   Top 5 Recruitment Marketing Tools You Can Use

   Recruiting solutions have changed dramatically over the past few years. The move from legacy to intelligent automated solutions provides you with more opportunities than ever before to build a killer recruitment marketing stack. Let’s take a look at some of the tools that you can use to boost your recruiting efforts in the new year:

   1. Beamery: Beamery is a leading talent CRM and marketing platform that allows recruiters to deliver consumer-grade personalization and an exceptional candidate experience. It offers dedicated capabilities aptly dubbed Beamery Attract, Beamery Engage, and Talent CRM for recruitment marketing. Beamery Attract enables organizations to build their employer brand from the ground up, build career sites, and manage recruitment events like campus drives, job fairs, and more. The engage module, on the other hand, uses data analytics and enrichment to deliver personalized engagement. Its CRM is also one of the most mature ones in the market.
   2. SmashFly: The enterprise recruitment marketing technology solution boasts of an AI-powered recruiting CRM that automates time-consuming and inefficient recruiting workflows. Emerson, the company’s AI-powered recruiting assistant, automatically creates new contact records and tracks every conversation to create talent pipelines for long-term engagement. Its CRM also features Pipeline Intelligence, an AI-driven recommendation engine that helps recruiters immediately identify and engage the most promising leads based on engagement and job roles.
   3. iCIMS: iCIMS acquired Jibe, a leading recruitment marketing solution provider, earlier this year and ended up with some of the most powerful recruitment marketing capabilities in the market. iCIMS’ Recruitment Marketing Suite now offers an end-to-end talent CRM and career site builder that helps recruiters optimize content for search engines and provides dedicated analytics and dashboarding support. Its Advanced Communications Suite integrates text, live chat, and AI throughout the candidate journey.
   4. Yello: Yello is yet another recruitment marketing solution with three distinct modules – Source, Engage, and Advance. Source and Engage are its two dedicated recruitment marketing modules with capabilities such as talent CRM, recruitment event management, candidate engagement, job boards and more. Yello can easily be integrated with your existing ATS or recruitment solution which makes it one of the most flexible solutions in the space.
   5. Talemetry: An enterprise-grade recruitment marketing platform, Talemetry, offers full-cycle recruitment marketing solutions. Key capabilities include career sites, CRM, job broadcast, analytics, employee referrals, and analytics. Talemetry also integrates seamlessly with other ATS and recruiting solutions, job boards, and collaborates with Google Cloud Talent Solution to provide AI-powered insights into candidate intent and engagement.

   Conclusion

   The job market is increasingly becoming candidate-driven as technology evolves – both consumer and enterprise. Job-seekers also have the luxury of being more selective when it comes to deciding who they want to work for. Given these realities, recruitment marketing is essential.

   Examining the candidate journey through the lens of candidate experience should help you create a successful recruitment marketing strategy that in turn enables you to develop a talent pool of the right candidates even before they apply.

   Lastly, building your employer brand and inviting candidates to apply takes significant time and money. Therefore, measuring the outcomes and tweaking your strategy regularly is a must. Check out our article on recruiting analytics for more details.

The post The Recruitment Marketing Cheat Sheet for 2020 appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Over the past few years, recruitment marketing has emerged as an essential strategy for organizations competing for talent in an increasingly tight labor market. However, competition has hardly been fair. Large organizations outspend SMBs by a mile when it comes to marketing jobs. The fact that big businesses tend to enjoy better brand awareness doesn’t help either. While it may seem that the deck is stacked against SMBs in the race for top talent, all is not lost.

Recruiting technology has emerged as a great equalizer with affordable, feature-rich solutions designed specifically for SMBs. Activities that were previously cost-intensive, such as, display advertising or job posting have become much more accessible for organizations with limited budgets.

A key innovation driving this trend has been the rise of affordable, programmatic recruitment, which was previously the realm of larger businesses with massive advertising budgets. So, how can smaller businesses leverage programmatic recruitment to land top talent?

What is Programmatic Recruitment and How Can SMBs Use it to Hire Better?

Programmatic recruitment is defined as the automated buying, publishing, and optimizing of recruitment ads. Programmatic advertising originated as a pureplay advertising solution that automated the bidding process with software. It found its way into the world of recruiting technology as recruitment became more digital and competitive.

Speaking about the emergence of programmatic recruitment, Amit Chauhan, CEO at JobAdX, a programmatic exchange, says, “We’re facing the most competitive hiring era, which means there’s definitely a shortage of talent but it’s not really a ‘talent shortage’ because there are enough people around. There’s just a big mismatch of skills as traditional hiring platforms are not showing the right opportunities to candidates.”

With programmatic recruiting solutions, organizations can set up dedicated budgets for ad spend and the cost per click and the software does the rest. The biggest advantage of programmatic recruitment over traditional job advertising is its ability to reach relevant audiences at the right time.

Most programmatic solutions use demographic data to identify prospects and deliver the right ads at a time and place that is most likely to result in engagement. Programmatic solutions rely on candidate browsing data, A/B testing, and artificial intelligence to optimize ad performance.

“As job seekers move across our network, we collect a critical amount of data which helps us understand what roles they’re clicking, what keywords they’re searching for, how they’re engaging with the jobs, and what makes them apply to a specific job instead of others. Before we deliver an employer’s job ad to one of our premium slots, we’re confident that it matches the industries, experience, location, and preferences of that job seeker on an individual level,” explains Amit.

As organizations look to promote their employer brand and connect with talent in new ways, programmatic recruitment offers an approach that is adaptable across channels and platforms. JobAdX, for instance, allows users to add video within job postings to make it more relevant and engaging for candidates.

“The power to entice the right talent by showcasing the company’s culture in a recruitment video has been widely acknowledged by employers but channels have been limited to social media or company career sites. As the only programmatic exchange that can seamlessly display video within the job postings across its publisher network, recruiters can now better engage the job seekers right at the moment they are searching for jobs and see quality conversions on employer branding initiatives in a whole new way.

“Ultimately, all of this improves the candidate experience and everyone wins – job boards see increased loyalty and conversations, while agencies and employers make higher quality hires faster and more easily,” says Amit.

Choosing the Right Programmatic Solution for Your Business

For a complete beginner, navigating through programmatic recruitment can be a bit tricky. One of the most important elements of successful programmatic recruitment is the solution. You need a solution that meets your business needs. For instance, if you want to attract a large volume of candidates, you might want to invest in a programmatic ad platform. However, if you just want to improve job distribution and get better-fit candidates for your organization, a programmatic exchange would make more sense.

“Firstly, understand your objectives. Is your top priority budget management, attracting a large volume of applicants, or improving the quality of inbound candidates? This will define whether you need a full-on programmatic platform or just better job distribution, where we play. We’re solely a programmatic exchange, not a platform, which means we apply programmatic ad buying to help optimize your spend but our focus is the targeting and delivery of your ads to the right candidates. If you’re looking for more qualified, targeted applicants, you’d want to work with a programmatic exchange like us. Programmatic platforms offer start-to-finish campaign creation and are great for budget management, but might be more than you need if you’re not looking for high-volume hiring,” says Amit.

The second step is setting your budget. Most programmatic platforms require minimum spends. So, if you have a budget of $5,000 to $10,000 a month, you could consider investing in a programmatic ad platform. On the other hand, if you have a more conservative recruitment budget, a programmatic exchange would be a better choice.

Lastly, you need to understand your bandwidth. “Many programmatic platforms out there are still complex and take time to implement. After getting on the platform, there might be a learning curve and getting to know it may take time. For an agency or a larger staffing company, that’s a much easier, must-have setup. But if you have a smaller recruiting team, then that’s a task all on its own. If that’s the case, an exchange is a better option to get you set up in minutes without the learning curve or resources,” Amit adds.

Ultimately, small and medium-sized businesses will benefit greatly from using a programmatic exchange. It helps you make your recruiting dollars reach your ideal candidates. And while big businesses may have more resources, SMBs can have better efficiency.

The post Can Programmatic Recruitment Help SMBs Attract Top Talent? appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

With 58 out of 169 companies having raised over $5 M in various financing rounds, investor interest in the recruiting space is certainly increasing. As recruitment becomes a key driver of organizations’ competitive advantage in a tight labor market with acute skill shortage across key positions, the market potential of the recruitment industry is only set to grow.

Recruitment Startup Funding Trends 2019

Here’s a quick snapshot of historic funding rends in the recruitment startup ecosystem and the ten biggest funding rounds in 2019:

1. Jobvite: The comprehensive analytics-driven recruitment platform raised a whopping $200 M in a private equity round from K1 Investment Management in February 2019. One of the first platforms to leverage social networks to match candidates with jobs, Jobvite, used the funding to bolster its recruitment offerings by acquiring Talemetry, RolePoint, and Canvas.
2. Andela: In one of the earliest funding rounds of the year, Andela, picked up $100 M in series D. The company that offers both coding lessons and jobs to students in developing countries is currently valued between $600 – $700 million. The company operates in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, and Rwanda with salaried developers working for companies located in the US and Europe.
3. Jobcase: The Boston-based open-access platform for job seekers and employers raised $100 M in a growth equity round led by Providence Strategic Growth (PSG) in late February. Jobcase helps white-collar workers discover job posting and reviews while offering employers a suite of recruiting tools. The business model is similar to LinkedIn where Jobcase charges candidates fees for accessing pages with information about job openings.
4. eCheng: The Chinese AI-powered talent matching and resume management platform bagged $80 M in series C financing round led by Cathay Innovation Fund and joined by previous investor Lightspeed China Partners. eCheng serves some of the leading businesses in China including Tencent, Alibaba, iSoftStone, and Vanke.
5. Neuvoo: One of the fastest-growing job websites, Neuvoo, received an equity investment of $40 M from Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), Canada’s second-largest pension fund. The investment is expected to help the company expand its global footprint and significantly increase its headcount. Neuvoo operates in over 70 countries and reported annual revenues of $57 M in 2018. Headquartered in Montrèal, Canada, the company also has offices in Europe and Latin America.
6. SmartRecruiters: The enterprise recruiting platform raised $50 M in a series D financing round led by Insight Partners and joined by Rembrandt Venture Partners and Mayfield Fund. The company offers an end-to-end recruitment solution including recruitment marketing, applicant tracking, and offer management. The platform has a marquee client list which includes Twitter, LinkedIn, Ikea, Visa, and Bosch.
7. AllyO: One of the first movers in the conversational AI space, AllyO completed its series B funding round with $45 M led by Sapphire Ventures and Scale Venture Partners with participation from Google’s AI fund – Gradient Ventures, Randstad Innovation Fund, Bain Capital Ventures, and Cervin Ventures. Selected as the Top HR Product of 2019 by Human Resource Executive Magazine, AllyO uses conversational AI to help organizations find more qualified candidates, automate workflows and glean in-depth insight into their recruitment process.
8. Personio: The German HR and recruiting platform closed a $40 M series B round in January, this year. The funding was led by Index Ventures and joined by existing investors Northzone and Rocket Internet’s Global Founders. The company’s clientele includes leading SMEs in Europe and abroad. Personio’s open API and multiple third-party software integrations make it an attractive value proposition for employers using an assorted variety of HR solutions. The company also acquired Rollbox, a Spanish API-based payroll solution in April to bolster its capabilities in the core HR market.
9. Triplebyte: The San-Francisco-based startup that calls itself a background-blind recruiting platform, raised $35 M in a series B funding round earlier this year. The company offers personalized online coding tests and technical interviews to help employers make data-driven hiring decisions. Triplebyte’s platform is aimed at candidates with non-traditional education backgrounds and career paths who possess high-level technical skills, which makes it a very compelling product for employers operating in the tough labor market today.
10. Nomad Health: Nomad Health, a clinician placement platform raised $34 M in equity and debt funding led by Icon Ventures with participation from Polaris Partners, RRE Ventures, .406 Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank. Launched in 2012, the Manhattan-based startup connects doctors and nurses to employers looking for new staff. Nomad Health lets employers hire for locum tenens, permanent, telehealth, and traveling nurse positions. The company aims to plug the massive talent shortage in the US healthcare system.

Funding trends for 2019 reflect the larger macroeconomic issues at play in the global talent marketplace. Skilled talent shortage continues to be one of the major pain points for organizations today and it is no surprise that startups solving for this problem have received the lion’s share of VC funding this year. Additionally, AI recruiting platforms have also raked in significant funding in 2019. As prominent VCs and investors like Softbank, Y Combinator, Lightspeed Ventures, Gradient Ventures, Randstad Innovation Fund, CDPQ, and more, focus on startups solving real-world problems using AI, we can expect to see a lot more action in the AI recruiting space going forward. While talent matching and data-driven skills assessment startups will continue to hold investor interest for at least the next two years, we’re likely to witness the rise of more industry-specific and specialized skills solutions.

With innovation coming from emerging AI powerhouses like China, Israel, Germany, and Canada, investor profiles in the recruiting technology landscape are also set to become more diverse. So far, 2019 has been a stellar year for recruitment startups and 2020 promises to be even more exciting.

What funding trends are you tracking in the recruitment space? Let us know in the comments below.

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“We believe that the experience we’re trying to solve for is the talent experience – from candidates to employees, from interns to retirement.” – Roopesh Nair, CEO of Symphony Talent

Symphony Talent, one of the first companies to operationalize the candidate experience with a full-funnel recruiting solution, today announced its acquisition of SmashFly Technologies, a leading recruitment marketing, and candidate relationship management (CRM) platform.

While the financial terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, this is undoubtedly one of the most significant acquisitions in the HR technology space. SmashFly has for long been at the forefront of the recruitment marketing and CRM market and counts many Fortune 500 companies among its clients. Together, Symphony Talent and SmashFly will serve nearly 750 customers globally across key sectors like healthcare, retail, FMCG, financial services, manufacturing and more.

In an exclusive interview with RecruitingDaily, Roopesh Nair, CEO of Symphony Talent said, “The digital era has accelerated and radically changed talent expectations.  The talent experience is the new battleground for talent acquisition and Symphony Talent is leading the charge to empower brands to differentiate themselves via their experiences to gain a competitive advantage.”

He believes this acquisition will help the combined companies to play to their combined strengths of technological capabilities and aligned vision in the market. “We believe that the experience we’re trying to solve for is the talent experience – from candidates to employees, from interns to retirement. This acquisition combines a powerful recruitment CRM and internal mobility offerings from SmashFly with Symphony Talent’s award-winning talent marketing technology and creative strategy solutions, which means together, under one company, we can really help practitioners create their strategy and accelerate their brand across touchpoints, across channels and audiences. It means a more unified and consistent approach to the career experience from talent acquisition’s perspective and how they deliver it to talent,” he says.

The acquisition comes at a time when the warning signs of a potential slowdown in the global economy are multiplying. Additionally, a tight labor market combined with the spillover effects of the ongoing trade war have created a challenging recruiting environment for employers around the globe. Nair views this as a key opportunity where organizations will look to position their talent as a key competitive advantage.

He says, “Smart and leading organizations are already doubling down on talent acquisition and are getting more and more savvy on the marketing aspect of recruiting. We’re seeing analysts constantly post about the increased investment in HCM technology, CRM technology, and marketing strategies in the space.

“It’s why it’s so critical for us to have made this acquisition and ensure we’re integrating and offering the best possible solution to enterprises right now (on top of also being talent-minded and acquiring SmashFly’s very prominent brand and people). You cannot have a leading, innovative business or brand without leading, innovative people behind it. The companies that have a higher standard and thinking around recruitment marketing, talent experience, employee engagement, and the meaning of a ‘job’ and ‘career’ today – plus the technology to fuel and measure those efforts – will have, and keep the competitive advantage.”

The leadership team at both the companies has deep expertise in the recruitment marketing and creative industries. Coupled with one of the most advanced technology stacks, Symphony Talent can now expect to win an even larger share of the pie.

Speaking about the future roadmap for the company, Nair says, “We’re committed to delivering on our roadmap as planned. Everything on the product roadmap Q4’2019 through Q1’2020 will be delivered and our expanded resources will open opportunities for quicker innovation.

“Our teams are currently executing on transition plans for the newly combined company. Our companies share a commitment to work through the transitional details and any inevitable issues as efficiently and with as minimal disruption as possible. We intend to provide more details on the integration plans over the next 100 days.”

The acquisition also expands the company’s global presence with operations in Belfast and Bangalore, along with its current full-service European headquarters in London.

The post Symphony Talent Announces its Acquisition of SmashFly Technologies appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Over the past couple of years, recruitment has taken on a pull approach thanks to a tight labor market and the demand for advanced skills. In doing so, recruitment leaders have looked to the marketing function, adapting successful marketing strategies to improve recruitment processes. Candidate nurturing is a strategy that borrows the principles of lead nurturing from marketing to help organizations attract, engage, and hire better talent.

What is Candidate Nurturing and Why Do You Need It?

Candidate nurturing is defined as a recruitment process designed to attract, engage and convert passive candidates through the distribution of targeted, personalized messaging across multiple channels.

A candidate nurture strategy relies on platforms such as email, programmatic advertising, text messaging, and career pages to engage passive talent from the instance of the first contact until conversion/onboarding.

 If you’re wondering why candidate nurturing is essential, consider the following statistics:

• 70 % of the global workforce is made up of passive talent who aren’t actively job searching, and the remaining 30% are active job seekers
• 81% of candidates believe employers continuously communicating status updates to them would greatly improve the overall experience
• 33% of job seekers want an automated email sent to them after applying
• 52% of candidates said that the biggest frustration during the job search is the lack of communication from recruiters

40% of candidates experienced a lack of communication during the transition period  Clearly, a lot of your potential employees are not actively looking for jobs and the ones applying, expect frequent updates on the status of their application. However, these are just your candidates’ expectations, what about your recruiting outcomes? Why is nurturing essential to your recruiting strategy?

5 Reasons Candidate Nurturing is Key to Your Recruiting Strategy

1. Hire for Cultural Fit

As a recruiter, you want to ensure that your new hires perform well at their jobs and adhere to your organization’s cultural values and vision. While we have tools to help new hires involved in their roles and improve performance, how do you create cultural alignment? That’s where candidate nurturing comes in. By providing candidates a glimpse into your organization’s work culture, you can easily familiarize them with your core values.

While social media is a powerful medium to showcase your culture, email campaigns around accomplishments, vision, and social responsibility are also effective for cultural alignment. These campaigns could take the form of a regular newsletter or a drip campaign.

2. Develop Your Talent Pipeline

Successful recruiters understand that recruitment today is more relationship-centric than transactional and the ability to build a strong talent pipeline leads to better recruiting ROI. Candidate nurturing helps you develop a talent pipeline and hire top talent by building long-lasting relationships with passive candidates without pushing specific job openings.

Identify where your ideal candidates spend time – are they active on professional networking sites like LinkedIn? Do they engage with emails or text messages? Once you’ve identified channels where you are likely to reach them effectively, you can begin introducing the idea of roles that could a good fit and see if they resonate. Over time, when you do have a job opening, you can reach out to your passive talent pool to fill it. It significantly reduces time to hire and cost per hire.

Webinars, social media live FAQ sessions, email campaigns, and social media communities promote two-way communication and help you stay on top of the candidates’ minds while building a talent pipeline for the organization.

3. Source Top Talent

It’s a well-established fact that social media plays a pivotal role in how people perceive your organization. Everything you post on the company’s social media page reflects on your organizational culture. And that’s why right from bootstrapped startups to large multinational corporations invest in building a social presence.

A positive organizational culture reflects a reliable brand and sends out a favorable message among aspiring applicants. Along with professional social media platforms such as LinkedIn, you may also choose to leverage Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to connect with the talent.

4. Avoid Last-Minute Candidate Dropouts

Recruiters have a tough time finding replacements in cases where candidates decline an offer at the last moment. Such instances increase the time-to-fill and result in additional recruiting costs.

While it is possible that a candidate may decline your offer for a better opportunity elsewhere, oftentimes, it is the lack of regular communication and timely updates that lead to uncertainty in their minds.

Keeping candidates engaged helps them understand your culture, what to expect once they get on board, and how they fit within the organization. Reducing this uncertainty goes a long way.

5. Improve the Candidate Experience

Candidate nurturing is a crucial step for improving the overall candidate experience. Nurture programs when planned right can offer a lot of personalization. CRMs and recruitment marketing solutions offer dedicated nurture and experience management capabilities that can help you identify, target, and engage candidates across different points in the candidate journey. Additionally, these tools also provide analytics and dashboarding features to help you measure and optimize engagement.

Additionally, regular email surveys help you understand how candidates perceive your organization, its culture, and provide valuable insights on how you can improve the candidate experience. It’s assuring for job seekers to know that their opinions are valued and helps create a strong employer brand.

Getting Started With Candidate Nurturing

As we discussed above, candidate nurturing is one of the most powerful strategies in the recruiter’s toolkit. Here are a few steps to get started:

1. Create talent communities that prospective candidates can join and initiate conversations.
2. Create content showcases your company culture
3. Be proactive in responding to candidate queries.
4. Invest in a talent CRM or recruitment marketing solution. Automation helps you scale drive personalization at scale.
5. Evaluate data regularly to optimize the performance of your candidate nurturing strategy.

The post Why Candidate Nurturing is Key to Your Recruiting Strategy appeared first on RecruitingDaily.