Not Valuing Soft Skills in Employees

Not recognizing the value of soft skills is one mistake to avoid when conducting employee skills assessments. Soft skills — such as communication, problem-solving and collaboration — are critical for workplace success and should be measured alongside hard skills required for job roles.

This can be avoided by encouraging employees to speak up during their assessments and posing questions that focus on their ability to perform less skills-based tasks within their role. An uncommon approach could include assigning a project or task in advance of the assessment, giving candidates an opportunity to demonstrate both technical and interpersonal skill-sets in a more natural setting than a traditional interview or assessment.

Michael Alexis
CEO, swag.org

Confusing Skills With Other Characteristics

You may be measuring skills in the hiring process and using this information to match candidates to jobs. Keep in mind, many skills can be trained. Other aspects of fit can be predictive of job success and long-term retention and can be very fair to diverse candidates.

Hiring teams have access to science-based candidate insights to help identify and hire the right talent. Virtual assessments with job simulations, like Modern Hire’s Virtual Job Tryouts, provide a realistic preview of a typical day on the job while measuring a host of job-related characteristics that are critical for success.

VJTs can even predict the success of a candidate in the open position and recommend them for the job; they can also predict the likelihood of the candidate not working out. By embracing science-based assessments, HR leaders can focus on hiring qualified candidates that are likely to have a positive impact on the organization, while increasing retention and reducing turnover in the new year ahead.

Eric Sydell
EVP of Innovation, Modern Hire

Basing the Assessments Solely on Job Performance 

While job performance is an important aspect of an employee’s skills and abilities, it is not the only one. Other factors, such as communication skills, problem-solving abilities and teamwork, can also be important indicators of an employee’s skills and potential.

To avoid this mistake, it’s important to use a variety of assessment methods, such as interviews, observation, and testing, to gain a comprehensive understanding of an employee’s skills and abilities.

Additionally, it’s important to ensure that the assessment is job-related and measures the skills and abilities that are necessary for successful job performance. Involving multiple people in the assessment process, such as managers, supervisors and peers can help with this problem. This will provide a more well-rounded view of an employee’s skills and help to mitigate any bias that may be present.

Paw Vej
Chief Operating Officer, Financer.com

Not Sticking With an 80/20 Formula

An over-reliance on skills assessments can lead to concerns when you hire new employees. A skills assessment doesn’t take into account work ethic, workplace experience or other pertinent information that hiring managers must take into account before hiring someone.

If someone scores well on the skills assessment, that should be part of the calculus of whether that candidate is worthy of being selected, but it should only be a small part of it. I think 20% is acceptable. Some might think 25% or 30% is more appropriate, but ultimately a candidate should be hired based on their performance at previous employment stops. Aptitude matters, but it isn’t the only thing that matters.

Brittany Dolin
Co-Founder, Pocketbook Agency

Turning It into an Employer Skills Assessment

Questions matter. Skill assessments have their obvious origins in employee and/or candidate evaluation. When labor markets are tight, as they have been for some time, prospective and current employees scrutinize the employer as much or more than they are being scrutinized at every turn in the candidate/employee lifecycle.

Skill assessments can reflect positively on a company, have a negligible impact or make a company look really bad. While I’m sure other responders will dive into the specific reasons this can happen (gender bias, lack of accessibility, etc.), my overall point is to remove any possibility that the tables can be turned on the employer.

Jeremy Ames
Senior Manager, Accenture

Basing Solely on Job Title or Tenure

Avoid basing the assessment solely on an individual’s job title or tenure. This can lead to inaccurate or incomplete assessments, as an employee’s job title or tenure does not necessarily reflect their current level of skill or proficiency.

It’s important to use a variety of assessment methods that provide a comprehensive view of an employee’s skills. These methods might include:

• Job performance evaluations
• Skill-specific tests or assessments
• Self-assessments
• Peer evaluations
• 360-degree evaluations
• On-the-job assessments
• Training and development opportunities

It’s also important to provide employees with clear criteria and performance standards, so they know what they need to do to demonstrate their skills and abilities. And be sure to communicate with the employee in advance on the areas and skills that will be focused on in the assessment. This will enable them to prepare adequately and be ready to demonstrate their skills.

Johannes Larsson
Founder & CEO, JohannesLarsson.com

Not Involving Employees in the Process

One mistake to avoid when conducting employee skills assessments is to assess employees on items outside of their job descriptions. We can avoid this by ensuring that the skills assessments are specific to the tasks and responsibilities associated with our employees’ jobs.

It is important to provide the team with clear instructions and guidelines on how they should complete the assessment, so they have a better understanding of what is expected of them. Involve your employees in the assessment process and ensure that their feedback is taken into account.

Christa Reed
Head of Job Market Research, JobSearcher

Not Giving Employees the Chance to Upset Your Biases

Let’s face it. We are humans, and every human is fundamentally a box of biases. These biases are not all inherently evil, as they are generalized predictions from the repetitiveness of previous experiences.

When you have two or three employees with a significantly shared trait repeat the same outcome, a manager would be naturally prone to associating such outcome (or skill or deficiency) with that trait and expecting another entirely different employee with that trait to repeat the same outcome. This is a bias.

But when conducting employee skills evaluations, strive to give employees an even playing field to upset these biases. Don’t be too quick to tap into the predictions of your existing biases. “Oh, he has X trait, he should automatically excel (or struggle) at Y skill”..don’t be too quick to assume. Strive to treat each employee as a new entity and give them a blank slate to prove their capacity and surprise you.

Lotus Felix
CEO, Lotus Brains Studio

The post 8 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Conducting Skills Assessments appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

“Our new offering is the next step toward building the most complete enterprise talent optimization platform that uniquely positions our customers to realize growth and innovation, even during hard times,” said CEO Anoop Gupta.

SeekOut’s Internal Talent Optimization solutions offer employers the ability to:

• Redeploy Existing Talent with skills and experience information from external sources as well as an internal HRIS. Employers will get the complete overview of the existing employee base, then route workers to open roles to help avoid layoffs and preserve talent.
• Retain and Grow Employees with tools that let them identify new opportunities within the organization, helping the business to engage and grow its workforce.
• Gain Insights on Existing Talent with analytics intended to help employers maximize their current talent pool.

SeekOut believes companies today are limited by systems that provide a shallow view of employee capabilities and fail to track experiences from prior roles and skills gained while at the company. This lack of information makes it difficult for employers to make the most of their teams, the company said. Given today’s uncertainty and the tight labor market, employers need data and insights to deploy their talent effectively, said SeekOut.

In January 2022,  Bellevue, Wash.-based startup raised a $115 million Series C round, valuing the company at over $1.2 billion. This represents a 2.6x increase in valuation since the company closed its Series B round in March 2021.

Over the last year, SeekOut said it has doubled its customer base to more than 1,000 enterprises. At the time, CEO Anoop Gupta said the company would use the funding for “investing deeply in innovations that extend our leadership position in talent acquisition, and power new solutions for internal mobility, employee retention career pathing and learning and development.”

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A new report from Eightfold AI, “How Banks Can Become Future Ready,” found that in order to tackle trends such as the increased use of AI and big data, the growing importance of cybersecurity, advancements in cloud computing and open-banking APIs, along with the rise of blockchain technology, banks need to quickly rethink their talent strategies.

While banks have made significant progress in meeting the digital demands of their customers, the industry continues to face challenges when establishing digital-first talent strategies, the report said. Only 15% of the top in-demand skills are currently being used within their IT workforces.

Inter-Industry Competition

Competing with FinTechs (and sometimes Big Tech companies) requires banking institutions to hire and build talent with a skills-based approach, such as:

• Upskill and reskill to help bridge the gap between rising and declining skills within every role. This requires a particular focus on equipping IT employees with rising skills such as Python, Docker, node.js and Machine Learning, the report said. Developing future-ready front and middle office employees will require a focus on rising skills such as digital sales, data analysis and business intelligence.
• Calibrate roles with future skills and consider recruiting emerging skills from outside the industry (e.g. Big Tech companies) to fulfill skill requirements.
• Adopt a “hiring for potential” mindset by analyzing who has potential to learn the most in-demand skills and whether they’re external or internal candidates, which further expands the organization’s qualified talent network.

Banks “are now competing with entire ecosystems of tech organizations for the same pool of talent,” observed Eightfold President Kamal AhluwaliaI. “Future-thinking institutions must scale their investments in talent in order to maintain their strategic advantage.”

To develop the report, Eightfold leveraged its global dataset and considered publicly available profiles from major banking corporations, as well as FinTech companies for benchmarking purposes. The company analyzed approximately 700,000 publicly available profiles from top banks, and benchmarked those findings against approximately 25,000 publicly available FinTech profiles.

Image: iStock

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Short answer? Yes. Are you ready to learn how to unlock them?

In today’s recruiting environment, great recruiters are more valuable than ever. There are unprecedented levels of competition out there.

In the face of this competitive market, more talent leaders are discovering that up-leveling their existing team is much more impactful than chasing after new hires.

Senior Talent Acquisition Leader Byron Kendal of Better, Updater, and Warby Parker will expose the secrets on how to unlock those recruiting superpowers from your existing team.

What You’ll Learn:

• How talent leaders should determine when to up skill vs. when to hire

• How leaders can build an effective recruiter training program in just a few short weeks

• What existing recruiters can do to maximize opportunities for advancement

About BrightHire

BrightHire’s interview intelligence platform is built right on Zoom to help your team run structured, high quality interviews that can be replayed, shared and analyzed. The result is faster hiring based on real substance, and an exceptional candidate experience.

The post How to Unlock Your Team’s Recruiting Superpowers appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

MojoHire completed beta testing its intelligent talent discovery system and moved it to general availability for the healthcare and technology verticals. The platform sits atop the HR tech stack, offering talent acquisition teams a unified view of people across systems. The idea is to help them easily discover internal and external talent, build teams and generate increased value from earlier technology investments.

DriverReach, a recruiting and compliance management system, closed a $7.5 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Fulcrum Equity Partners, with participation from CreativeCo Capital. The company said it will use the funds for research and product development with an eye toward expanding its features to enable more compliance and reporting functionality and more integration with job boards and other lead generation partners and to add approximately 60 individuals over the next three years, with an emphasis on sales and marketing.

While 80% of employed American adults consider professional development and training an important consideration when accepting a new job, only 39% say their current employer is helping them improve their current skills or gain new skills to do their job better, according to results the American Staffing Association Workforce Monitor. Many said they aren’t receiving the skills training needed to maintain or grow their careers.

Demand for DEI leaders is growing as more consumers, employees and even investors demand change in corporate America. In fact, says Business Insider, Diversity and inclusion manager ranked second on LinkedIn’s Jobs on the Rise 2022 report, which was released Tuesday.

The post HCM Talent Technology Roundup January 20, 2022 appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Everyone agrees that skill-based assessments are the best way to guarantee a qualified and skilled candidate that is more likely to have a better retention rate and suitability for the work environment. That will ultimately become a valuable asset for the company. This type of approach guarantees long-term success for both parties– the employer and the employee and results in tremendous time and cost savings translated into a beneficial relationship with the concept of recruiting. Therefore, those processes should be performed in a well-thought-out and clever manner. 

With the enormous progress in innovation, how can we move forward from asking people about their needs to assessing them even before applying for the job? 

Where can a candidate display their skills and show what they truly are worth in today’s recruiting platform?

So what are those elusive skills that we fail to identify through hundreds of thousands of CVs? How can we differentiate between the candidates that seem good on paper and those that can do the job? In a world that is used to seeing new hires through their CVs and cover letters alone, constantly mounting with irrelevant information, inevitably building discriminative stereotypes and misconceptions, it is easy to miss out on the right person. The existing sourcing tools are old school, and accordingly, HR teams realize that skills-based screening is the way to go. 

The high-tech world learned asking about skills is not enough and developed performance evaluations tests to help identify the right candidate. They have much higher salaries and greater resources when sorting through new candidates, and can afford performance-based evaluations in various areas. While it sounds promising, these evaluations are performed only after the candidate sends over their CV and interviews, which means they didn’t rectify the current sourcing method. They use the old ways and add more tests along the road, eventually selecting from the same tall pile of candidates. 

Another platform we recently started seeing many skills questionnaires appearing on is the various social media channels. It might seem like a way to address larger audiences, but it doesn’t reflect any qualifications because people can list anything they want about themselves. It makes those questionnaires more a test about a candidate’s judgment rather than their abilities. They think about what their potential employers want to hear and act the part. To get that specific job, there is still a long way to go. 

To shift the perspective from CVs to skills, an employer looks at a list of a candidate’s skills and still learns very little. It goes without saying that a candidate’s background and advantages will help them do their job, but those attributes can shine during an interview. The bottom line, is all of those skills sourcing solutions are just too little, too late. HR teams know that the current process is not enough, but they don’t have the proper solution yet. And the issues begin from the get-go. When the initial screening process is far from objective or efficient, all those add-ons will never be good enough. 

Rethinking the whole process makes you realize one vital thing– altering the current funnel is inevitable. If you want to hire someone for a job, let them try and do the job first. There is no clearer picture than the complete picture when a candidate tries out the job, feels the environment, and can function and perform their skills in the most objective manner. Both the candidate and employer will quickly know if the job is theirs to have or not. And, of course, the candidate’s chances of sticking with the company are increasing significantly. 

When introducing cutting-edge AI tools to the process, the advantages of skills sourcing will not get lost into another pile. AI, incorporated with accumulated HR knowledge and advanced technology, gives us the chance to deliver a performance-based evaluation for a specific job. And that is what matters. Since every job requires a different set of various skills, the crucial thing to know before hiring someone is how they perform within desired skills. It is not only if they hold those particular skills but realizing how those skills manifest. And that is the latest message in sourcing: Instead of being only skills-based, it is about performance-based sourcing. 

HR industry with AI technology

Think of the countless opportunities created when combining years of professional experience in the HR industry with AI technology. The novel solution born out of this combination takes skills and performance assessment to the next level. Tailoring performance evaluations for specific jobs using the technology is easier, faster and more fitting to each company’s needs. The skills evaluated with AI can immediately affect a candidate’s performance and abilities, reflecting multiple virtues of their expertise. 

Another considerable advantage of AI-based skills assessment is its objectivity. When the technology is structured to look for particular features, it is blind to others. It ignores color, race, gender, age, experience and any disability or irrelevant limitation. This blindness ultimately creates a much more diverse and inclusive workplace. It can also help in one of the most common phenomena of Covid-19: job mobility. Using an intelligent skills-based test, candidates can realize that they fit into positions they think they cannot do because of a lack of experience. A performance assessment could open a window in new hiring options for those individuals according to their vetted qualifications. 

The story of screening is the story of hiring.

The approach towards screening is shifting from the information a candidate testifies about themselves to their actual performance. The new strategy calls for new solutions that will help HR move forward to the next step, creating an efficient win-win platform where candidates and employers take control over the process. Harnessing AI technology brings the advantages of performance testing to the front seat with every single candidate, every position and every company out there.

The post It’s Time to Move From Skills Assessment to Proven Skills-Based Recruiting appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

We’ve all seen the headlines proclaiming that Christmas will be ruined yet again this year — but this time not because we’re in the middle of a pandemic. The fate of Christmas 2021 apparently lies in the hands of HGV (Heavy Goods Vehicle) drivers, of which the Road Haulage Association estimates there is a shortage of up to 100,000. 

Because of this shortage, supermarkets and retail stores are experiencing supply issues. Physicians, too, are reporting delays to flu vaccines and blood test tubes vials arriving at their surgeries.

However, WaveTrackR data has shown that in August, applications within the Transport & Logistics sector increased for the first time since April. Could the rise in jobs, widely publicized increased salaries and sign-on bonuses be taking affect?

Supply Chain Worries

IKEA has become the latest retail giant — joining Tesco, Morrisons, Iceland and toy retailer The Entertainer (alongside many more) — to warn driver shortages are causing product shortages and could increase prices.

Morrisons has said that it expects prices to rise over the course of the rest of the year as a result of the shortage. Most consumers have seen gaps on supermarket shelves or a series of substitutions on their shopping delivery.

In August, Logistics UK and the British Retail Consortium jointly wrote to Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, warning that action needs to be taken or the impact on supply chains will only worsen. Especially as Christmas — the busiest period in the retail and logistics year — approaches.

From September onwards, retailers will be stock building in preparation for the Christmas period, so a strong supply chain is essential.

Historic Driver Shortages

Some in the industry have been warning of driver shortages for years, given the majority of the workforce is made up of older workers (the average age of HGV drivers in the UK is 55) and there has been a lack of younger workers wanting to join the industry.

The estimated shortage pre-COVID was around 60,000 drivers. Then came the double whammy of a pandemic, which paused HGV driver training and testing for 12 months, and Brexit, which led to thousands of EU drivers leaving the UK (an estimated 25,000 EU drivers returned home during the pandemic and following the end of the Brexit transition period; the ONS Labour Force Survey found that only approximately 600 EU lorry drivers had returned to the UK by July 2021). 

It’s unsurprising we are left with a driver shortage. High training costs have been a deterrent and a change to IR35 tax, meaning that agency workers have had to pay more tax and agencies need to pay National Insurance contributions, haven’t helped. Rod McKenzie, managing director of policy and public affairs at the Road Haulage Association, has said the industry is losing more lorry drivers weekly.

Could the Tide be Turning for Applications?

WaveTrackR data has been confirming the shortages trend through a downwards trajectory for job applications in the sector. The data reveals that the average applications per job in Transport & Logistics fell each month from March to June. That led to the sector experiencing among the lowest applications per job across all industries. 

However, the tide finally seems to be turning as that number has been rising since July, concurrent with the general rise in applications for roles in the industry over July and August.

This has culminated in the highest level of applications being received all year in August. Why? Perhaps salary increases, which WaveTrackR has logged as solidly increasing between Quarter 2 and Quarter 3, and golden hellos have impacted the rise in applications.

Alternatively, maybe the backlog of driver training, tests and licenses being issued starting to clear means that a drip feed of new candidates are now entering the market. Whatever the reasons, the data is encouraging.     

How the Shortage can Continue to be Tackled

Both retail and transport lobby groups have called on the government to take action in a number of ways to address the current driver shortage. Streamlining the HGV driving test system to increase the number of tests available is seen as crucial, and the government has responded by announcing the test for both an articulated and a rigid lorry will now be combined.

This should result in a faster testing system, increasing the availability of tests. The groups have also suggested that funding for driver training be made more accessible by adding it to the National Skills Fund and allowing trainee drivers on the Apprenticeship Levy to drive as soon as possible into the program.

What industry bodies really want — but what the government is so far resisting — is for HGV drivers to be added to the Home Office Shortage Occupation list, which would allow European drivers short-term visas.

The latter would be a sensible short-term solution while license backlogs are cleared and new drivers are trained. It has also been suggested that HGV drivers should be added as a standard occupational code for the skilled worker visa.

There aren’t many that would deny HGV drivers aren’t highly skilled. What does seem to be a common consensus is that the rules limiting driving hours being relaxed are a hastily made, unsafe measure.

How Can We Encourage Younger Workers into the Industry?

Part of the reason for a shortage of drivers is the stigma of unsociable hours, poor standards when parking overnight and average pay. The latter is being rectified, with big names such as Tesco and John Lewis offering substantial financial incentives to new drivers, though this is unlikely to be sustained in the long term. 

What is really needed is funding for training (which is in the thousands of pounds) to increase the number of available drivers that can be hired.

In terms of poor working conditions, the government has pledged to work alongside the industry to improve lorry park standards by ensuring basics such as access to a toilet, hand washing facilities, a hot shower and food are available, as well as increasing official parking spaces for lorry drivers.

There have also been recent moves by the industry to pay attention to the mental health of drivers who are on the road by themselves for days at a time.

A rise in applications within the Logistics & Transport industry in August is good news but a shortage of 100,000 drivers will take time to resolve. The government sticking to its word about speeding up the testing process will certainly help.

Allowing temporary visas to EU drivers would be an ideal solution in the short term as the backlog begins to clear — we wait to see whether the government U-turns on that. 

Long term, there needs to be a drive to encourage a greater number of younger workers to join the profession. HGV drivers were part of the backbone that held up the UK during the pandemic and the current fallout from the shortages proves just how much we all rely on them to keep the nation going.

It’s a skilled profession that should be recognized as such — something that would go a long way to boosting the recruitment drive.

The post Is the Driver Shortage About to Ease as Transport & Logistics Applications Rise? appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

In order to secure this extraordinary source of talent, organizations need to have the right blend of purpose, culture, and opportunity, and recruiters need to have a solid understanding of how the leadership experience acquired by JMOs during their service translates to different roles within the organization.  

While it’s always more difficult to assess leadership qualities than hard skillsets in all candidates, it becomes even more difficult to evaluate the leadership skills of former military officers.

The vast majority of corporate recruiters have never served in the military, and even those who have served can still find it confusing to understand the attributes and skills of officers who served in other branches.  

Getting to Know JMOs

JMOs are mature young leaders who represent a diverse cross-section of America. They’ve earned a BS or BA in technical or nontechnical areas from America’s top universities, and many have advanced degrees as well. 

Most JMOs have served in the military between four and 10 years, and all receive leadership, communications, legal, operational, and functional area training. Typically, JMOs have four to eight years of military leadership experience after graduating college, leading organizations from 20-200 people. 

JMOs are known to be ambitious problem solvers with a willingness to volunteer and help others. Eager to learn and prove themselves as valued team members, JMOs are able to hit the ground running and make an immediate impact on their organization’s bottom line.

They are highly adaptive, excellent developmental candidates, and are often promoted faster than their peers without military experience. JMOs tend to be resolute when it comes to integrity, and will not tolerate an individual or organization that compromises their ethics. 

What type of corporate roles are JMOs best suited for?

The military is a giant organization giving officers opportunities to lead in many areas including engineering, construction, cybersecurity, maintenance, and logistics. Most JMOs are well suited for mid-level leadership roles in operations, sales, and high-tech environments, and are trained for project management and balancing timelines, people, and technology. 

Branch of service too can come into play. For example, the Navy and Air Force teach a more Total Quality Management (TQM) style of leadership which is compatible with roles in engineering and technology.

The Army and Marine Corps provide leadership experience that is better suited for roles in areas such as sales, operations, and leadership development.

Best Practices to Win JMO Talent

Unfortunately many organizations look to hire JMOs only in order to meet regulatory and diversity requirements. If an organization wants to truly maximize this source of talent, it needs to view JMOs as fast trackers who can significantly contribute to company P&L performance.

Here are four practices we recommend to realize the full potential of your JMO hiring efforts:  

1. Buy-in and sponsorship from leadership

Company operational leaders, Talent Acquisition and HR need to work together in prioritizing the goals and strategy for the initiative.  Considerations should include prioritizing the hiring effort, identifying the best starting roles, creating programs that allow JMOs to learn multiple functional areas of the company’s business, and investing in veterans once they become employees. 

2. Mentorship, formal training, and Leadership Development Programs (LDP)

JMOs crave mentorship, purpose, and a leadership path, and it’s not uncommon for JMOs to relocate multiple times in order to move up within an organization.

Although there is no one-size-fits-all LDP, an effective program will expose JMOs to different areas of a company and provide opportunities to grow and lead through all segments.  

It is not unusual for JMOs to accept a position before they transition to civilian life, so consider interviewing military candidates six months before they leave the service, and always provide information on your upcoming developmental and training classes.

3. Educate recruiters on military occupations and skillsets

Matching a JMO to the right job is challenging, and most HR professionals lack relevant knowledge of military structure, operations, and ranks.  

Recruiters can educate themselves by conducting more in-depth face-to-face interviews (virtual or in-person) with veteran candidates, referring to past successes within the company or industry, and seeking out employees who may be veterans to serve as a resource.

Referencing the Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) is also helpful in learning about military roles, responsibilities, and kinds of training received in the service.

4. Make your brand more attractive to JMOs

While practices to attract JMOs are not a defined science, making the investment to build a military-friendly employer brand and widely promote leadership programs is a head start.

These future business leaders look for successful and purpose-driven companies with clearly defined missions, so be sure these messages come across on your website and in outreach communications.

The unemployment rate for JMOs falls well below that of the overall veteran unemployment rate, demonstrating that corporate America has a thirst for them.

Organizations that understand and embrace that JMOs seek recognition and leadership opportunities in organizations in which they take pride have the upper hand in winning over this exemplary group of individuals.

The post Why Corporate America Wants to Hire Junior Military Officers appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

The top 3 were very revealing:

Engaging employees to view jobs

It may sound simple to ensure all employees see the internal opportunities, but the reality is that, whilst lots of time and money has gone into the external candidate experience, very little has gone into providing a great employee experience when searching for internal roles.

This poor user experience leads to limited employee engagement and ultimately means a company risks losing talent simply by not meeting the employee’s expectations of being able to pursue a career path at a time and place that suits them.

Knowing what roles in what locations an employee is interested in

Unless managers have a very good grasp of where their team is in their careers and what opportunities for growth they are interested in and what are available, there’s a good chance that employees will leave to grow their careers elsewhere.

Even if employees are seeing all internal job roles, they’re often not seeing every opportunity a company may have across multiple locations, limiting choice.

Does anyone, other than the employee themselves, really know what role they are willing to look at and what location they would be willing to move to advance their career?

Employers keeping up to date with employee’s skillset

Regularly mentioned as one of the biggest challenges, how do you match employee skills with internal roles, when you have incomplete information about those skills? The answer lies with the employee.

They know if they’ve completed an external online course that may help their career or enhance their leadership skills through a community-based project etc. This again comes down in part to providing the right employee experience.

Through engagement and empowering the employee, they will add new skills or competencies to their profile, helping companies match the latest skills with internal job opportunities.

As established during the research, resumes, employee information in an HR system, or LinkedIn profiles are instantly old data, but regular engagement can encourage employee participation in quarterly updates of their skill set, making job matching far more accurate.

Final thoughts

Millions are being spent by vendors and companies alike in developing sophisticated ways of measuring employee soft skills and competencies and matching them with internal job opportunities, but in some ways that miss the fundamentals.

Employees will seek internal mobility if they have good visibility of the types of roles they are looking for and an engaging and simple process to apply for those roles. That simplicity of process will also encourage them to keep their skills profile up to date.

Great internal mobility is achievable, but it requires companies to think more deeply about the most important person in the process, the employee.

The post Internal Mobility – The Top 3 Barriers appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

There is no Degree for Talent Sourcing

Preaching to the choir here, but there is no degree for Talent Acquisition, Recruiting, or Sourcing. We can get a Human Resource Management degree, and that degree is vital to understanding employment law.

However, there is no such thing as a bachelor’s degree in Talent Acquisition. We are lucky enough to have some great training and certificates available thru SourceCon/ERE, Recruiter Academy, AIRS, Brain Gain, and Sourcing Certifications. Thank goodness for those.

But for us in sourcing, we are in the business of research curation. That research curation requires diligence and a constant that doesn’t end in a terminal degree.

So, what is research curation?

A Sourcer is equivalent to a reference librarian. If you aren’t aware of that, I can paint a picture for you.  Back in the day before the internet, answers to any questions meant a trip to the library.

In high school, when a book report or paper was due, it meant a trip to the library. Library users were able to use a card catalog and look up most research articles, books, and magazines, on most any type of topic, all on our own. That would be akin to a Google search today.

In every library though, there was a holy section of books. Not accessible to the public to touch on their own but guarded by the reference librarian.  This reference librarian had first editions, full encyclopedias, genealogy, greys anatomy, and other scientific manuscripts, and myriads of other collateral too expensive and specific to leave out for the general public.

They were keepers of specific information. If you couldn’t find it on your own, you enlisted the help of a professional reference librarian.  A Talent acquisition Recruiter has access to most pieces of information found in the card catalog of data.

But if you want the specific, the special, the hard to find, you enlist the help of today’s version of a reference librarian, the Sourcer.

Not every search that a Sourcer is engaged with requires a deep dive on the internet with complex Boolean strings. Finding candidates off Indeed and LinkedIn can still be 60% of a Sourcers hires.

There is no shame in the low-hanging-fruit game. However, a Sourcer wants to leverage 100% of the workforce, not just the active candidates on paid job boards. To access 100% of the labor pool, a Sourcer must have records and data stored that directs us on our quest for the most qualified.

To that, I will give you a peek inside a Sourcers inventory and library.

A Sourcers Library includes:

Competitive Intelligence

Links to all resources to identify market intelligence. Perhaps even battle cards to summarize each competitor’s weakness, strengths, and value propositions.  This includes Google Alerts, Salary intel, Employee Reviews, Email Naming Convention, Benefit details, and Culture on all competitors. This intel should be stored and cataloged alphabetically by each competitor.

Recruitment Marketing

Oh, yes. We can no longer say “that’s not my job” on recruitment marketing. Sourcers need to know where to find the best hashtags, how to post the most compelling content, and manage their own social media calendars. Social Media is now 50% of a Sourcers job. Since many of us are not marketing experts, we imperatively need a content library to house all our recruitment marketing collateral. I suggest following Rally Recruitment Marketing for their free templates and advice.

Chrome Extensions

There are still plenty of free Chrome Extensions that are safe, and supply Sourcers with all they need to identify contact information. Right now, I have about 40 chrome extensions for contact info in my URL toolbar favorites.  Don’t neglect the Chrome extensions that are out there for efficiency either.  Ways to track, mine, and stay organized.  CV Timeline is my favorite time saver for LinkedIn.  Technology is there to make our lives simpler and more efficient. Take advantage of it.

A CRM

There needs to be one “source-of-truth” when it comes to storing our most priceless curation, and that is the leads/prospects we are identifying.  I’ve tried a million different spreadsheets to serve as an alternative storehouse, but a CRM is by far and away the best tool for storing candidate curations.

Lists

Sourcers have lists for everything. Lists of associations, data mining, scraping, data extractors (whatever you want to call it) and more.

Paid tools like Phantombuster are a great start to categorizing candidate details for future curation.

A good Sourcer can rattle off twenty places to find any single job thrown at them. Not because they went to school for it. Not because they received a bachelor’s or master’s degree in it.

But because they practiced a strong behavioral habit to be curious and to store research for later use.

For your next Sourcing hire, look to add a training program. Realize the shortage in our industry for trained professionals and invest in them. They need to learn the skills somewhere.

Happy Hunting.

The post There is no Degree for Talent Sourcing appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

Why HR Desperately Needs a New Take on Talent Mobility

Let’s get right to it: COVID-19 sucks. Professionally speaking, it sucks big time. Here we are, eight-plus months into this calamity, and companies are still struggling to stay in the fight and successfully counter a stinging one-two punch of budget cuts and hiring freezes.

And although it would appear that we are a ways away from producing an actual cure for 2020’s biggest buzzkill when it comes to Human Capital Management, I have some good news…talent mobility is the antidote that we have all been waiting for.

Given the enduring uncertainty of our new normal, it has never been more crucial for HR departments to develop in-house talent. And while “mobility” as a strategic pillar of HCM has seen its fair share of innovative iterations in the digital age, survival in the current environment demands that HR departments venture into the uncharted waters of project-based sourcing.

In shifting from siloed and rigid mobility programs to a focus on talent marketplaces and short-term, “gig” assignments, organizations will not only succeed in more effectively upskilling a motivated workforce, but will achieve significant savings on sourcing activities.

Armed with a tech-infused, multi-tiered, and employee-driven approach to talent mobility, organizations will have a fighting chance to develop the agility needed for economically viable sourcing in these crazy and trying times.

It may be unorthodox. It may sound strange. But it’s time for HR to move the gig economy in-house.

First, Establish a Talent Marketplace to Better Develop Internal Talent

The construction of an internal talent marketplace is the first step an organization should take when looking to bolster talent mobility activities. As an internal digital platform that identifies motivated employees and provides them with the growth opportunities most relevant to their position, skill-set, and goals. The talent marketplace represents an important philosophical evolution with respect to HR and our understanding of mobility.

While employee mobility has traditionally (and some would say dogmatically) focused on predetermined, vertical career paths, talent marketplaces empower organizations to provide employees with more control over their career development and professional pathways.

Beyond merely promoting employees or shifting them from one geographic territory to another, talent marketplaces position organizations to better prepare employees for vertical, horizontal, and, eventually, project-based development opportunities.

Second, Look to Upskill Employees With Project-Based Assignments

Once an organization has successfully constructed an internal talent marketplace from which to provide employees with a targeted mobility experience, HR should shift its focus to filling project-based roles with permanent employees.

While we typically associate project-based employment with the procurement department and their never-ending quest to cost-effectively source contingent, temporary, and “here-today-gone-tomorrow” talent, this perspective tends to be to the detriment of HR. As we continue to move further and further away from the idea that professional growth is a linear (i.e., non-agile) experience, internal “side gigs” provide organizations with the unique chance to up-skill and develop agility in large segments of the workforce while simultaneously encouraging employees to take the career road less traveled.

Not only does internal side gig sourcing make business sense (as it will drastically reduce acquisition costs), but project-based assignments clearly align the interests of both employer and employee in a time when organizational needs are guaranteed to evolve.

Perhaps your organization has a technical writer interested in UX, or an implementation specialist looking to try their hand at client training. Even better, imagine your organization has both interested employees and a business need.

A gig approach to mobility will empower organizations with the agility needed to meet changing needs while encouraging employees to pursue the project-based work that both inspires them and assists them in developing the core competencies associated with their role.

It is only once acquisition stakeholders (i.e., both procurement and HR) have determined that highly specialized knowledge is immediately required and not internally available that an organization should look to source contingent talent.

Third, Directly Source With a Contingent Talent Network

If it is determined that the only way forward in regards to sourcing for a project-based role is with temporary external talent, the best way to do so is by implementing a direct sourcing strategy.

As traditional contingent sourcing activities are simply too costly to be sustainable for many companies given the economic realities of the ongoing pandemic, organizations must look to cut out the middleman and directly source contingent workers through a contingent talent network. Just as opportunity marketplaces position internal candidates to have greater control over their professional development, contingent talent networks aim to provide contingent workers with an engaging “candidate” experience that encourages top-tier, expert talent to come back and apply again in the future.

Once effectively implemented, organizations will marvel at their ability to cut costs, improve time to fill and streamline the administrative tasks associated with contingent sourcing.

Connecting the Talent Mobility Dots

Times of great uncertainty demand innovative thinking. As we inch closer to 2021, those organizations struggling to address and overcome today’s pandemic-driven mobility challenges must aim to develop greater harmony between internal and external talent pools.

The most effective way to do so is by taking a multi-faceted approach to talent mobility and sourcing activities, an approach driven by a focus on non-linear development, project-based assignments, and both internal and external marketplaces.

The post Why HR Desperately Needs a New Take on Talent Mobility appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

How to Improve Your Veteran Recruiting Efforts

Believe it or not, we’re well into Q4 2020. What a year this has been. I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy during these (dare I say it?) unprecedented times. From this point forward, this will be a COVID-free zone. I know we can all use a little break from that topic! Today, November 11th is Veterans Day.

In addition to honoring your Veteran employees, now is a great time to analyze your current Veteran recruiting efforts and start planning for next year. If you’re not an Affirmative Action employer, you may be unfamiliar with the Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), a federal law that prohibits discrimination in employment against Veterans.

VEVRAA does the math for us every year – what a beautiful thing – and establishes a hiring benchmark goal based on the Veterans in the civilian labor force. The most recently established hiring benchmark goal set for Veterans was 5.7%. If you were unsure of what you should be aiming for with Veteran hiring, now you have your answer!

If you are an Affirmative Action employer, it’s important to remember that this is a GOAL, not a quota. You will not be monetarily penalized for not meeting this goal. Of course, everyone is more than welcome to shoot for the stars if you’re an overachiever like me!

How do you find Veteran Applicants?

Now that we know what we should be aiming for, how do we generate more Veteran applicants? Great question. There are plenty of vendors and sourcing options, but I won’t get into that here.

If you haven’t made local connections with Local Veterans’ Employment Representatives (LVERs) and Disabled Veterans’ Outreach Program (DVOPs), that’s a great place to start. These individuals are specialists who have dedicated their careers to supporting Veterans transitioning into and growing within the workforce after their service.

You can find plenty of free resources for developing your Veteran recruiting strategy along with ways to find LVERs and DVOPs in your area here.

Achieve your Diversity Goals

Outside of obvious reasons to hire Veterans, improving your Veteran hiring can actually improve your diversity hiring. Say what?! If you want to do a little light reading (that’s sarcasm – it’s 110 pages), you can check out this Minority Veterans Report. I’ve pulled some highlights from the report for you to save you some time.

If you need to build a business case for additional Veteran hiring resources, bringing attention to the intersectionality of Veteran goals + Diversity goals should ring clear to your executive team.

To emphasize, diversity extends beyond race and gender. Hiring Veterans can also help achieve your diversity goals related to age, disability status, and more.

• 5 million Veterans in the United States and Puerto Rico were minorities. Minorities represented about 22.6 percent of the total Veteran population in 2014.
• In 2014, 52.0 percent of minority Veterans were Black non-Hispanic, compared with 32.0 percent of non-Veteran minorities.
• The median age of minority Veterans in 2014 was 55, compared with 39 for non-Veteran minorities.
• In August 2019, 4.7 million Veterans (25% of the total) had a service-connected disability.

Translate Skillset

One of the biggest sticking points for a recruiter or hiring manager can be trying to translate military experience to the experience we’re looking for in an applicant. There’s no need to get into the weeds trying to determine what type of military experience equates to a 3-5 year requirement on a specific job description. Instead, I’ve found it helpful to focus more on the soft skills that a Veteran developed during their service.

If you reflect upon the challenges our Veterans face during their time in service and the different types of skills they had to learn and develop to overcome those challenges, it’s easy to recognize how skills like adaptability, dependability, problem-solving, leadership, and more translate to almost any civilian career.

With this in mind, here’s a great (short) Youtube video if you need a little more inspiration!

Closing

Finally, I’ll leave you with this. Regardless of your views on the military, hiring Vets is the right thing to do.

They put their lives on the line for our country. We need to support them to succeed in their next chapter of life. I’m sure you’ve all seen a ton of your friends on social media participating in the 22 Pushup Challenge to raise awareness about Veteran suicide rates.

In fact, providing stable employment opportunities to our Veterans is a great way to bring some stability to their lives after their service. The Unemployment Rate for Veterans has been on a downward trend, so we’re all headed in the right direction.

Happy Recruiting!

The post Veterans Day 2020: How to Improve Your Veteran Recruiting Efforts appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

As we start to speculate on what recruiting will look like post-COVID, a largely unfamiliar job seeker persona is emerging: career changers. 

I’m not talking about “job hoppers” or those simply looking for a better position with a higher salary. I’m referring to job seekers who are pursuing an entirely new career path requiring a new set of skills – often in a brand-new industry.

By now, we’ve all seen COVID-19’s impact on employment. From layoffs to business closures. Now that the job market appears to be on the upswing, recruiters should prepare for the millions of unemployed professionals returning to the workforce. While some people may be lucky enough to get their old jobs back, others will seek a complete career change. 

But it’s not just unemployment propelling job seekers to change career paths. Candidates in industries hit the hardest by COVID restrictions (such as hospitality, food service, culinary, and travel) don’t want to return to a sector with a hazy future. Searching for work in a dwindling or highly disrupted industry is anything but appealing. 

On the other hand, people who’ve been working tirelessly through COVID in essential industries (like healthcare or retail) are stressed, burnt out, and in need of something new. They, too, are eyeing career changes. Additional reasons for changing careers include an inability to adapt to remote work or fear of going back to an “in-person” setting. It’s also likely that today’s climate has made many people truly think about life goals and priorities. 

Recruiting Career Changers

According to a survey conducted by iHire in September, 61.8% of job seekers said they are “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to make a major career change in the coming year. That means recruiters will start to see job applicants who are unqualified (on paper, at least) making their way into their funnels. In a time when 77.1% of organizations struggle to attract qualified, relevant candidates, I can see how the thought of an even more diluted talent pool is frustrating. However, I encourage you to embrace career changers in this new age of recruiting.

Here’s the why – and the how.

First, making a career change is not easy. It’s risky, it’s scary, and it’s rarely a smooth process. Candidates who clearly have put in the time and effort to market themselves to find jobs in a new industry, by highlighting relevant skills and experience in their resumes. Plus investing in professional and personal development. They are demonstrating a strong work ethic. Those are qualities that you cannot teach!

Second, career changers haven’t learned the “wrong way” to do a job. Have you ever had an employee with years of experience who could not grasp your processes and insisted on doing things differently? If so, you know that it’s sometimes harder to change a seasoned pro’s behavior than it is to train someone new and eager to learn.

Third, career changers have transferable skills. While someone may not possess a specific certification or a certain number of years in a field, they have likely acquired valuable skills that apply to just about any role or industry. These skills could include communication (written and verbal), management, organization, attention to detail, leadership, among many more. As with work ethic, these skills are not easily taught. 

Conversely, hard skills and on-the-job proficiencies (such as using a specific type of software, operating machinery, writing a proposal, or managing a database) can be taught. So, even if a candidate does not have the exact skill set, they could be trained in certain areas.

Re-examining Your “Must-Haves”

Now, let’s talk about how you can bring career changers into your talent pool. For trainable positions, consider loosening your requirements listed in your job ads. Evaluate “must-haves” for a role, versus “nice-to-haves.”  Identify what is absolutely necessary for someone to hold that job and what would serve as icing on the cake? Listing too many must-haves deters great talent from applying. Talent you could train to succeed in that role. 

To gain an idea of what types of skills, characteristics, and experiences are must-haves or nice-to-haves, assess your current staff’s previous work experience. Do their backgrounds align with their present roles? Which transferrable skills did they carry over from past jobs? What are some common traits that have made your team thrive?

Lastly, if you do encounter a career changer during your sourcing efforts, but ultimately offer the job to someone more qualified, add them to your talent pipeline and keep in touch. You may end up with an open position that is more geared toward that candidate’s transferable skills and relevant experience. By pipelining them, you’ll be able to fill the future role quickly. 

In closing, I’m not saying that you need to hire an unlicensed physician, for example. Or go out of your way to recruit a career changer over the candidate that checks all the boxes. Rather, I encourage you to be aware that career changers make great hires. If you’re willing to consider their transferable skills, loosen your “must-haves,” and train them to fill in the gaps. 

The post Don’t Forget About Career Changers in Post-COVID Recruiting appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

As each day brings new challenges for organizations, it can be easy to let recruitment take a back seat. Amid widespread uncertainty, layoffs, furloughs, and closures, the way forward isn’t always clear.

But savvy recruiters are realizing the time to start planning for your post-COVID recovery is now. Do you have a plan and some strategies in place to press “go” when you’re ready to start hiring again? If not, there will be a race for talent once the economy starts to recover. Your organization will struggle to fill critical roles if your competitors are faster to market.

To lay the foundations for future success, organizations will need to adopt 5 key strategies to ensure they’re growth-ready post-COVID-19.

These are:

• Assess skills gaps and talent shortages 

• Align recruiting strategies with business strategies 

• Engage and nurture furloughed employees and alumni 

• Leverage internal mobility to build an agile workforce 

• Lean on technology to supercharge remote recruiting (with a focus on screening and onboarding) 

Let’s look at each more closely:

Assess skills gaps and talent shortages

Determine the talent and skillsets you may have lost or gained. Across all industries, there have been hard hits – and in some, huge growth. Online retailers like Amazon have hired 175,000+ workers during this time.

In the US, the unemployment rate in April was 14.7%, the highest it’s been since World War II. This means there’s more talent on the market than ever before. It also means time-to-hire will remain critical when jobs return and competition for this talent is fierce.

The talent you’ve lost is probably the same as the talent your competitors have lost.

Have you considered the type of talent required to help your business succeed post-COVID-19? For example, the skills, competencies, and experience you once required when hiring retail staff may not be applicable if you’ve moved to online ordering and warehouse distribution.

You need a complete view of your current workforce and their bench strength, as well as an understanding of who is sitting in your internal and external talent pipelines. Prior to COVID-19, PageUp research found that only 37% of organizations say they understand current skill gaps and this number is likely to have decreased. 

Once you’ve discovered the gaps in your workforce, you can start proactively planning to fill talent pipelines for the future.

Align recruiting strategies with business strategies

The first step to building a successful recruitment strategy is to re-evaluate your current approach – whether you’re ready to hire or not. 

What are your organizational goals and strategies? It’s crucial to align your recruitment strategies with the goals of the business. Commercially, where does your organization want to be in 6 to 12 months’ time? 

If you don’t know the answer to this question, now is the time to make sure you’re part of the conversation. Have candid and honest discussions with business leaders and hiring managers to understand the skills, behaviors, and experience needed in the future – especially when reimagining or changing the types of roles your organization needs. 

Ask yourself: 

• Am I freezing, stabilizing, or ramping up hiring over the next 12 months? 
• What recruitment headcount will I need?
• Am I ready to start hiring when the time comes?

Engage and nurture furloughed employees and alumni

If you’re in a holding pattern and not hiring right now, there are still many things you can do to prepare for future recruitment. 

You need to keep talent pools warm – and in particular, nurture furloughed employees and alumni. These are valuable people that are pre-vetted and already aligned with your organization’s culture and values. 

Keeping this talent at-hand until you’re ready to hire again will make filling crucial skill gaps faster and easier. You don’t want to lose valuable people just because your competitor got to them first. 

Here’s what you can do if you’re not hiring but want to keep talent pools warm. 

• Identify your most effective sourcing channels: do you know what these are? Do you have a plan in place to tap into those channels?
• Recruitment marketing strategies can help you proactively tap into talent and build robust talent pipelines by engaging passive candidates, alumni, and furloughed employees, and nurturing talent pools. 
• Your career site plays an important role here. If it’s set up properly, you can use EOI capture forms to build talent pools even if you’re not hiring. More importantly, a good career site builds your employee value proposition (EVP) and employer brand. Now is the time to refresh these, particularly if you’re tapping into new talent segments. When you’re ready to hire there should be consistency of employer brand. 

Leverage internal mobility to build an agile workforce

Don’t forget about the pools of talent you have within your organization. Internally, you should be prioritizing employee engagement and looking for opportunities to redeploy (rather than furlough) talent. 

Internal mobility is a powerful tool to keep valuable employees working, engaged, and supported by the business. If an employee has transferable skills or characteristics, they may not be able to move vertically but they can be redeployed into different teams or divisions in the business. 

Lean on technology to supercharge remote recruiting

Of course, all of the above strategies are high-touch in their execution. Talent teams alone cannot handle the workload – or gain useful insights – if they rely on manual processes. 

Technology can streamline communication, track and measure the effectiveness of these strategies, and deliver a great experience for every candidate. 

Applicant tracking systems (ATS), screening and onboarding tech solutions become even more important in a remote world, with limited in-person interactions. Remote work has accelerated the need for HR tech and forced laggards to adopt tech solutions – if you’re not yet implementing HR tech solutions, you’re behind the competition. 

The businesses that are perfecting remote interviewing, screening, and onboarding now, will be well-placed to win the best talent when they’re ready to scale-up hiring again. Those who aren’t will struggle to find the talent they need in six months. 

There’s plenty of tech out there to support you – you just have to find what works for you. 

The post 5 Strategies to Prepare for Post-COVID Recruiting appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

“But just so we’re reminded of the ones who are held back
Up front there ought to be a man in black.” – Johnny Cash

We know things are not alright in our workplaces.

Someone must stand up and be the (wo)man in black. But who?

When it comes to creating human-centered, equitable workplaces, that person should be you and me. It should be Human Resources.

What is holding us back?

Maya Angelou once said: “I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.”

Let’s examine her quote in its component parts:

Empathy.

Earlier this year, I had an opportunity to introduce the concept of design thinking to students at DePaul University’s Master’s in Human Resources Management program. When I asked the students what they thought prevented HR from becoming human-centered, their unencumbered minds came up with these “3Ps”: Profit, Policy, and Process.

I venture that most of us entered the Human Resources profession aspiring to be advocates for our employees. Then, reality hit, and many of us got sucked into the HR of yesteryear, prioritizing the bottom line, compliance, and rigid processes.

Whenever I tell HR professionals that my mission is to “bring the HUMAN back to Human Resources”, I see their eyes light up and a glimmer of hope and excitement emerge. Most of us in HR have empathy; we just have forgotten how to tap into it.

Why does empathy and an employee experience-centric approach matter in times of record-high unemployment? As the economy turns around, employees and prospective candidates will most certainly judge organizations by the way they treated employees during the crisis. Empathy is also a pre-condition to psychological safety which in turn fosters the innovation needed to re-imagine our businesses.

Courage.

When I interviewed Halima McWilliams, People Operations and Culture Leader at Corgan, for a recent Talent Tales episode, she brilliantly stated that courage and fear can exist together. But fear should not keep us from doing what’s right.

Those of us who hold HR leadership roles or are otherwise privileged need to lead by example as we wield more influence in the organization. The more power we have, the more we need to think about how we might use it as a force for good.

I know this is not easy. I have been in your shoes. There are probably plenty of instances when I should have stood up more forcefully or more often, but I did not. I am consciously working toward getting better, and so can you. When you encounter a situation that does not sit well, reflect on it, research it, and discuss with a trusted peer. Every time you do this, you will grow your courage till you are ready to act.

Some acts of courage are more subtle than others. It takes courage to admit that we all have biases and blind spots and that we might need to ask for feedback from others to overcome them.

Need a nudge to get started? I find Brené Brown’s work inspiring and instructive in the way it tangibly connects vulnerability and courage.

Action.

Gianpiero Petriglieri, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at INSEAD, stated in a 2019 MIT Sloan Management Review article on organizational learning that “nothing truly novel, nothing that matters, is ever learned with ease.”

Adults learn best by doing. When it comes to acquiring new skills, collaborating with peers and exploring unfamiliar concepts in community through the process of practical inquiry have also proven effective in changing behavior and unleashing meaningful action.

That’s why I am so enthusiastic about the transformative potential of design thinking for our function.

In 2019, I founded the HR.Hackathon Alliance as a way for Human Resources professionals to safely experiment with the design thinking method while tackling real workplace problems.

Then 2020 hit and I felt a moral obligation to use our HR.Hackathon Alliance platform to benefit the social good.

These are three examples of social impact initiatives we recently launched:

1. #HRvsVirus

Our April 2020 #HRvsVirus Hackathon provided a virtual forum where an interdisciplinary group of 130 global problem solvers – from HR professionals to design thinkers and coders – came together united by a shared purpose.

2. Career Hackathon

In July 2020, we piloted Career Hackathon, a concept designed during the #HRvsVirus Hackathon. The solution aims to address the record high unemployment caused by the crisis.

3. #HRvsRacism

In August 2020, we launched #HRvsRacism, an ongoing initiative that aims to help HR professionals recognize and address racial inequities and racism in the workplace.

YOUR TURN:

• How might you practice empathy, unleash your courage, and start championing employee-centric workplace practices?
• How might you experiment with design thinking methods such as HR Hackathons to co-create change with your employees and leaders?
• How might you turn change efforts into sustainable movements?
• How might you work out loud so you can learn with and from the HR community?

I believe Human Resources can become a force for good. I am looking forward to the day when we will “wear a rainbow”. But first, let’s rise together as the (wo)man in black.

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