Category: Talent Acquisition Strategy

A Comprehensive Recruiting Solution Saves 35% in Recruitment Costs

Posted on by nfuqua
A Comprehensive Recruiting Solution Saves 35% in Recruitment Costs

A Comprehensive Recruiting Solution Saves 35% in Recruitment Costs

A leading regional food company across the Asia-Pacific region partnered with PeopleScout to implement an RPO solution to reduce agency spend and improve recruitment outcomes.

35 % reduction in agency spend
$ 500,000 saved in recruitment costs
Implemented a new streamlined recruitment process underpinned by analytics
Implemented a new streamlined recruitment process underpinned by analytics

Scope and Scale

The client operates in a highly competitive market where the need for evolving technical specialization can expand quickly as a result of high demands and product innovation. PeopleScout has developed an unrivaled experience and knowledge of the organization and the talent acquisition skills needed within consumer goods and consumer goods manufacturing companies. To meet its workforce demands, the client engaged PeopleScout to implement a full-cycle RPO program for their head office and production sites.

Situation

The client requires a scalable RPO solution to optimize recruitment technology, reduce agency usage, centralize recruitment processes and increase the quality-of-hire by standardizing the recruitment and selection process. The solution combines highly skilled recruiters, innovative technology and sophisticated recruitment processes to source market leading talent across Australia and the wider APAC region.

Solution

EMBEDDED RECRUITMENT SUPPORT

The solution has been constantly evolving over time to become a fit-for-purpose recruitment model that can flex up and down to meet the growth needs of the company across both regions as determined by changes in seasons and mergers and acquisitions.

IMPROVED TECHNOLOGY

The optimization of the recruitment technology ensures all roles are approved through an online form. The end-to-end recruitment process is shifted online allowing for measurable analytics.

TAILORED RECRUITMENT FOR DRIVERS

PeopleScout designed a recruitment and assessment process for drivers with a simple one-click apply and a single onsite interview. Completed pre-employment paperwork meant that drivers only came in once to complete the selection process. Mobile drug and alcohol testing vans were made available at the end of their shifts for a period of three days—reducing administrative costs and time-to-hire. On the day of the interview, candidates also completed medical assessments, further reducing time-to-fill.

SOURCING FOR LEADERSHIP ROLES

PeopleScout was asked to recruit a number of senior leadership roles across the organization. In the past, these roles would have been filled by an executive recruitment agency. PeopleScout was able to reduce time-to-fill and create a significant cost savings.

Results

REDUCTION IN AGENCY SPEND

Since the start of our journey with the client we have reduced agency spend from 40% to less than 5%. This equates to a cost reduction of well in excess of half a million dollars.

INSIGHTS & EXPERTISE

The client values the transparent approach to sharing data and the regular insights underpinning process improvement provided by PeopleScout’s RPO team as well as their ability to quickly source and hire candidates for hard-to-fill positions.

ACQUISITION SUPPORT

The use of structured screening and assessment combined with hiring manager training and uplift in hiring manager capability has led to an increased quality of hire.

IMPROVED PERFORMANCE

PeopleScout has improved the client’s recruitment performance by merging people, process and technology to enhance the experience with the recruitment process for candidates, recruiters and hiring managers.

ALIGNMENT TO PEOPLE CAPABILITIES

The company people capabilities set the behaviors of how the company performs, grows, recruits and recognizes people. The talent acquisition team continues to work closely with key stakeholders to build success profiles and interview guides that embed these capabilities in the recruitment process, and the team coaches hiring managers on best practice interview techniques.

At a Glance

  • COMPANY
    Food manufacturing company
  • INDUSTRY
    Consumer Goods
  • PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS
    Recruitment Process Outsourcing, Affinix
Let’s Connect

PeopleScout U.S. Jobs Report Analysis — April 2020

Posted on by nfuqua

U.S. employers shed 20.5 million jobs in April as the coronavirus crisis began to show its real impact. The unemployment rate rose to 14.7%, the highest level since the Great Depression. Year-over-year wage growth rose to 7.9%. This is because the vast majority of the job losses were in lower-wage roles. The numbers are even more bleak than they appear. The government’s definition of unemployed typically requires that people be actively looking for work. Additionally, 9 million workers claimed they were out of work for other reasons. If those people are counted, the unemployment rate jumps closer to 20%.

U.S. April Jobs Report 2020 infographic

The Numbers

20.5 Million: The U.S. economy shed 20.5 million jobs in April

14.7%: The unemployment rate rose to 14.7%.

7.9%: Wages rose 7.9% over the last year.

What We Know

The New York Times reports that the job losses in April alone are more than double the entire previous recession, where 8.7 million jobs were lost and unemployment peaked at 10% in October 2009. The only comparable period was during the Great Depression. In 1933, unemployment reached around 25%, but the government did not report official monthly statistics until 1948.

The leisure and hospitality industry was hit especially hard, with more than 7.65 million jobs lost. That includes all jobs gained in the industry since 1988. Women and minorities were particularly hard hit, with the unemployment rate for Latino and Hispanic workers jumping to 18.9%, and the rate for women jumping to 16.2%.

The massive increase in hourly wages reflects the fact that the majority of the layoffs were in lower-wage positions, while higher-paid, white-collar workers were more likely to hold on to jobs.

What We Expect

The unemployment rate will likely continue to rise in May, according to CNBC, which predicts a rate around 20% for the month.

The numbers may also already be higher than the report currently reflects. MarketWatch reports that some furloughed workers or others who considered themselves employed, even though they weren’t working, were not counted. If those workers were counted, the rate would be around 20% already.  

Are There Any Bright Spots?

“Bright spot” is relative in this report. However, 78.3% of those who were laid off in April consider the separation temporary, while 11.1% say the layoff was permanent. This means those jobs could return if the COVID-19 crisis improves, but it also means those layoffs could become permanent if the situation worsens.

There may also be a bright spot for companies who have the resources to hire during the crisis. Harvard Business Review reports that this is an unprecedented opportunity to hire high-quality talent. There are a lot of highly skilled workers, from recent graduates to experienced leaders who are looking for work right now. Employers who can hire during this crisis can bring in strong people who otherwise might not have been seeking new opportunities.

Hiring Solutions for Healthcare Providers with Krista Sullivan de Torres

Posted on by jpatel

As organizations around the globe confront talent scarcity challenges, even the most seasoned talent leaders find themselves in uncharted territory. This profile shares insights from PeopleScout Global Leader of Solutions Design, Krista Sullivan de Torres. Krista is a seasoned professional with more than a decade of human resources and talent acquisition experience. While Krista’s professional experience spans many industries, she has a passion for and deep expertise in healthcare recruitment. Her experience includes launching RPO programs for healthcare startup organizations, managing RPO operations for managed care, population health, behavioral health, and healthcare system clients. Krista’s specialties include global talent acquisition team design, talent acquisition operations, analytics and reporting, recruiting, sourcing and retention. Krista holds a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

Krista shared her insights about hiring solutions for healthcare providers from her home office in Florida. 

Ebook

How RPO Can Solve The Top Challenges In Healthcare Talent Acquisition

Access Ebook

What are some of the hiring challenges facing the healthcare industry right now? 

Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, there were already many challenges around healthcare hiring. We all hear about the shortage of nurses, but there’s also a shortage of clinicians across the board. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, we’ve seen an increased number of patients, so these shortages have become even more acute — particularly in the areas that have been hit hardest with the disease. In addition, some challenges arise when clinicians who have COVID-19 risk factors, or live with someone who does, are now unable or unwilling to work in order to protect themselves and their families — causing a large strain in hiring for these specialized roles.  

Hiring for a healthcare role, clinical or nonclinical, is much more difficult than hiring in many of the other essential industries right now. How and why is that? 

Regardless of whether we’re hiring for a role that is clinical or nonclinical, there are a lot of additional requirements for working in healthcare than there are in most other fields. If a candidate is going to be working directly with patients, particularly those that are most vulnerable, an extremely thorough background check is necessary to protect the safety of patients. So, rather than a traditional pre-hire online form and standard background check, healthcare candidates will undergo additional criminal history checks, fingerprinting and more. These critical checks tend to slow down the hiring process and can add a layer of complexity when we’re looking at the available workforce. 

Another factor affecting hiring is that a lot of people are a little afraid to work in the healthcare industry right now. As I mentioned earlier, people may be cautious about taking a job in healthcare in order to protect themselves or high-risk family members against COVID-19. In addition to there being a challenge in the number of candidates available to start, we are faced with the challenge of selecting the right people for the job and ensuring we have a pool of candidates who are excited and available to work during this unusual time.  

Lastly, a major factor we consider in the healthcare industry — particularly in a clinical setting — is ensuring healthcare workers are extremely customer-focused. We look for people who are very focused on the patient and the patient’s family. We’re facing challenges in the spike in the number of people who are severely ill, so ensuring we have workers who are correctly educating and caring for patients is of the utmost importance.  

What sort of hiring solution for healthcare providers are available right now? 

A lot of healthcare organizations are really trying to get creative during this critical hiring time due to the healthcare talent shortage. They’re looking to potentially bring back previously retired workers, flexing up hours for part-time associates and bringing in traveling nurses or clinicians to support them where their internal teams are at capacity. Many organizations are also interested in implementing a recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) solution to quickly get short-term support in locations that are particularly hard-hit.  

How do these RPO solutions work in practice? What are some of their benefits? 

That’s a great question. One of the many benefits of healthcare RPO is that we’re able to ramp up very quickly to meet client needs. For example, a client came to PeopleScout when they needed to rapidly scale up hiring to support their hospitals. We spoke with the client, came up with a solution and worked through the contracting phase all within three days. It helps that PeopleScout has a large team of clinical and nonclinical healthcare recruiters who are trained to know the industry and can identify high-quality candidates to get the pipeline filled quickly. 

When it comes to on-demand recruitment support, the beauty lies in rapid engagement and disengagement. Once immediate hiring needs are fulfilled, an RPO provider can pull recruiters back in-house and assign them to a new project. This is a great benefit for clients — they don’t need to deal with the stress of layoffs and furloughs because they’re able to engage and disengage experienced recruiters as needed.  

The most important thing right now is to keep everyone safe and healthy. What is the best kind of solution for that? 

One important way to keep people safe while still meeting critical talent needs is to use a virtual hiring solution for healthcare providers. PeopleScout has a bit of an advantage here because we were a virtually based culture even prior to the COVID-19 crisis, so many of our recruiters were already working from home. Our virtual solution allows us to conduct digital interviews — on-demand or live — so we can continue to safely service our clients without interruption. We’ve been able to effectively maintain — and in some cases exceed — productivity while also minimizing the risk for our clients, candidates and internal teams. 

Are there any final thoughts on hiring solutions healthcare providers you’d like to leave us with? 

We’re all going through a really challenging time right now and trying to support one another. We’re all in this together and PeopleScout is here to support our clients, candidates, teams and prospects in any way we can. 

Kent County Council: A Social Media Campaign Promoting a Career in Care

Posted on by edyson
Kent County Council: A Social Media Campaign Promoting a Career in Care

Social Media Recruitment Campaign

Kent County Council: A Social Media Campaign Promoting a Career in Care

PeopleScout developed a social media campaign for Kent County Council (KCC) to attract more home social care and healthcare workers.

51,000 impressions
1,000 click-throughs
75,000 views on YouTube in just 2 weeks

Support workers make a genuine difference to real lives, yet Kent County Council (KCC) was finding it hard to attract the right people to fill these vacancies. They approached PeopleScout to develop a campaign to reach an audience that may not realize they had the skills and attributes to become care workers and show them they could have a meaningful career, just by “being you.”

Scope & Scale

Kent County Council, along with over 1,400 partner organizations, are committed to providing essential care and support, working with some of the most vulnerable members of the community. Their need to recruit was based on the requirement to alleviate pressure on nursing homes and hospitals by providing care in the clients’ own homes, therefore freeing up valuable beds elsewhere.

It was also important to demonstrate to the wider Kent population that KCC was taking positive and supportive action in what was a high profile and often criticized area for all local authorities.

Situation

With job openings that aren’t clearly defined by specific skills or experience, it’s often challenging to convince potential recruits that a role is right for them. With “unskilled” (in terms of qualifications) positions such as these, the lure of other opportunities, including retail, is often more appealing and the lack of visibility or explanation of support roles, alongside a misunderstanding of what is entailed, compounds this issue. In addition to this, there was a lack of clarity about the genuine career potential that these jobs could offer potential candidates. KCC aimed to raise the profile of the work they do in an area that is both sensitive and one that touches most people at some stage in their lives.

Solution

To fully understand why existing support workers do what they do, we ran a focus group to investigate the motivators and to hear real-life stories. Our creative team then set to work to produce a personal and appropriate creative identity; one that would put empathy and natural caring skills needed for these roles at the very heart of the campaign. We concluded the best way to communicate this was through video, showing everyday situations where people made a difference, doing everyday things and how this translated into a care workers’ job.

This was driven by the central campaign message of, “You’d be surprised how qualified you are to be a support worker – just by being you.” With a small promotion budget and to ensure that the power of the video’s visuals were maximized, we used social media to push the video out to the target audience using geographic and behavioral targeting methods.

Results

The social media campaign ran for just over two weeks and in that time delivered over 51,000 impressions, converting to over 1,000 click-throughs – an impressive rate of 2.1%. Equally impressive, YouTube delivered almost 172,000 impressions and over 75,000 views.

At a Glance

  • COMPANY
    Kent County Council
  • INDUSTRY
    Government & Public Sector
  • PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS
    Talent Advisory
  • ABOUT KCC
    Kent County Council is a county council that governs the county of Kent in England including 1.6 million residents. Amongst its many services, the council provides health and social care for adults and children.
Let’s Connect

Sainsbury’s: Getting More Vans on the Road

Posted on by edyson
Sainsbury's: Getting More Vans on the Road

Recruitment Media Campaign

Sainsbury’s: Getting More Vans on the Road

Grocery retailer Sainsbury’s turned to PeopleScout to hire drivers to support their growing online business.

6,200 annual hires
5 weeks to fill most roles
analytics informed approach resulted in reduced marketing spend
analytics informed approach resulted in reduced marketing spend

With online grocery shopping becoming increasingly popular, Sainsbury’s looked to PeopleScout to maximize the number of delivery slots that they could offer to customers. In a saturated marketplace, it wasn’t enough just to target existing drivers, we also needed to find those with transferable skills and encourage them to apply. The resulting strategy enabled Sainsbury’s to go to market with a number of highly targeted and locations-specific attraction campaigns.

Situation

Before engaging with PeopleScout, the client struggled to meet its hiring goals. Approximately two-thirds of candidates dropped out of the hiring process between the first two steps of the screening process. Many candidates couldn’t complete screening during traditional recruiting hours.  

In response to these challenges, PeopleScout provides a highly scalable delivery team to meet the client’s fluctuating hiring needs and address regional and cultural preferences during the screening process. PeopleScout’s centralized recruitment support ensures compliance and streamlines the process through innovative technology solutions. Positions in scope include 6,200 annual hires for warehouse and truck driver positions.

Sainsbury’s business strategy is to respond to the changing needs of their customers, enabling them to shop whenever and wherever they want. Seven days a week, Sainsbury’s delivers fresh food, groceries, general merchandise and clothing from suppliers around the world, via 33 distribution centers, to their store and online customers, meeting their requirements for flexible, convenient shopping.

Drivers are a vital part of this strategy, ensuring that Sainsbury’s can make deliveries to millions of customers at a time that suits them.

The online grocery department is a fast-growing business for Sainsbury’s. When we started this project, one in five employees worked in the department, but with changing consumer habits, this was soon to become one in three.

Despite being one of the company’s largest employee populations, it experienced high turnover in line with the challenging driver recruitment market. Some locations, for example, inner-city areas and affluent suburban locations, found it particularly hard to recruit.

The level of attrition made it hard for the department to grow, and driver availability became the limiting factor when it came to processing orders. It was vital for the business to hire more drivers immediately, but also have a robust strategy for the future too.

Solution

SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS

  • Marketing Intelligence & Market Analysis
  • Persona Development
  • Process Design
  • Creative Development
  • Integrated Media Campaign

AT A GLANCE

  • COMPANY
    Sainsbury’s
  • INDUSTRY
    Retail
  • PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS
    Recruitment Process Outsourcing, Talent Advisory
  • ANNUAL HIRES
    6,200 annual hires for warehouse and truck driver positions
  • LOCATIONS
    33 distribution centers
  • ABOUT SAINSBURY’S
    Sainsbury’s is a British supermarket and the second largest grocery chain in the United Kingdom. Since opening their first store in 1869, Sainsbury’s in focused on providing great value food and convenient shopping, whether in-store or online—as well as through their other brands Argos, Habitat, Tu, Nectar and Sainsbury’s Bank.
Contact Sales

Our first step was to leverage interviews and focus groups to understand the recruitment proposition for drivers at Sainsbury’s.

In addition to interviews, we utilized market mapping techniques to understand the labor force, reporting on salary benchmarks, competitor activity, and the socio-demographics of hard-to-fill locations.

Using the data collected from interviews and focus groups, we developed distinct driver personas, each with its own messaging framework and channel strategy. We used these to develop highly targeted comms for each group, responding to their motivations and behaviors.

Secondary messaging included: flexible shifts where we knew there was a high student population and non-monetary benefits such as child-care vouchers in areas that had a high density of families.

Results

The campaign was so successful that the majority of roles were filled within the first five weeks of the 12-week campaign, meaning that Sainsbury’s could cut back on their marketing spend. More impressively, seven locations needed to pause their recruitment due to high application numbers including two of the locations that were identified as hard-to-fill areas.

After speaking to hiring managers, existing employees, and those working for competitor organizations, we found that the majority of people eligible to be a Sainsbury’s delivery driver didn’t realize that they already had the skills to do the job. In fact, the role required skills like good customer service, time management, and self-motivation which we found to crossover with a number of different sectors.

This led us to design a creative route that focused on the core messaging of “All you need is a license” and “Where will your license take you?” educating the audience around the training and development new joiners received. This sat in contrast to another creative route which we used in locations that had high competitor activity. There we led with the messaging around the fact that Sainsbury’s offered guaranteed hours where other organizations did not.

Before the campaign, Sainsbury’s was engaging with candidates across multiple channels with different communications, which meant they ended up talking to the same audience in different ways, about different things. By taking this insight-driven segmented approach, Sainsbury’s could instead talk confidently about the things that mattered to candidates, using the channels that they were most likely to respond to.

“The success of the campaign so far has been unprecedented and as such after five weeks we are already in a place where most of our stores in the trial have filled all driver hours required. In total, we have received over 2,000 applications. We’ve extended 131 offers, and 106 have been accepted so far.”

Client Testimonial

COVID-19 Series: Hiring Solutions for Healthcare Providers

Posted on by nfuqua

As organizations around the globe confront the challenges presented by the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, even the most seasoned talent leaders find themselves in uncharted territory. We’re creating a series with our experts here at PeopleScout about the issues that are most pressing during this uncertain time.

We are focused on the safety of our employees and clients, friends, families and loved ones. However, it is important for many organizations to keep their talent acquisition functions moving – whether to provide essential services or to serve our communities by providing jobs. Many organizations are also now adapting to a newly virtual workforce.

In that spirit, this podcast shares insights from PeopleScout Global Leader of Solutions Design, Krista Sullivan de Torres about hiring solutions for healthcare providers.

Krista is a seasoned professional with more than a decade of human resources and talent acquisition experience. While Krista’s professional experience spans many industries, she has a passion for and deep expertise in healthcare. Her experience includes launching RPO programs for healthcare startup organizations, managing RPO operations for managed care, population health, behavioral health, and healthcare system clients. Krista’s specialties include global talent acquisition team design, talent acquisition operations, analytics and reporting, recruiting, sourcing and retention. Krista holds a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Talking Talent: Stretch Your HR Thinking

Posted on by nfuqua

David Fairhurst is well known as an innovative HR leader and entertaining speaker. He was formerly Global Chief People Officer for McDonald’s, one of the largest employers in the world, with 2 million employees covering over 120 countries. He has held HR leadership positions at many of the top global organizations including Heinz, GSK and Tesco.  David is the founder of Orgshakers, helping businesses shape their organizations to achieve short-term performance as well as long-term organizational health.

In this podcast, David speaks with Robert Peasnell, Deputy Managing Director of PeopleScout UK about the future of HR and how you can stretch your thinking to create successful HR strategies.

Listen to find out:

  • How to navigate change and create organizational readiness.
  • The importance of being brave in employer brand and EVP innovation
  • Understanding the cultural context of HR in other countries
  • How HR messaging can change organizational behavior
  • The need to use tech to disrupt the market and win the best talent
  • How to make an impact in communities
  • The likely fundamental shifts after lockdown

Hiring Solutions for Essential Employers with Jessie McGowan

Posted on by jpatel

As organizations around the globe confront the challenges presented by the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, even the most seasoned talent leaders find themselves in uncharted territory. We’re creating a mini-series with our experts here at PeopleScout about the issues that are most pressing during this uncertain time. 

This profile shares insights from PeopleScout Leader of Business Development in North America, Jessie McGowan. Jessie spends the majority of her time sharing our solution offerings with prospective clients, where she calls upon her years of experience leading a diverse portfolio of RPO client partners. 

Jessie shared her insights about hiring solutions for essential employers from her home in Charleston. 

A lot of people are feeling overwhelmed right now. What are you hearing from talent acquisition and HR leaders? In what ways and industries do those teams need support right now? 

There is a lot going on in all industries as we react to what’s happening in the world today with COVID-19. Mission critical industries like grocery, healthcare, logistics and other supply chain roles that hire drivers or selectors, manufacturing — specifically medical device — are seeing tremendous increases in their needs to find and hire qualified talent. And, unless they’re working with an RPO provider like PeopleScout that’s built to flex, they’re not going to have the adequate talent acquisition staff to meet the demands of the business.   

What are some easy ways essential employers can find that support? 

PeopleScout has a few offerings. One is Recruiter On-Demand (ROD) — where we provide a qualified recruiter to work as an extension of an organization’s team on an hourly basis. ROD can also be leveraged as a project approach, where an organization can have a provider support a certain function of their hiring process or a certain number of hires for a period of time. For instance, if you received 500,000 applications last week, how are you going to get through them? Unless you’ve already built a highly efficient automated process, a partner like PeopleScout can help improve that process for organizations. 

What do these solutions look like in practice? How are they implemented? 

Recruiter On-Demand can be deployed within about 24 hours. We have qualified recruiters with a wide range of domain experience like frontline or retail hiring, healthcare, manufacturing, drivers and IT. First, we assign the right fit recruiter and quote an hourly rate. Then, the organization provides our recruiter access to their applicant tracking system or system of record and an email address so that PeopleScout can become invisible to the candidate throughout the process.  

Our Recruiter On-Demand solution is simple and straight forward, and we work hard to keep it moving and efficient. Once we’ve landed on the business terms, we assign an engagement leader who will schedule what we call a “kickoff” with the client to document the process and discuss expectations. We’ve been doing this a long time, so we’ve built the process with the intention of keeping it really easy for talent acquisition leaders, and we’re able to launch it very quickly in a seamless manner. 

How do we use the solution in a way that keeps everyone, including employees and candidates, safe? 

That’s a great and timely question. Most of our recruiters worked from home even before the COVID-19 outbreak, so virtual work is part of the PeopleScout DNA. As a matter of fact, some of our most complex, high volume recruiting solutions are 98% virtual, where a very small subset of team members might sit together in a delivery center in Chicago, Charlotte or Toronto, for example.  

At PeopleScout, we have a lot of experience in building world-class virtual solutions that are designed to provide an exceptional candidate experience and deliver efficiency. We are able to advise talent leaders on utilization of digital interviewing tools such as texting or prerecorded voice or video. We also have our own proprietary tool, Affinix™ talent technology or we can advise a leader on what might be best for them and available in the market. We’re flexible and focused on getting talent acquisition leaders what they need to be able to deliver to their business and stakeholders, and we have a lot of experience, especially building a no-contact, virtual solution. We can source, qualify, schedule talent, offer positions, and even onboard new hires all virtually, over the phone or by utilizing technology. 

Can you talk a bit more about what a virtual solution looks like in practice? 

Our virtual interview management solution is designed to complement your existing hiring process and it can be set up in a matter of days. It would include process steps such as: 

  • Phone screening: includes on-demand and live options 
  • Video interviewing: includes on-demand and live options 
  • Scheduling tools: enables candidates to self-schedule available interview slots or be scheduled via recruiters’ assistance  
  • Results-based automated interview progression: allows you to define the criteria that determines whether to automatically advance candidates 
  • Feedback-driven advancement: creates settings based on recruiter rating and scoring criteria 

Interview notifications and updates can be pushed out to the candidate, so they understand at any given moment where they are in the interview process. And, hiring leaders can also see the progression of a candidate throughout the process. So, while at PeopleScout we’ve been supporting an essentially 100% virtual recruitment process for years now, we can appreciate that this is a new approach for many essential employers, and we can walk them through what to consider as they implement a virtual hiring solution. 

A lot of us are feeling a lot of stress and anxiety right now. What recommendations do you have for someone who is leading a talent acquisition team that feels like they’re in crisis? 

Sometimes it’s hard to see what the right plan might be when you’re dealing with the type of stress and anxiety that surrounds us these days. That’s where we can help. PeopleScout is highly consultative — by asking a few key questions, we can help a talent acquisition leader identify the right levers to pull to drive the result that they need. We’re happy to walk a potential partner through a quick diagnostic to see if we’re a fit and if we can be helpful. Sometimes, even if we’re not the right fit, just having the conversation can be helpful in getting down to the root of what talent leaders really need right now. And we’re happy to share our knowledge and be helpful, especially during these tough times. 

Are there any final thoughts you’d like to leave essential employers with today? 

The hope is that this is temporary. And that very quickly we’ll go back to solving more familiar talent acquisition challenges, like how to find more great people. But, at this time we’re poised to be flexible, and creative, to help solve the new problems we’re all dealing with today. 

PeopleScout U.S. Jobs Report Analysis — March 2020

Posted on by nfuqua

U.S. employers shed 701,000 jobs in March as the coronavirus crisis began to impact the country. The unemployment rate rose to 4.4%. Year-over-year wage growth rose to 3.1%. This ends the longest continuous economic expansion in U.S. history.

The numbers are expected to grow even more bleak in the coming months. The March numbers are based on reports from the first two weeks of the month, before many states implemented stay-at-home orders. Therefore, the full impact is not yet known.

U.S. jobs report infographic

The Numbers

701,000: The U.S. economy shed 701,000 jobs in March

4.4%: The unemployment rate rose to 4.4%

3.1%: Average hourly wages rose 3.1% over the last year.

The March Losses

The job losses are most significant in the leisure and hospitality sector, which shed 459,000 jobs as bars and restaurants closed and international and most domestic travel came to a halt. The March jobs report was the biggest monthly drop since the worst months of the Great Recession.

According to the New York Times, even industries that had initially continued running, like manufacturing, are starting to see major impacts as factories close. The job losses are also spread across industries considered essential, including healthcare, as dentists and other non-essential healthcare providers have closed their doors until the pandemic lifts.

There are very few bright spots in the report. Some employers in the transportation and warehousing sector and grocery stores have picked up hiring to meet increased demands.

What’s to Come

The numbers are likely to get far worse in the coming months. As MarketWatch reports, the March numbers don’t reflect the approximately 10 million people who filed for unemployment during the final two weeks of the month. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. could lose 27.9 million jobs and have an unemployment rate as high as 16% by the end of May. The nonpartisan congressional budget office predicts that unemployment will pass 10% in the second quarter of the year. April’s job report could show the largest ever drop in employment.

COVID-19 Series: Hiring Solutions for Essential Employers

Posted on by nfuqua

As organizations around the globe confront the challenges presented by the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, even the most seasoned talent leaders find themselves in uncharted territory. We’re creating a series with our experts here at PeopleScout about the issues that are most pressing during this uncertain time.

We are focused on the safety of our employees and clients, friends, families and loved ones. However, it is important for many organizations to keep their talent acquisition functions moving – whether to provide essential services or to serve our communities by providing jobs. Many organizations are also now adapting to a newly virtual workforce.

In that spirit, this podcast shares insights from PeopleScout Leader of Business Development in North America, Jessie McGowan about hiring solutions for essential employers.

Jessie spends the majority of her time sharing our solution offerings with prospective clients where she calls upon her years of experience leading a diverse portfolio of RPO client partners.