Imagine a world without telephones.

People mashed morse code into each others’ ears at 20 words per minute…and it wasn’t even fun! Today, we don’t even have to remember phone numbers to connect with the people we care about.

That’s the sort of night and day difference between manually managing your commissions vs utilizing the PaletteHQ platform.

There’s No S.O.S. in PaletteHQ

Join this info-packed demo with Jordan Blackwell to see you how easy your job can be when you bundle up the busy work and hand it to great tech. 

PaletteHQ tracks and optimizes the performance of your agents and recruiters, ensuring they are incentivized properly without the manual work. This is all streamlined via automation while keeping the complexities of your commission structure intact. 

To top that off, PaletteHQ will reconcile your CRM with your payroll system, eliminating cross-checks and providing you with real-time overviews to measure performance at a glance.

During this demo, you’ll learn:

• How to reduce manual work by automating commissions for your agents and recruiters.
• Get data you can trust by reconciling information from your CRM and billing system
• Discover how automation can simplify even the most complex commission structure
• How to save yourself time, money, and peace of mind with the unstoppable power of automation.

Hey, we all love learning about the newest, greatest tools out there. Plus, demos are fun.

Log in, kick back, and enjoy. You may just find yourself hanging up on guarantee dates, commission tiers, calculating payouts, and all those inconvenient blues.

The post PaletteHQ: The Golden Age of Commission Automation appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Imagine a world without telephones.

People mashed morse code into each others’ ears at 20 words per minute…and it wasn’t even fun! Today, we don’t even have to remember phone numbers to connect with the people we care about.

That’s the sort of night and day difference between manually managing your commissions vs utilizing the PaletteHQ platform.

There’s No S.O.S. in PaletteHQ

On March 21st @ 2:00 PM E.T. Jordan Blackwell will bring an info-packed demo to RecruitingDaily, showing you how easy your job can be when you bundle up the busy work and hand it to great tech. 

PaletteHQ tracks and optimizes the performance of your agents and recruiters, ensuring they are incentivized properly without the manual work. This is all streamlined via automation while keeping the complexities of your commission structure intact. 

To top that off, PaletteHQ will reconcile your CRM with your payroll system, eliminating cross-checks and providing you with real-time overviews to measure performance at a glance.

During this demo, you’ll learn:

• How to reduce manual work by automating commissions for your agents and recruiters.
• Get data you can trust by reconciling information from your CRM and billing system
• Discover how automation can simplify even the most complex commission structure
• How to save yourself time, money, and peace of mind with the unstoppable power of automation.

Hey, we all love learning about the newest, greatest tools out there. Plus, demos are fun.

Log in, kick back, and enjoy. You may just find yourself hanging up on guarantee dates, commission tiers, calculating payouts, and all those inconvenient blues.

RecruitingDaily events are recorded! If you can’t make the live show, just register, and we’ll send you a copy of all materials and the video after the show. 

The post PaletteHQ: The Golden Age of Commission Automation appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Although it doesn’t disclose many details about itself, Prelude claims to have hundreds of customers, according to TechCrunch. Among them are One Media, Duolingo, Cloudflare and Samsara.

In a blog post, Prelude founder and CEO Will Laufer said his company will become “a core part” of Calendly’s recruiting solution. Prelude’s recruiting operations platform, he said, “will continue to grow in combination with Calendly’s seamless scheduling automation platform.”

The deal hints at Calendly’s approach to building out specialized, vertical-focused products “starting with HR,” said TechCrunch. That’s a course change of sorts, because the company built its business on a general-toolkit approach. (The pandemic didn’t hurt its growth, for that matter.)

Calendly Founder and CEO Tope Awotona said the deal won’t be the company’s last acquisition, though he indicated Calendly isn’t planning a wave of buying. Many of the tools needed to grow the product, he said, will be built in-house.

TechCrunch noted that Calendly has come under increasing pressure from competing scheduling services from the likes of Google and Microsoft. The deal will help face down such threats, it said, and also smooth the way for Calendly to better serve the enterprise market.

Under the Radar

Laufer said Prelude’s existing customers won’t feel any major changes because of the acquisition. The company’s employees will join Calendly to continue their product development and support efforts. In addition, “our investments in product and customer success will grow in the coming months,” he said.

To date, Prelude hasn’t been exactly a household name. Founded in 2017, the company is well-respected but has raised just $2.4 million.

Calendly will leverage Prelude for its enterprise customers who already use its scheduling platform for multiple departments. The company believes an improved interview scheduling solution that integrates with ATS’s will help remove the friction that exists in the candidate experience “by changing how companies approach their hiring strategies.”

The Calendly-Prelude combination fits neatly into talent acquisition’s current prioritizing of automation. Tools that can remove friction from most any point of the hiring process have grown in popularity as employers struggle to manage the dynamics of an elusive talent pool, limited resources and the need to coordinate meetings with candidates who may hail from a remote area.

The post Calendly Wades Into Recruiting Solutions by Acquiring Operations Platform Prelude appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

There’s no doubt that AI is helpful, but when misused, both the candidate and employer suffer the consequences. Employers must know how to use AI recruitment tools to attract talent, whereas candidates have to understand how specific keywords can get them noticed.

In this article, we’ll help both parties understand AI and how they can leverage its benefits to overcome recruitment challenges. We’ll also examine the best AI tools industries should use.

What is AI Recruitment?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a science that trains machines to perform tasks initially given to humans. What results is automation and accuracy, which saves businesses time and money.

Since AI can be used to solve complex, repeatable problems, it’s endlessly useful for finding quality employees. Screening resumes and scheduling interviews takes time, but AI tools can speed up the process. This allows employers and HR staff more time to focus on other matters.

AI recruitment tools won’t replace sections of your human resources department. Instead, it helps recruiters discover passive candidates and utilize data-driven insights that allow their teams to make better decisions. When used appropriately, AI can build stronger teams.

Why is AI Important for Recruitment?

AI recruitment tools do more than save you time and money. They also help startups stay competitive because it introduces a wider candidate pool full of diverse choices.

Here’s how:

Artificial Intelligence and Automation

Recruiters are often asked to do more for less, but without automation, that isn’t always easy. When faced with tedious tasks like looking through resumes, recruiters may become less patient with unconventional candidates, meaning quality hires get lost in the process.

According to Dice’s Recruitment Automation Report, recruiters can spend 30 hours a week sourcing resumes. Why do that when you can use AI recruitment tools to do the following:

• • Schedule interviews via chatbots and calendar integration
  • Screen candidates based on a score of 1-100
  • Source potential employers based on culture fit

Keep in mind that your recruitment process will only be as good as the person using it. It’s essential to look up a few great resume examples that work with AI tools before using them.

Artificial Intelligence and Personalization

AI recruitment tools aren’t just helpful in attracting hires; they can also be beneficial for every stage of the employee lifestyle. With AI tools, you can help employees reach their goals faster.

• • Candidates will have personalized experiences and job recommendations based on their search history, profile, location, similar persona and similar job openings.
  • Employees can be offered the same features as external candidates by supplying job referrals in the employer’s network based on previous employers and references.
  • Recruiters can create their own personalized pipeline that matches a candidate’s compatibility automatically, which also helps them rediscover past candidates.

A fully customizable recruitment tool can still inject personality into talent acquisition.

Artificial Intelligence and Analytics

When an employer doesn’t use AI tools for recruitment, they’re missing out on valuable data that they could use to improve their talent acquisition process. By analyzing data, businesses:

• • Can discover best-fit job seekers and qualified candidates
  • Tap into cloud-sourced suggestions in the platform
  • Will obtain data trends and view more dynamic talent pools
  • Start to understand what candidates want in the recruitment process

With data and analytics, recruiters can lower their time and cost per hire metrics.

What Challenges Come With AI Recruitment?

While AI recruitment can be helpful in many ways, there are things that hold it back. When implementing AI recruitment software, make a plan that overcomes the following shortcomings.

Replacement Fears

Your employees are afraid of being replaced by AI software, and that fear shouldn’t be understated or laughed off. It’s essential to explain how AI tools help the HR department, rather than letting that fear fester, as it may make employees unwilling to accept the new change.

Training Challenges

You must train your staff on how to use AI programs effectively, as it increases their usefulness. HR staff and recruiters should be aware of SEO keyword practices and what a good score looks like. They should also know how to spot keyword stuffers or candidates who can game the system.

Acquisition Difficulties

AI software isn’t perfect. Your candidates may use synonyms of keywords you’re looking for, which makes them appear less qualified than another candidate. While it’s a good idea to add synonyms to your AI software, it’s also important to manually review some resumes.

Lack of Bias Control

While AI recruitment software was initially created to remove bias from the hiring process, employers may input keywords that unintentionally cause bias. For example, geographic or academic keywords may cause HR to gloss over qualified applicants immediately.

Unusable Data

When implementing AI software, you have to make sure that the data flowing into it is fed by a network of candidates, employees, recruiters and job descriptions. Not all technology partners will share data across multiple businesses, but you need this to improve your hiring practices.

What AI Recruitment Tools are Available?

Recruitment software comes in many forms, but they typically come with the following core functionalities: search, personalization, insights and conversational/automatic chatbots.

Search Functionality

For career sites to deliver relevant, accurate results, they need a quality search tool. Any tool that provides inconclusive or irrelevant results will populate candidates that don’t fit the job description. However, semantic search seeks to understand human language and context.

Chatbot Functionality

Recruitment chatbots are able to understand a candidate’s personality, which helps employers match them with their company culture. Job sites get a lot of use out of chatbots that can direct candidates to the right jobs, but it also allows HR to talk to candidates using natural language.

Insight Functionality

With fit-based and engagement-based scoring, AI cloud-based tools can discover and rediscover job seekers. AI tools are able to put candidates into different categories and save resumes for a later date, which shortens the talent acquisition process the next time around.

Personalization Functionality

Tools that offer personalization can deliver tailored content for employees and candidates who are looking for specific job titles or careers. Not only that, but recruitment teams can match skills and compatibility with a hands-off approach, which makes their talent pool even larger.

Conclusion

AI recruitment tools aren’t complicated, but they can take a bit of time and energy to set up. Once you and your teams are well-versed in the software’s features, you’ll be able to expand your talent pool and spend less time on talent acquisition. This gives you more time to onboard candidates.

The post Recruiting Intelligence: Using AI Recruitment Tools to Assess Human Talent and Capacity appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

A study of TA trends by the HCM research firm Aptitude Research – “Top TA Tech Trends in 2022” – identified a number of concerns on the part of technology customers, including support for DEI, AI matching of candidates to jobs, expanded internal mobility features, programmatic job advertising and greater candidate communication features.

Aptitude Research founder and Chief Analyst Madeline Laurano said 72% of companies plan to invest in new technology during 2022. As a result, talent acquisition leaders are under pressure to adopt the latest innovations in a short amount of time.

“Traditional providers are reinventing themselves, startups are emerging overnight and new categories are being created,” Laurano said. “Talent acquisition buyers have more opportunities, but they also face new pressures when considering remote work, candidate communication and employer brand.”

More Details

The study found companies want their talent acquisition systems to be more than a workflow or a traditional ATS. They’re looking for systems that incorporate features for recruitment marketing, onboarding and internal mobility. “The modern talent acquisition system is an end-to-end platform that supports attracting, recruiting and hiring talent,” the study said.

On AI matching, TA providers have emphasized AI matching over the past year, while many have also invested in both candidate-centric and employer-centric matching.

Companies are looking closely at internal mobility as it relates to talent acquisition. While most providers offer basic capabilities such as dedicated career sites and personalized communication for internal hires, only a few providers go deeper with features such as skills frameworks, succession planning and career development.

In addition, employers want their TA stack to account for integration, data management and automation. “Companies that achieve the most success with their talent acquisition systems are paying close attention to this layer of technology,” the study said.

Of the companies using programmatic job advertising, 90% are either continuing to invest or plan to increase their investment this year. Unlike traditional job advertising, which can be slow and time-consuming, a programmatic approach solves immediate needs by offering greater efficiency.

“Companies state that the key driver for technology decisions is reducing time-to-fill and improving overall efficiency,” the study said. “By streamlining advertising and targeting the right candidates, the process of attracting and recruiting talent improves significantly.”

Aptitude also found that 42% of companies are either investing or planning to invest in conversational AI during 2022. “Candidate communication is a critical part of improving the candidate experience, especially in a remote world,” the study said.

The post Need for Efficiency Drives Talent Acquisition Technology Decisions appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Outreach automation does not = a poor candidate experience.

It adds efficiency and effectiveness to your daily routine, and there are ways to reach out to candidates like a human, not a bot, through automation.

Greg Hawkes spent an hour online with us for a session focused all on the “Do’s and Don’ts” of Recruitment Automation – from a job seeker perspective.

Watch to learn how to automate your recruitment workflows in a way that will elevate your response rates and boost your candidate experience.

Takeaways

• All in one Sourcing and Recruitment platforms
• Strategies in candidate identification (and how to scrape those pipelines)
• Do’s and Don’ts to increase response rates
• Drip Campaign resources to Automate outreach and engagement

Plus

• Greg’s 4 best scraping tools, plus other scrapers and automation tools
• Ways to find contact info
• OSINT as a mindset – tools to unlock contact info
• LISTSERV infiltrations
• How to automate outreach and messaging
• The Virtual World of conferences & events, TikTok, video & streaming tech

So stop playing “Red Light, Green Light” with your candidates and learn how this is all about inclusion, not elimination.

You’ll walk away with a game plan, strategies, tools, and resources, all driven by a candidate centered focus.

The post Recruitment Automation and the Job Seeker Perspective appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Outreach automation does not = a poor candidate experience. It adds efficiency and effectiveness to your daily routine, and there are ways to reach out to candidates like a human, not a bot, through automation.

Greg Hawkes has offered to come online with all of us for a session focused all on the “Do’s and Don’ts” of Recruitment Automation – from a job seeker perspective.

You’ll learn how to automate your recruitment workflows in a way that will elevate your response rates and boost your candidate experience.

We’ll talk about:

Outreach.

Inclusion.

Flexibility.

Feeling valued.

And of course, TikTok. With Greg, there will always be TikTok.

So stop playing “Red Light, Green Light” with your candidates and learn how this is all about inclusion, not elimination.

You’ll walk away with a game plan, strategies, tools, and resources, all driven by a candidate centered focus.

Takeaways

• All in one Sourcing and Recruitment platforms
• Strategies in candidate identification (and how to scrape those pipelines)
• Do’s and Don’ts to increase response rates
• OSINT tools to unlock contact info
• Drip Campaign resources to Automate outreach and engagement

The post Recruitment Automation and the Job Seeker Perspective appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

PandoLogic acquired Wade & Wendy, a provider of conversational recruiting technology. The company said the acquisition positions it as the only programmatic advertising provider that will be able to define quality applicants without the bias that comes with human involvement. Adding Wade & Wendy’s conversational AI to pandoIQ will deliver a more personalized application and candidate experience, PandoLogic said. Wade & Wendy automates the scheduling of candidate interviews, and addresses time-consuming tasks such as sourcing and screening.

Betterworks received an additional $61 million from current investors, bringing its funds raised to date to $126 million. The company said it continues to lead the OKR and performance management marketplace, and has improved its technology through product development and acquisitions, including that of Hyphen, now called Betterworks Engage.

Workrise, a workforce management platform for skilled trades, raised a $300 million Series E round led by Baillie Gifford and new investor Franklin Templeton. Workrise connects skilled laborers with overv500 infrastructure and energy companies, manages payroll and benefits, and provides access to training.

Freelance management platform Worksome raised $13 million in A funding round. The company said it will use the funds to accelerate their growth in the U.S. and other global markets. Worksome is an end-to-end platform focused on managing and paying freelancers and contractors.

Reward Gateway will be acquired by the private equity firms Abry Partners and Castik Capital. Previously controlled by Great Hill Partners, the company said it’s seen more than 180% growth in revenue since 2015 and currently supports more than 1,900 customers with over 5 million employees globally.

Workday and Crown Commercial Service signed a memorandum of understanding to serve the UK’s public sector with expanded cloud services. CCS, the UK’s largest public procurement organization, helps UK agencies achieve maximum commercial value when procuring common goods and services.

HireRight announced an integration partnership with ATS provider Fountain to support employers with high-volume hiring needs. The integration offers employers streamlined workflows to move candidates through the hiring process, track the status of screening orders and provide an enhanced experience for applicants.

The post HCM Talent Technology Roundup May 28, 2021 appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

In fact, 93% of the Fortune 500 use AI poorly, which means they’re not delivering the level of personalization candidates have come to expect, according to Phenom’s 2021 State of Candidate Experience benchmark report.

Candidates seek the same personalized experience they see in their personal lives during their job search, Phenom said. Advanced technology—like AI—is the foundation of many services employers leverage to deliver relevant information in real time.

The stuff works. According to Phenom, chatbots that answer questions and present relevant jobs can double candidate leads and increase apply rates. By automating manual tasks such as screening and scheduling, they also improve recruiter productivity.

What Employers Don’t Do

The report identified a number of things employers don’t do: Some 94% don’t provide job recommendations based on their career site’s browsing history. Ninety-one percent don’t present job recommendations based on a candidate’s profile. Also, 91% don’t display recently viewed jobs. And notably, 99% don’t share an application’s status after the initial email used to confirm submission.

All that’s not helping employers who bemoan the lack of qualified candidates to work with. “The digital revolution accelerated by the pandemic has only increased candidate expectations for seamless, exceptional talent experiences,” said Phenom CEO Mahe Bayireddi. “Companies that deliver the most personalized talent journeys will be at an advantage when competing for future employees.”

During the Covid-19 pandemic, HR and recruiting teams that expanded their use of advanced technology were in a better position to (virtually) hire, grow their talent communities, upskill employees and reach talent goals, Phenom said.

While the report focuses on the current state of candidate experience across the Fortune 500, Phenom points out that employers should be mindful of every key stakeholder experience in their process. The relationships among candidates, employees, recruiters and managers are all interconnected, it said, and neglecting even one can undermine an employer’s ability to hire, develop and retain talent.

The post Most Large Employers Aren’t Using AI, Despite Hype appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

There’s no room for error under such circumstances because hiring strong candidates is what can make or break your business and determine its future.

Although high-volume hiring is similar to regular hiring, some specific strategies and best practices can help you handle an extraordinary number of applicants.

Hire for Culture Fit

Strong company culture is the bedrock of every successful business.

That’s why hiring for culture fit should be your guiding principle, especially when you’re about to bring a number of new people into your organization.

In other words, it’s crucial to establish the structure of your ideal team and start with key roles and the must-have skills for people in each of these roles. If there are some secondary positions, deal with those later in the second wave of hiring.

By prioritizing the required, non-negotiable skills and identifying non-essential ones, you’ll prevent driving off good candidates. Think about whether there’s a minimum of years of experience that a certain position requires or holding particular degrees or certificates, as well as what criteria you are flexible on.

This way, you’ll attract a number of potential hires to the initial screening, during which you’ll be able to leave your job description aside for a moment and see how some of these people fit into your desired company culture.

And now comes the most important part – how would you describe your company culture? What are your main principles and core values? Are you looking for team-oriented people or individuals who prefer to work by themselves and are ready to handle pressure and tight deadlines?  

All these soft skills play an important role when it comes to team dynamics, so take them into consideration during the high-volume hiring process.

Leverage Referrals

Don’t expect that posting a job on your company’s website or job boards will be enough for high-volume hiring. The best way to fill a number of positions concurrently is by leveraging referrals. That way, you’ll be able to ensure a steady stream of good and reliable candidates.

According to 55% of companies, referrals reduce hiring costs, while 49% report that employees who are hired through referrals stay longer. It’s also worth mentioning that referred candidates can be vetted and hired after two weeks, while the entire process usually takes between 4-5 weeks.

It’s only logical that your best and hardest-working employees know other similar people who would be great additions to your startup. Of course, this doesn’t mean that a referral strategy is 100% flawless – there will be occasional misses. But, in general, the odds of finding top talent through employee referrals are high.

You can even incentivize not only your top performers but all your employees with monetary rewards to refer their friends and former co-workers.

Simplify Communication with Your Applicants

When it comes to the initial screening process, you should speed it up using a text campaign.

Instead of asking your applicants to fill out long forms, it’s much better to screen and vet them using simple questions that reflect your needs and requirements.

For example, questions such as “Do you have a driver’s license?” or “Do you have a Microsoft Office Specialist certificate?” can help you narrow down your pool of applicants and eliminate those who don’t have the necessary qualifications.

This is a great way to accelerate the screening and hiring process significantly and allow your recruiters to focus on those who passed the first hurdle.

Automate the Process

New technologies can be of tremendous help to recruitment specialists, especially when they have to deal with high-volume hiring. Automating certain parts of the workflow can facilitate their job and assist them in finding the right candidates quickly and effortlessly.

Given that most people are on social media, it’s only logical to look for your next hires on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter. You can use automation tools to source candidates by scanning your existing employees’ connections or creating a lookalike audience and targeting it with ads on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Besides social recruiting, you can use AI-powered tools for screening resumes and identifying the candidates that are fit to be interviewed.

Chatbots are another great addition to your recruitment team, as they can be used to collect relevant information from your candidates, notify them about the latest developments, answer the most common questions, and schedule interviews. These algorithms significantly improve the way companies engage with and nurture candidates.

Don’t Neglect Retention

When you’re expanding and increasing the staff size, it’s crucial not to neglect retention.

First of all, you should make sure to keep your existing employees happy and satisfied. It’s them who enabled your startup’s growth, so it’s important to show them your gratitude and debunk the dangerous “everyone’s replaceable” cliché.

Offer them training programs, corporate consulting and coaching, and other perks that could additionally boost their motivation and help them adjust to the change in the workplace.

In other words, treat your existing employees with respect as they also contribute to your hiring efforts when they share their work experiences with others on social media and promote your corporate culture, which in turn attracts suitable candidates.

Similarly, the climate in your startup is a key factor in how your new hires will adjust, so it’s important to obtain regular feedback from existing employees and find out what they think about company expansion as well as whether your company culture is changing for the worse.

Finally, properly onboard your new hires because that’s how you’ll reduce staff turnover, which is expensive both in terms of money and time.

High-volume hiring is tough, especially for startups, but besides sticking to the best practices for finding and attracting top talent, follow these tips to help you assess and vet your candidates more efficiently.

The post 5 Tips on High-Volume Hiring For Startups appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Even brick-and-mortar companies underwent an evolution of sorts. Retail giant Walmart, for instance, tripled its online revenue in 2020 Q3. At the same time, Home Depot Mexico gained 70% of new online customers, topping its US parent. Businesses have pivoted and thrived.

Thanks to multiple Coronavirus vaccination drives across the world, we might finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. Yet, companies at large still follow an inconsistent and unpredictable recovery path even in 2021.

More emphasis is given to ensuring that digital job evaluations and other strategic workforce planning tools are used to re-align the company structures with the new business realities in the post-COVID-19 world. That is where HR technology solutions come in.

What has changed for 2021?

As we navigate our way in 2021, HR leaders particularly are expected to use a plethora of tools to deliver a better employee experience and offer tech-driven solutions to address both new and persistent problems in the workplace.

Standard HR tools are used to store company and employee data, automate daily and repetitive processes and leverage analytic capabilities in order to drive strategic decision-making.

Depending on the platform, they manage many functions. From recruitment to onboarding, as well as payroll, performance management, and internal communication.

Let’s explore six digital HR tech trends that are set to rock the New Year:

1. HRMS finds users on a massive-scale

As of 2019, an increasing number of large companies (47% globally) possess a licensed or on-premise HR management system or HRMS.

Moreover, ever since the pandemic swept the world by its feet — not in a good way — and forced professionals worldwide to go remote, many companies are less than thrilled by the lack of control they have over their employees.

Naturally, the Coronavirus outbreak has caused a significant surge in the online interest in remote working policies — and the importance of using HRMS.

On the platform, companies can monitor KPIs to measure employee performance, share files and resources, automate repetitive tasks, and support employees who are pursuing training and development programs.

The latter can feed data via their hand-held tool, consume company-related news or professional development content, and request leaves and track approvals. Employees can ensure transparent communication with their managers and team members

The HR department, on the other hand, can swiftly convey employee-specific vigilance and off-the-record policy updates amongst the now-distributed and remote teams.

2. Gig workers become an integral part of the workforce

For many years, people viewed freelance and contract jobs as supplementary options to full-time employment. However, that is not true anymore. According to a 2019 report, only 8% of companies have established processes to manage and develop alternative workforce sources.

On the other hand, 65% of them already see freelancers and contractors as an essential part of their day-to-day operations. Although HR was involved in sourcing, interviewing, and hiring freelancers only about half the time or less, it is predicted that it will change in 2021.

The good news is 75% of HR departments support sourcing gig workers today, and 66% of them negotiate work arrangements.

HR tools such as Zoho People, Breezy HR, and ADP can be used to manage payout and tenures and necessary activities like tracking attendance and leaves.

Similarly, talent marketplaces like Kaggle help them generate tangible returns for the company regarding the potential and value offered by freelancers and contractors. Full-time employees and freelancers can collaborate to achieve goals.

3. Recruitment leverages Artificial Intelligence

In 2021, we will see HR leveraging data, intelligent algorithms, and social listening tools to make their recruitment drives more effective. Although we have seen application tracking systems capturing the online resume and managing the end-to-end recruiting process before, we have a long way to go.

IBM, for example, uses AI to analyze a potential hire’s social media shares, including their facial expressions and sentences to see if they will be a good fit.

This includes using tools that handle multiple tasks such as posting a job on the careers portal and sourcing applications from different platforms or channels to scheduling interviews and carrying out the post-hiring process — in a bid to increase the strategic value generated from the otherwise dull and long hiring process.

4. Increased support for employees with disabilities

For differently-abled people, finding work is a major challenge. However, that is set to change as an increasing number of companies are recognizing the value of a diverse workforce — especially during the pandemic.

To facilitate these hires, companies can adopt web accessibility solutions to ensure everyone can comfortably access business websites that are ADA-compliant, use project management tools, and leverage cloud storage facilities.

5. Employee wellness takes center stage

During times of social isolation and sickness, it is more important than ever for companies to focus on employee wellbeing. Implementing an online wellness program is one step in this process, made more manageable through an HRMS system.

Companies can use the technology to send auto-reminders regarding general health and wellbeing practices. These can be reminders on drinking water, exercising, or merely doing yoga or meditation amidst the hectic schedule. This could inspire employees to remain in good health and help them be more engaged at work.

Many employee wellness software such as Wellable and Sprout gives employees quick access to holistic health information, personalized workout and diet recommendations, health risk surveys, and online communities.

Not only that — these platforms enable companies to track the progress of employees to identify and reward healthy behaviors at work. Talk about taking employee wellness to the next level!

6. Digital learning and L&D gain emphasis

The remote working culture has created a sense of insecurity and uneasiness among employees due to limited managerial visibility and increased pressure to perform their best. Suddenly, measuring workforce productivity has taken precedence across all departments.

Thankfully, most HR tools allow employees to log in the number of hours against each task undertaken during the day. Combine that with project management capabilities, and employers can track business outcomes and KPIs in real-time and ensure transparent collaboration.

Moreover, annual performance reviews are quickly falling out of style. Managers are keener to make quarterly or monthly reviews with sometimes even more granular weekly check-ins. That makes the employees aware of their performance and goals and gives managers a chance to be more specific in their expectations.

Over to you

Without a doubt — HR technology in 2020 developed at supersonic speed to meet the challenging needs of businesses, making it even more integral in daily operations than ever before. There was no choice!

HR tech tools help streamline and simplify organizational tasks, attract talent that has the liberty to work from anywhere and anyhow they want, and enable stakeholders to make data-driven decisions. That is the need of the hour across sectors and business.

Research shows that companies that do not use any HR software fall behind those that do. The choice is clear — implement HR-related tech solutions now to keep up with the changing world of work and continue to transform in the years to come.

The post Top Digital HR Tech Trends for 2021 appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

AI Technology is replacing the “humans” for sourcing and engaging candidates.

…and that’s a good thing. Technology frees up a recruiter to do what they do best:

Learning more about candidates, talking to the clients who want to hire them, and reading between the lines on what would be the best fit for both.

77% of CEOs say their company’s digital transformation was significantly accelerated during the economic crisis.

The rise of the alternative workforce (non-permanent) is prompting businesses to radically rethink how people work and how they are deployed, and in what capacity (perm, contract, freelancer, crowdsourced).

Post-Covid, there are an unprecedented number of new startup businesses. Most of them are sole proprietors or Independent Consultants.

This means some of your best talent will only be in talent communities and sources of talent supply outside of the traditional permanent recruitment model.

Sourcing and matching technology is your tour guide to finding and engaging this talent. It can work faster, cheaper, and better than humans to comb social media, job boards, and ATS databases.

AI matching and Machine Learning help find right-fit workers and connect them to the businesses who want to hire them, in whatever capacity they want to work, and in whatever role is needed.

Even the best recruiters only have so much bandwidth to do these kinds of tasks. And it’s not the best use of their time.

AI can process a 90 data point candidate profile and make recommendations on a large list of candidates in seconds vs. days with compelling results and accuracy.

The tradeoff is conversing with even the savviest bot isn’t as much fun as talking to a human. (Nobody is that perky 24/7!)

But that bot is the difference in a candidate getting notified of a job or put into the hiring process, that otherwise might not have happened due to maxed out bandwidth of an overworked recruiter.  

Technology is now the connector to engage a  dispersed workforce across multiple talent supply channels.

Technology has shifted from a “Talent Management” focus to enabling a workforce ecosystem of the right balance of machines and people.

Candidate engagement and the candidate “journey” has become more important than ever. Your best candidates may now sit on freelancer or on-demand workforce platforms as well as filling out applications on your career sites and job boards.

Technology can find these workers using AI, attraction strategies (scraping social media, inviting candidates to join talent pools with other like-minded candidates), and funnel these candidates to the permanent or non-permanent roles open in your company.

Its key is to engage that candidate and make them feel special from beginning to end. Being spammed within an inch of your life then left in a CRM candidate dead pool works for no one.  

Set and Service Resources, one of the top retail staffing companies in the country, is in the midst of its own digital transformation. Focusing on the candidate experience is priority one in order to position their company as the go-to for all retail hiring needs. Per their CEO Erik Hanvey,

“We want to deliver outstanding service for each candidate in all parts of our process. We are automating each aspect of their journey so they can find what they need with the least amount of effort. If they want to talk with someone, one of our Talent Agents is available.

Making them wait for a response at any step may lose them. 

We are trying to replicate what you see in the restaurant mobile order apps. I get food from the same restaurant because the process is simple and the food is pretty good. They remember who I am, my last orders, and notify me when I have rewards I can use. 

That’s the experience we want to create for our applicants – lead me to what I want as quickly as possible and if you don’t have it, notify me when you do.”

There are over 2500 different talent tech providers that help companies source, engage, select, and hire workers.

This number continues to grow exponentially. Especially as workers disperse across different platforms, are working more remotely, and traditional sourcing and recruitment tasks are cannibalized by tech that can do it better, faster, and cheaper.

The Permanent Workforce will be the minority in 5 years as a New Talent Landscape Emerges.

Since 2005, there was a 173% increase in the percentage of people in the U.S. who regularly work from home, per Global Workforce Analytics. Office space is being repurposed for more open meeting and collaboration spaces for teams to connect once a week.

Companies are upgrading technology to enable an effective remote workforce. The 9:00-5:00 day in a brick-and-mortar building is going the way of flip phones.

Airbnb came back from the brink of disaster, after record cancellations and losses due to Covid restrictions, with a resurgence of their “work anywhere” marketing campaign.

Their workers can embrace the new remote workforce and live and work in as many cities and countries as they want. This trend has been enthusiastically embraced. Airbnb opened their IPO in December 2020 at $146.00 per share, nearly double the anticipated price predicted.

As workers disperse across multiple countries, cities, and sourcing channels, it is important to rethink how and where work gets done and by whom.

We need to break down the walls between perm, contractor, independent consultant. It’s now all just one big talent marketplace.  

Technology is the connector, the searcher, the explorer to find that talent where they are, engage them, and connect them to the people who want to hire them.  

In the end, it’s about putting more people to work as quickly as possible. So they can find purpose, feed their families, build, and create.

There is nothing more human than that.

The post AI Technology is Putting More People Back to Work appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

The truth is that marketing consists of a number of repetitive, tedious tasks that play an important part in every effective campaign.

What’s even worse, all these seemingly low-level tasks are time-consuming, which means that marketers can’t properly focus on the more creative aspect of their work.

Therefore, email marketing automation tools, social media management tools, CRM platforms, as well as lead generation and nurturing tools successfully pick up the slack and take over all these tasks, thus freeing up marketers’ time.

But, it would only be fair to admit that marketing automation comes with a set of challenges. Here’s what they are and how to overcome them.

1. Failure to Effectively Utilize Automation

This is one of the biggest challenges that marketers face when it comes to automation.

It’s not easy to pick the right tool or platform, implement it properly, and train your team to use it. This entire process can be complex, especially if a vendor doesn’t offer free onboarding. Small businesses, which usually need marketing automation the most and can greatly benefit from it, in many cases don’t have the right expertise to implement and start using these helpful tools.

When marketers aren’t properly onboarded, they will need more time to set up and manage their new automation tool, not to mention that this lack of mastery can lead to disappointing results for their campaigns.

While it’s true that the purpose of marketing automation is to simplify and streamline marketing tasks, this initial step requires a significant effort. That’s why marketing teams should be committed to learning how to use a marketing automation tool in-depth, as only advanced users can expect to effectively utilize it and gain a competitive edge.

To overcome this challenge, opt for a solution that provides great customer support and care, as this way, you’ll make sure that your marketing team will get the best onboarding experience and be trained to take full advantage of marketing automation.

2. Lack of Engaging Content

Engaging content is the core part of every marketing strategy, and yet 65% of marketers struggle to create it.

No wonder this is so when there’s so much existing content on every possible topic you can think of, meaning that you need to offer a unique perspective if you want to attract potential readers and provide value to them. That’s why it’s important to learn how to start blogging and why this activity is essential for the success of your digital marketing strategy.

However, it’s not enough to simply automate and streamline your emails and social media posts – they need to be fueled by exceptional content tailored to the needs and preferences of your audience. Think about conducting a content audit that will tell you what you need to improve in order to drive traffic.

Also, don’t fall into the trap of churning out several blog posts a week only for the sake of it. It’s better to have fewer but well-researched blog posts and send out fewer but personalized and targeted emails.

Another problem with content lies in the fact that even if you produce high-quality content, it’s not enough if you don’t promote it and make it more visible. In other words, all your blog posts, videos, and other content pieces will be practically useless if you don’t promote them and boost their Google rankings.

3. Relying on Subpar Data

In order for your marketing automation efforts to be successful, your data has to be clean, relevant, and verified.

Sending an email campaign to a list that you purchased on the internet can result in more than poor deliverability and open rates. Such lists are packed with obsolete and outdated information, which means that many of these email addresses are now defunct.

Email service providers leverage these dormant addresses and use them to plant spam traps, so when you send an email to any of them, it raises red flags. If this happens more than once, you’ll be marked as a spammer, and your email messages will be automatically sent to the spam folders of your recipients.

Another dangerous practice is sending unsolicited emails. With GDPR and similar regulations that require companies to follow strict personal data protection protocols and guidelines, you should only send electronic messages to recipients who have given you their consent.

All this means that your list should be regularly scrubbed because if you reach out to somebody who unsubscribed from your newsletter, you risk being fined.

Similarly, if a recipient never opens or responds to your email message, you should remove them from your list. The same applies to hard bounces, that is, emails that can’t be delivered.

It’s true that cleaning your data will make your list much shorter, but on the other hand, you’ll be left only with recipients who are clearly interested in receiving your messages and updates.

4. Automating Tasks That Shouldn’t Be Automated

Marketing automation is great because it helps you do more with less, but not every task can and should be automated.

Take social media as an example. While you can automate and schedule the publication of your content-based posts in advance, you can’t do the same when it comes to responding to your followers’ comments. It’s something that requires a human touch and a real-time reaction.

Similarly, content creation, although resource-intensive, shouldn’t be automated. Although there are some tools that can help you put at least a certain part of your content creation process on autopilot, it’s important that you do it yourself.

Pre-defined, customizable email templates seem like an excellent way to create your campaigns, but without adding your unique perspective and communicating your brand values, such messages can miss the mark, fall flat, and disappoint your recipients.

Despite these challenges, marketing automation is worth your time and resources as it will give a huge boost to your marketing strategy and efforts. Persistence is key, so make sure to give it time until it starts yielding results.

The post Top 4 Marketing Automation Challenges and How to Overcome Them appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Your ATS Contains Gold – How to Easily Uncover a Hidden Competitive Advantage

Dams have been built all over the world as a source of energy for local communities. Washington state, where I live, is home to 3rd deepest lake in the United States, thanks to a dam. Lake Chelan has a depth of 1,486 feet, or 453 meters, deeper than even the Great Lakes, including Lake Superior.

That’s one deep lake!

Why am I talking about dams and lakes? Because that’s the best analogy I’ve been able to come up with as a comparison for what most companies’ applicant tracking systems have become. A deep, dark reservoir, where finding the prized fish is nearly impossible.

It’s time to blow up that dam and get the river of candidates flowing again. 

I’m not talking about turning your ATS into a CRM. Most aren’t built for messaging and that kind of engagement and follow up at scale. They’re pretty awful for nearly everything except being a database.

So, let’s stop trying to turn applicant tracking systems into what they’re not. 

Instead, what I’m suggesting is taking advantage of the data and contact information they contain to revitalize your recruitment marketing funnel and obtain a return on the time and investment initially made to attract those applicants in the first place. 

You’re sitting atop a gold mine of passive candidates, and you don’t even realize it. 

Or maybe you do but the project needed to organize and revitalize it seems really difficult and time-consuming.

So, before you start thinking to yourself, “my team doesn’t have the time to mess with these old resumes,” I’d like you to at least hear me out on the recommendations I have and why I think this is such an essential and untapped resource.

Data Decay

I’m not naïve enough to think that there’s not a lot of garbage in your ATS. That’s a huge problem with most applicant tracking systems; they definitely meet the “garbage in, garbage out” criteria of a database.

Even the quality data – the candidates that made it through to the final interview stages or the ones who accepted a competing offer – has decayed over time.

A person can gain a heck of a lot of experience in just two years. So, if you have resumes that are two years old or older, that data isn’t going to be super helpful toward the open reqs you’re working on now or the ones you plan to open throughout the year.

Create a System

This is precisely the reason to create a system for regularly engaging with past applicants, asking for an updated resume. I would even suggest asking the ones who may not have had the relevant experience at the time.

The reason for this is if they were seeking these kinds of roles back then, they might have found someone willing to give them a chance and have since acquired the necessary skills and experience to be considered.

You never know, so stop creating your own internal stories for other people’s situations.

Developing a well-thought-out system for outreach and engagement of these past candidates will allow you to create efficiencies, especially when introducing automation.

Start Small

There’s no question this will be a challenging project, but it’s not impossible.

Because it’s difficult, just doing it at any level will put you in the top percentile of companies tapping into these resources. That’s a huge competitive advantage right out of the gate.

You also don’t have to reach out to everyone who has applied for every single role that you’ve posted.

Instead, you should be strategic about the skills and roles most critical to your company right now and over the next year.

If that happens to be software engineers, then that’s a great place to start.

The initial spin-up of a project like this will take considerable effort, and it may make sense to outsource some of the heavy lifting needed to get it off the ground.

Contracting a highly-skilled sourcing professional with excellent email communication skills would be ideal. Don’t skimp on this role. It’s worth paying for someone experienced and probably a little above market value because, remember, “garbage in is garbage out.”

Also, having managed numerous projects over the past several years, there’s a simple calculation that is true most of the time. If you budget 3 months for a project, it will likely take 6 months to complete; if you budget 6 months for a project, it will probably take a year to complete.

You’re good at math and can see what I’m getting at here.

Filter and Batch

Once you’ve decided on the role or skillset, it’s time to put on your headlamp and start mining the data.

Again, it will pay to be strategic in your approach to this. Start with the best odds, which will be people who made it through to the interview phase.

Go through past roles that are at least two years old and older. Pull out all of the candidates who were interviewed but weren’t hired.

Don’t waste your time reviewing their resumes because they’re irrelevant due to data decay.

The next level will depend on your company’s size and the number of job postings you’ve had for these roles over the years. If you’re a large, Fortune 500 company, hiring people all over the world, the number of applicants could be unwieldy. Sticking to the candidates you pull out from the previous step will likely be more than enough.

If you’re a smaller company that only hires regionally or locally, you’ll likely want to pull in your entire candidate pool.

Regardless of your size, the candidate pool you’re able to extract from this exercise will likely be large, so you’ll probably want to work in batches.

What I mean by this is breaking your list into smaller, more manageable lists. Sure, you could use an email marketing platform or a free CRM like Hubspot to email all of them at once, but you’ll quickly be inundated by the replies. This will make it difficult to review the incoming resumes fast enough, and the candidate experience will suffer.

These candidates have been at the bottom of your ATS reservoir, hibernating for years. You don’t need to bring them all to the surface at the same time.

Leverage Tools

As I mentioned earlier, your ATS is likely not built for effective messaging and outreach. Some are better at this than others, but it might be easier to use a separate tool that’s built specifically for this kind of outreach.

There are numerous email tracking and automation platforms such as HubSpot Sales Hub, GMass, and MixMax, that are designed for cold sales outreach but work just fine for a project like this. I’ve used GMass and MixMax in the past, and both work great.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the number of options available, using G2’s Grid can be extremely valuable.

The benefit of these tools is they allow you to build personalized messaging and email sequences to automate your follow up. This is priceless given it’s been proven over and over again that it takes more than one email to get a decent response rate.

Woodpecker, another email tracking and automation platform, analyzed the results of 20 million emails sent from their platform and discovered that an email sequence containing between 1-3 emails typically saw a 9% reply rate. This statistic shot up nearly 200% to a 27% reply rate when an email sequence contained 4-7 emails.

Follow up is critical, and who has the time to do this at scale manually?

Most of these platforms are also very reasonably priced. Typically the cost is directly correlated to the number of contacts you have.

However, if you’re an enterprise, Fortune 500 organization, or larger, it might be worthwhile to invest in a more robust marketing automation platform. There are even some that have been built specifically for recruitment applications, like Candidate.ID.

In Conclusion

You’re sitting atop a gold mine of candidates that could become a valuable competitive advantage. Most companies won’t leverage this resource. Not because it’s impossible, but because it’s difficult.

But, it doesn’t have to be overly complicated or expensive. Like everything else in business, if you invest the time upfront in developing a strategic, well-thought-out program, the cost will decrease over time, and the return will increase.

Don’t be afraid to experiment and test things. You could uncover other competitive advantages through your creativity.

The bottom line, it’s time to blow up the dam that is your ATS and release the river of the possibility that exists right under your nose.

The post Your ATS Contains Gold – How to Easily Uncover a Hidden Competitive Advantage appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

5 Tenets of Successful High-Volume Recruiting

High-volume recruitment presents a completely different set of challenges from those found in traditional corporate recruiting. While the roles traditionally require fewer prerequisites, you’re dealing with a significantly higher volume of candidates that are typically less responsive.

A different set of challenges requires a different approach. Attracting qualified candidates while simultaneously screening and searching through hundreds of applications is tedious and time-consuming. Once you do have these candidates in your funnel, the ways in which you screen and evaluate them requires the ability to work quickly and efficiently.

A successful high-volume recruiting process has many characteristics. I’ve included 5 key tenets to help you establish an effective high-volume hiring process:

Eliminate barriers to entry

The first challenge that high-volume recruiters experience is a lack of applicants. If you’re staffing for many positions, across a variety of locations, not having people in your pipeline will require you to spend more time on sourcing. The more time you spend sourcing, the greater your cost-per-applicant becomes.

The easiest way to increase the number of applicants in your funnel is to eliminate unnecessary barriers preventing or deterring them from applying. Shorter applications (1-5 minutes) have a 12.47% completion rate, compared to a 6.97% completion rate for longer applications (6-15 minutes). Try to avoid too much jargon, and only include critical information.

Before posting a job description and application form, ask yourself what the absolute must-haves for the role are. If you find yourself including other qualifiers that aren’t dealbreakers, don’t include them. Any lingering questions beyond the must-haves can be addressed later in the interview process. The most important factor is getting these people into your pipeline.

Take a mobile-first approach

Email has traditionally been the primary form of communication between recruiters and candidates, but times are changing. Individuals are becoming more and more comfortable having companies communicate with them via text. Utilizing text messaging as a primary source of communication with your candidates is crucial for any successful high-volume hiring process.

When dealing with such a high volume of applicants, you don’t have extra time to try to get their attention. Emails have anywhere between a 15-20% open rate, while text messages have a 98-99% open rate. You can almost be certain when you text someone, they will see it at some point.

A few other key statistics about job seekers from our recent survey:

• 57% of applicants apply to jobs via their mobile devices
• 52.3% said lack of follow-up was one of the most annoying things about the application process.
• 52.3% prefer a phone call to let them know they’ve made it to the interview stage

Add video interviews to your process

In a Covid world, video interviews are gaining increased popularity. Prior to COVID, there was a stigma associated with video interviews. Many recruiters reported that applicant conversion rates were much lower when applicants were asked to submit a pre-recorded video at the start of the recruitment process.

Those times are gone. Candidates and companies alike are buying into the new norm, as there has been a 67% spike in video interviews conducted on the Fountain platform and a 150% increase in candidates wanting to digitize their CV via a pre-recorded video.

If you were to get on the phone with a candidate who identified themselves as an under-qualified candidate within the first 3-4 minutes, what would you do? You’d likely spend the full 15 minutes allotted to speak with them as a courtesy. Alternatively, if your first step was to evaluate a group of pre-recorded video interviews, you would be able to get through 3 candidates in that same amount of time.

Give the candidate more control

High-volume recruiters have at least 10x more roles than corporate recruiters on average. They don’t have nearly as much time to make decisions and weigh candidate feedback. This requires the ability to work at an expedited pace.

There can be many stages in a candidate’s journey. Application, interview, assessment, document upload, background checks, etc. As a recruiter, you need to have a set process that allows you to navigate these stages in your workflow in a quick, repeatable, and scalable manner.

A key workflow that high-volume recruiters can implement immediately to accelerate their recruiting is allowing applicants to schedule their own interviews. Going back and forth with an individual via email is time-consuming at scale. Eliminating this step will increase the total number of candidates you can manage in your pipeline.

It’s important to note that you should have limits to when a candidate can book time on your calendar. Set the parameters so they have to schedule within a 5-7 day window. This will help you decrease the amount of time each candidate spends in your pipeline.

Lean into workflow automation

The distinctions in workflows are a big reason why a traditional ATS just doesn’t work for high-volume recruiting. You need a system that allows for a high level of automation if you’re going to evaluate your candidate pools effectively.

You can’t allow automation to come at the expense of the candidate experience, however. There has to be a healthy balance, and you need to identify which stages can be automated. Candidate screening and feedback is a step that can’t be automated, but a “thank you” email after applying can be. There are enough candidate touchpoints in a candidate’s lifecycle (at least 5 within the first 48 hours) that some can be automated.

Successfully personalizing messaging and communication at scale is difficult, but a necessary component if you are to successfully scale your recruiting.

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