Rick Betori’s role as PeopleScout’s managing director of the Americas has a few similarities with a previous leadership position he held as coach of his children’s baseball teams.
“The ball is always going to roll in between someone’s legs,” he told me from his home in the Chicago suburbs. “And, it’s not about the fact that it went through their legs; it’s what they do after and how they respond when things don’t go according to plan. That’s one of the most important things I can do in my role as a leader.”
Rick thrives when there’s a challenge to tackle, when there’s a problem to solve and when there’s the opportunity to connect the right person with the right job in a difficult labor market. It’s an important quality as employers face a talent landscape that has been transformed by the pandemic.
Although Rick joined PeopleScout in 2021, he has been a part of the TrueBlue organization since 2011, most recently leading delivery operations at PeopleReady, where he helped spearhead the company’s digital transformation. As such, he understands how technology, combined with human expertise, can solve the toughest talent problems. We talked to him about the role of talent technology in 2022.
You’re not new to TrueBlue, but you are a relatively new face here at PeopleScout. What makes you really excited about talent acquisition right now?
I’m excited because I believe that we can truly help companies that are facing some of their largest hiring challenges in their histories. Talent acquisition teams need creative partners to help them succeed, and I’m thrilled to be a part of finding those solutions.
I’m also passionate about our talent technology platform, Affinix™, and what it does to help candidates seamlessly move through the application process. Candidates have so many choices today; when they’re searching for a new role, they expect a great experience, and they want it to be fast. I also think that now more than ever, data and analytics will be key in helping employers stay ahead of their competition in a difficult talent market.
And finally, I’ve been a part of the TrueBlue family since 2011, so I’ve been able to witness the passion and energy of the PeopleScout team working to put our clients first. It’s been great to dig in with the team in these last few months. They bring this infectious energy to do what’s right for our clients and their applicants. I’m proud to be a part of this organization moving forward.
Throughout the last couple of years, we’ve seen a lot of employers add technology to their recruitment process out of need. For talent acquisition leaders, where do you think their relationship with talent technology stands today?
I hate to start the answer to a question with “it depends,” but it really does vary. We have seen many employers add technology solutions to deal with increased workload, compliance concerns, and to eliminate or simplify administrative tasks.
More recently, employers feel the pressures of attracting top talent, so they’re taking the next step, focusing on easing and improving the process for candidates. More companies are starting to leverage technology to reduce friction for candidates in the application process and at the same time, building a stronger employer brand.
Finally, we’re seeing leaders stepping back and asking, “How can technology, data and analytics inform our decision-making from a talent standpoint?” These leaders want more information around changes in roles; how the market is responding in their specific area; and how factors like the rise of the gig economy and the COVID-19 pandemic have influenced their prospective talent pools.
The right technology can really make the recruitment process feel even more personal and enhance an organization’s employer brand. How can you make that happen?
It’s about more than the right technology; it’s about the right technology at the right time. Employers can make the greatest impact by targeting specific points in the candidate’s journey.
For example, we know that candidates want to feel a sense of control in the process, and they want to feel as though things are moving forward. That means employers need to keep candidates feeling engaged and empowered. So, the right technology intervention could be implementing a pre-screen that candidates can complete by text or adding an interview self-scheduling tool. These give candidates the ability to feel like they’re taking the next step in the process, rather than waiting to hear back from someone.
Employers should also evaluate specific tools to ensure they fit with their brand. For example, candidates applying to a technology company would expect the process to include more advanced technology, more automation and a more cutting-edge approach to the recruitment process. On the other hand, candidates for positions where the work is focused on manual tasks or face-to-face interactions may expect a different experience. It’s not one size fits all.
In the current market, talent acquisition teams need to move faster than ever to identify and secure talent. The days of long recruitment processes, multiple interviews and multiple steps are over.
Candidates have so many opportunities facing them today…and it’s not just different employers. Think about the impact of virtual work. It used to be that companies simply competed with other organizations in their area, but now, they compete for top talent with companies across the globe.
Add that to that the fact that many employers are reporting a record numbers of job openings and they can’t ramp up their internal teams fast enough to keep up with the number of requisitions they’ve got to fill. The right tools, and the right partner, can make the process easier and even provide them a competitive advantage.
Adding new technology to an established process can be scary. What advice do you have for talent leaders to help them gain buy-in in their organizations?
First off, I’d say, if there wasn’t any fear, I’d be surprised. It’s human nature. But that’s not a reason not to automate.
It starts with having a good, strong, proactive communication plan around the process—explaining what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. It should be transparent and easy to understand. The plan should clearly demonstrate the benefits for the team, and then, it’s important to gather feedback. There must be open lines of communication. It’s about letting people weigh in as you fine-tune the process. Finally, it’s great to recognize and celebrate the early adopters. We’ve seen a lot of success in highlighting the employees who engage and really embrace the change early on.
With internal buy-in, it’s tough, and you can’t underestimate the challenge. However, a good, solid plan executed by leadership goes a long way.
Are there any final thoughts you’d like to leave us with?
I want to put an exclamation point on something I said earlier about the importance of speed in the current talent market. I know the types of pressures that talent leaders are under right now. I don’t have a crystal ball to tell you how long it will last, but I can say that when you find the right partner, they can help you start this process in a way that feels manageable, and that can also help you prepare for whatever challenge lies ahead.
Talent attraction means grabbing a candidate’s attention and in this day and age that is not an easy task. Every day, we’re bombarded with between 4,000 and 10,000 ads. Naturally, we don’t give every one of them our full attention; our brains screen out the majority that they consider irrelevant so we don’t get overwhelmed. Recruitment messages—designed to grow awareness and excitement around job opportunities—are just one subset of ads fighting for our attention in this intense daily contest.
In such a ruthless environment, talent attraction techniques have evolved and adapted. Modern recruitment marketing now draws heavily on consumer marketing practices and technology to ensure that recruiting organizations create clear space between themselves and their competitors. This optimizes the likelihood that their messages will receive the attention of the right candidates and fuel growth in healthy pipelines for future vacancies.
This article will walk you through four strategic pillars to succeed in this hugely competitive space for top talent.
Talent Attraction Pillar One: Establishing Your Brand Narrative as a North Star
To attract top talent, you need to tell a vivid story about your unique employer value proposition, or EVP. This proposition should clearly communicate the compelling elements of your employment offer, as well as the behaviors and values you expect of candidates in return.
This narrative allows candidates to make an informed decision about whether your organization is somewhere they aspire to work and somewhere they can have an influence. But, it also ensures that the people who do go on to apply are in tune with your company values; are motivated to be a part of your team’s mission; and are ready to take on the particular challenges associated with their role.
Recruitment marketing is the task of telling that story—why talent should want to work for you. Specifically, it’s about telling it:
To the right people, at the right time
Consistently, with targeted content and experiences that develop a candidate’s understanding of—and trust in—your company
In exciting and unexpected ways to stand out from the competition
Changing jobs is a significant life event fueled by a complex and highly emotional decision-making process. More than ever, candidates are searching for an employer that exhibits a shared set of values and work that they find meaningful. This is even more apparent in the Millennial and Gen Z members of the workforce. As such, a well-articulated employee value proposition can provoke an emotive response from candidates; give them a first glimpse into your company culture; and differentiate you from your competitors for talent. Without a clearly defined employer brand story, the guiding North Star of your strategy is missing.
Talent Attraction Pillar Two: Build Authenticity & Trust with Your Employees’ Voice
When considering whether to apply for a role, candidates will evaluate the authenticity of your brand claims and develop perceptions of what it’s really like to work for you. Therefore, when it comes to the credibility of your messages, the sources that deliver them are all important. Appetite for glossy corporate advertising is low; candidates are looking for trusted spokespeople to reveal the real story.
According to Edelman’s brand trust report, nearly seven in 10 people globally use one or more advertising avoidance strategy.
Personal experience, earned media, and peer-to-peer conversations are far more influential than owned media and paid advertising in the battle for brand trust.
Industry experts and regular employees are seen as significantly more credible spokespeople for a brand than the company’s CEO.
Similarly, candidates are savvy to corporate clichés and empty promises. Alternatively, they will use resources like Glassdoor and Indeed to seek out the opinions of existing employees who have previously road-tested an employee experience.
Of course, you can’t control everything that’s written about your brand online, but you can empower your most engaged employees to be the voice of your brand by sharing their own experiences. Plus, personal stories will provide you with credible evidence to support your employer value proposition and build credibility among your external brand audiences. It can be easy to overcomplicate advocacy; the key is to make it a fun and celebratory process. For instance:
Make sharing simple. There are many content amplification tools that will allow employees to access your employer brand content and repost it to their own social channels in seconds.
Introduce a little competition. Award points to employees for sharing their own stories and reposting those of their colleagues.
Make advocacy rewarding. What do your advocates get in return for being active brand ambassadors? Social media training? Networking opportunities?
But, don’t just expect employees to go off and create great content; you’ll need to offer support. So, consider setting content creation challenges with detailed guidelines to keep them energized and engaged.
Talent Attraction Pillar Three: Connect to Talent with Data-Driven Insights
Top talent doesn’t need to actively look for new opportunities because, like in the consumer world, offers have already started coming to them. Nowadays, passive and active candidate status is no longer clear cut. While some people are actively looking for jobs, it would be incorrect to label everyone else passive and disinterested in new opportunities.
In fact, candidates expect to be approached with new opportunities. Take the highly competitive tech market, for example: More than half of all software engineers in North America are approached by recruiters at least once every quarter. In such a competitive market, you need to engage your future workforce before the demand to hire them exists.
So, instead of playing the numbers game and hoping that the right person is out there somewhere, wouldn’t it be better to have an existing relationship with the people we think would be perfect for the job? And, better still, to know exactly their level of interest in new opportunities so that, when we do approach them, we know it’s a welcome advance? Fortunately, this is all made possible if we build high-quality, data-driven talent pipelines that provide recruiters with live insights into candidate interest levels and improve their efficiency. Below are three steps you can take to start building talent pipelines.
Pillar Four: Differentiate Your Brand Through Human Experiences
Let’s reimagine the marketing funnel as the journey of a single candidate. Armed with your compelling employer value proposition, the task throughout this journey is to bring the promises of that proposition to life for candidates and reinforce your brand messages so that they build a preference for your organization.
In other words, rather than just telling candidates why you should be their preferred choice of employer, show them at every touchpoint.
Remember when we referred to your employer brand as your North Star? This is exactly what we meant by that: Use your employer brand and value proposition as a guiding force when crafting all of your recruitment communications and experiences. The more consistently and distinctively your value proposition is expressed throughout the candidate journey (and beyond into the employee lifecycle), the more your brand reputation will align to the identity that you want to portray.
As an example, if you claim to be an employer that cares about employee wellbeing, show candidates from the start by supporting them through the recruitment process with deep empathy. Likewise, if you claim to be an employer that fosters innovation, ensure that your communications are fresh and different.
The way that candidates experience your organization throughout the candidate journey will show them everything they need to know about how your company treats customers and colleagues. That perception, once created, is hard to shift. If you treat candidates with dignity and show them how their time is valued, most will walk away from the recruitment process feeling positive about the brand you represent—whether they were successful or not. This means that you’re more likely to be the beneficiary of positive word-of-mouth advertising from that individual, as well as ensure that they’re more likely to reengage with you in the future should another, more appropriate, opportunity arise. That could be next week, next month or next year. The long game matters. A human-centric approach is different and will certainly stand out among the numerous companies that still facilitate an impersonal hiring process.
Making The Right Match
When these four strategic pillars work cohesively together, they allow you to seek out top talent and start conversations with potential employees wherever they prefer to consume content. Then, you can convert candidates to the next stage of the recruitment process by delivering content that responds to behavioral triggers and underlying candidate motivations. Finally, you can differentiate your organization from your competitors with human experiences that bring your employer brand to life in unexpected and exciting ways.
To learn more about recruitment marketing and talent attraction and retention, including the important metrics you should focus on, read our ebook.
When people of different backgrounds with different experiences come together, they drive innovation—both in the workplace and in the world at large. In fact, there’s substantial research that DE&I initiatives bring many advantages to the workplace, including increased profitability and creativity; greater productivity; and better problem-solving, among others.
Employees with diverse backgrounds also bring their own perspectives, ideas and experiences, which help to create organizations that are resilient and effective and that outperform organizations that do not invest in diversity.
Yet, despite the obvious benefits of increased diversity and inclusion in the workplace, the reality still leaves much to be desired. For instance, research from Boston Consulting Group shows that diversity and inclusion efforts have yielded sparse results: Although nearly all companies have programs in effect, only 25% of employees from diverse backgrounds feel they have personally benefited from them.
Clearly, employers must do more, and the responsibility for diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) belongs to the entire organization—including talent acquisition and HR leaders. So, in this article, we’ll cover the different areas of the business that contribute to DE&I; how you can determine your DE&I program maturity; and areas where talent acquisition leaders can have the greatest influence.
So, Who’s Responsible for DE&I Initiatives?
For years, talent acquisition teams have led diversity efforts within organizations. In some cases, employers hire a chief diversity officer (CDO) and provide a budget for DE&I initiatives. However, the responsibility for DE&I initiatives is much broader, and everyone from senior leaders to entry-level employees in everything from marketing to IT has a role in creating an inclusive workplace. Here, we outline the roles that different areas of the business play in DE&I efforts.
Talent Acquisition & HR
More than any other group or individual, talent acquisition and the broader HR organization are responsible for diversity and inclusion in the workplace. According to a Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) survey, in 59% of organizations, HR and talent acquisition oversee diversity efforts and, at 64%, they’re tasked with implementing diversity initiatives.
Leadership
An organization’s leadership team is responsible for diversity outcomes at 25% of organizations, according to a Deloitte report. But, leadership must play a role in the DE&I initiatives at all organizations. In fact, having a C-suite member as the diversity and inclusion program leader is one of the biggest differentiators between organizations in which diversity is not considered a barrier to progression versus ones where it is, according to PwC’s data.
However, to be successful champions of diversity, leadership needs to be fully engaged—because an inclusive and equitable culture must be present from the top down. Notably, if time and other responsibilities that accompany their jobs make it difficult for executives to be fully engaged, organizations may want to reconsider having their C-suite remain heavily involved in their diversity efforts. In this case, you might consider appointing another individual (or individuals) who is more able to focus on the work and, as a result, bring about more change.
Diversity Committees
Not every organization has the resources to support a full-time diversity role. In fact, the larger the employer, the more likely it is to have dedicated diversity staff, according to Xpert HR. However, as SHRM found, smaller organizations may be able to aid diversity and inclusion programs by taking a cue from the 17% of employers that have an advisory group/committee comprised of volunteer staff members. This can actually be quite an effective approach, as employee sponsorship corresponds with lower levels of reported bias within an organization, according to Center for Talent Innovation research.
Identifying Gaps in the Maturity of Your DE&I Initiatives and Programs
When it comes to really progressing your organization’s DE&I program, the best place to start is by asking yourself where your organization stands today. That way, you can best identify where to place your initial efforts in order to create the greatest influence. Below, we outline the different stages of DE&I program maturity. Note that your organization may be at different levels in different areas.
Beginner: Generally, employers at the beginner level of maturity tend to be more reactive rather than proactive; they may narrowly define workplace diversity, and leaders usually have limited involvement in driving DE&I forward within the organization.
Intermediate: Employers at the intermediate level typically focus on more purpose-driven DE&I initiatives, with leadership assuming a greater role in progressing DE&I in the workplace. At this level, the definition of diversity expands to include less-visible characteristics, like disability, religion, class, age, regionalism, sexual orientation and more. Additionally, at this stage, an employer may employ a dedicated staff and provide a budget for DE&I.
Advanced: Employers at the advanced stage focus on multi-dimensionality and intersectionality when thinking about diversity. In this situation, leaders practice inclusive leadership skills and are held accountable for creating a diverse and inclusive workplace. They also often have DE&I resources and budgets distributed throughout the organization to ensure organization-wide diversity.
Leading: Employers at this level take a sustainable approach to DE&I, in which leaders are expected to lead holistically and inclusively; be key DE&I initiatives change agents; and hold the organization accountable. In addition to their internal resources, they often have external DE&I advisory boards that guide them on leading practices.
Identifying your organization’s DE&I maturity level allows you to better measure your progress on key areas of workforce diversity, including communication, employee education, company culture, resource investment and the involvement of leadership. This will help guide your next steps toward creating a more diverse, equitable and inclusive workforce, as well as allow your organization to focus on interventions that are targeted and specific. Plus, in organizational environments facing a multiplicity of DE&I issues at once, the ability to pinpoint current state, plot out the desired state and craft the roadmap to get there is critical.
What is DE&I? The Role of Talent Acquisition
While the responsibility for DE&I is spread across an organization, talent acquisition still plays a major role. Recruiters, sourcers, hiring managers and HR leaders are powerhouse roles that must work together to find the right candidate for the job, while also demonstrating an organization’s commitment to DE&I from the company’s first interactions with employees.
As talent acquisition leaders, you also play a key role in bringing to life diversity and inclusion as values that are deeply embedded in an organization. More precisely, your team plays a particularly critical role by sourcing, engaging and eventually hiring candidates from underrepresented groups.
Does your organization have a talent pool of diverse candidates? Do your interviewing practices reduce unconscious bias? Do you have a strong reputation for being a diverse workplace? These are some of the critical questions that you and your teams should attempt to answer to deliver on the organization’s diversity agenda.
By understanding your role and performing it effectively, talent acquisition teams can work with leaders in other areas of the business to build a truly holistic DE&I program. Here, we discuss some of the tactics that talent acquisition can adopt to overcome diversity sourcing, selection and hiring challenges.
Championing Diversity
Once your talent acquisition team establishes awareness and accountability, members should become champions of diversity hiring; you have a tremendous opportunity to drive the diversity agenda by reinforcing the case for diversity hiring. For instance, engaged recruiters can champion diversity and make it an everyday dialogue with hiring managers. That’s because recruiters are responsible for ensuring that all candidates are treated fairly and equally in a process that removes bias. They’re also the first step in demonstrating how the organization appreciates and celebrates its diverse employees.
Diversity Sourcing
To ensure that your talent pool is representative of diverse candidates, source your candidates from a variety of talent channels. Clearly, you can’t rely on the same sources repeatedly when seeking out new candidates; focusing only on the sources that you know best can result in a talent pool of similar candidates and a lack of diversity.
Instead, seek out opportunities to source candidates from underrepresented backgrounds. For example, there are many online and offline groups dedicated to women in technology. This could be a great opportunity to meet and connect with high-caliber, female candidates directly—instead of waiting for them to find you through platforms like Indeed. And, the more initiative you take to find these channels, the more likely it is that your talent pools will be diverse.
What’s more, if you’re struggling to find diverse talent, reach out to employees from diverse backgrounds and encourage them to share your job ads with their networks; then, give them the tools they need to promote open roles within your organization. As a result, your employees and candidates will both feel that your company values their opinions and contributions, which is fantastic for team morale and engagement.
DE&I Initiatives: Building Inclusivity
Building an inclusive workplace is central to creating a workplace environment in which every employee feels valued. Granted, every organization is different, so the content and structure of an inclusion program needs to meet the conditions of your organization. To get you started, SHRM offers an inclusivity checklist for HR that provides a good place to start:
Make sure that company leaders understand that inclusion is about ensuring that everyone’s voice is heard, opinions are considered, and value to the team is evident.
Train managers to show that inclusivity is a core competency—and hold them accountable.
Form an inclusion council with genuine influence and power.
Value differences and create an environment in which people can feel comfortable bringing their authentic selves to work.
Identify the needs of underrepresented groups, and give them the necessary support and resources.
Provide workers with a safe space to voice their concerns.
Benchmark key aspects of your organization’s culture and understand the employee experience before making changes to promote inclusivity.
Remember that daily interactions are the most telling sign of whether your company has an inclusive culture.
Unconscious Bias & Candidate Selection
One of the key reasons companies lose out on diverse talent is unconscious bias, which can have detrimental effects on the diversity hiring process. The concept of unconscious bias or implicit bias was first introduced in 2006 as “the new science of unconscious mental processes that has a substantial bearing on discrimination law.”This challenged the longstanding idea that people are guided only by explicit beliefs and conscious intentions.
One example of unconscious bias is that a candidate’s last name—which implies their ethnic background—can adversely affect their chances of landing a job. Unfortunately, studies by Ghent University show that the last name appearing on a candidate’s résumé can reduce the possibility of receiving a call back by 25% in Germany; 29% in Sweden and the UK; and 50% in the U.S. Accordingly, to address unconscious biases, some companies mask candidate demographics while presenting them to the hiring team in order to shift the focus from ethnicity to experience and skills.
In another strategy highlighted by DiversityJobs, a large utility company in the U.S. moved away from the practice of long interviews with a few leaders and started exposing candidates to more interviewers in multiple, short interviews. This reduced the chance of a single, biased assessor significantly influencing a hiring decision. Additionally, the organization was also able to showcase a more diverse selection team to all new hires.
Diversity at Work: Converting Candidates From Underrepresented Groups Into Employees
However, winning over diverse candidates goes beyond just locating them and ensuring that they’re treated fairly during the hiring process. Rather, to win diverse talent, organizations should demonstrate the authenticity of their commitment to DE&I by leveraging their employer brand through career sites and social media channels, as well as by showing how diverse and inclusive they are through their employees and leadership.
Furthermore, talent acquisition can also play a role in reinforcing these messages by:
Adding a link to diversity and inclusion policies and practices in job advertisements and recruiters’ email signatures.
Minimizing adverse effects of recruitment discrimination by complementing recruiters with talent acquisition technologies like PeopleScout’s AffinixTM.
Ensuring job-related information is accessible to all groups. (For example, ensure your career site is accessible to those with visual impairments through design, alt text and screen readers; and ensure presentations and videos include subtitles or sign language.)
Scheduling interviews in locations that are accessible and convenient for all candidates, such as parking for people with disabilities; Braille script on elevators and signage; and female, male and gender-neutral restrooms.
Sharing relevant stories about a diverse set of employees in the organization and involving diverse employees and senior leaders in the interviewing process.
Respecting candidates’ gender identity. Because gender identity is internal, a person’s gender identity is not necessarily visible to others, so asking candidates what pronoun(s) they prefer to use in interviews and other communications can make a difference.
DE&I Initiatives: Talent Technology
The right talent acquisition technology can be a powerful tool for reaching your DE&I initiatives and goals. And, as you begin to recognize and fix disparities in hiring processes and work environments, data can be an important tool in determining the effectiveness of those efforts. No DE&I initiative can be successful unless it can be measured.
To that end, diversity dashboards—like those available in PeopleScout’s Affinix Analytics—can break down your hires by gender and ethnicity. Then, with that information, you can identify where the most diverse hires have been found. From there, you can focus on which recruitment strategies are most effective in bringing in candidates form underrepresented groups. And, once those initiatives are in place, you can track your success over time.
The goal of diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace should be a central pillar in any organization’s journey. Embracing a multitude of viewpoints and cultures drives innovation; improves decision-making; increases employee productivity and retention; and leads to better-served employees—and, by extension, customers. While responsibility for diversity, equity and inclusion is shared across an organization, talent acquisition leaders have a significant influence.
Getting inclusivity and diversity right for talent acquisition teams means properly sourcing, interviewing and hiring candidates from underrepresented groups. What’s more, talent teams must understand not only where different candidates search for jobs, but also the factors important to those candidates.
To that end, a PeopleScout survey of job candidates focuses on inclusion and diversity, found important differences in how diverse groups find, research and apply for jobs, and employers can use these insights to make their recruitment process more equitable and inclusive. The survey focused on job candidates throughout the U.S. from a wide variety of backgrounds. However, due to the relatively small sample size, these survey results should be taken as purely directional. Below, we share the most important insights.
Talking Talent On-Demand Webinar
Data and Diversity: Using Technology to Achieve Your DE&I Goals
Inclusivity and Diversity: Candidates From Underrepresented Groups Find & Research Jobs Differently
Racial and ethnic minority candidates are more likely to hear about a job opportunity through word of mouth than white candidates. More precisely, nearly half of Black or African American candidates report learning about their most recent job through word of mouth, while only 35% of white candidates found their most recent job in the same way.
Black or African American candidates are also the most likely group to research an employer or job opportunity by talking to people in their communities—at more than double the rate of white candidates.
Inclusivity and Diversity: What This Means for Talent Acquisition
Your current employees from underrepresented backgrounds are important partners in sourcing and recruiting diverse talent; they understand your culture and values and can share both job openings and their experience at your organization with other candidates.
Women Rely on a Larger Range of Sources When Researching Employers
Notably, women in the workplace are more likely than men to research an employer through third-party channels, whereas men are more likely to rely on your careers site. For instance, while half of men report researching an employer through the employer’s careers site, only one-third of women do the same. Women are also twice as likely as men to use employer review sites, like Glassdoor.
What This Means for Talent Acquisition
Many candidates rely on your careers site for research. As such, your careers site should showcase your employer brand, but it cannot be your sole focus. Instead, also invest in improving your employer brand through employer review sites, like Glassdoor. Additionally, encourage your employees to share their positive experiences of working at your organization on social media sites, like LinkedIn.
The way you showcase diversity efforts also makes a difference to candidates, with the biggest gap between white and Black or African American candidates. For instance, when asked about the factors that candidates consider when applying to a job, Black or African American candidates were five times as likely as white candidates to consider your diversity efforts. Black or African American candidates were also more than four times as likely to consider whether your careers site features “people who look like me.”
What This Means for Talent Acquisition
Your diversity efforts are important to your candidates; they want to hear about what your organization is doing to improve diversity, equity and inclusion at your organization. And, in a competitive talent market, it’s important to feature those commitments, as they could be the deciding factor for candidates.
Now more than ever, an organization’s hiring strategy should be adaptable. Throughout the last two years, many employers have had to reimagine their recruitment processes. Due to the pandemic, organizations rapidly moved recruiting processes to virtual models, shifting in-person interviews to digital and transitioning traditional office roles to remote.
Today, as businesses bounce back and job openings are at record highs, employers need to hire top talent—and fast. And, just as a hybrid approach to in-person and remote work for employees has become the norm, so, too, will the need for a blended recruiting strategy that will optimize the candidate experience advantages of in-person, while also continuing to leverage the benefits of virtual.
So, in this article, we’ll walk through what a hybrid hiring strategy is, discuss the benefits of in-person versus virtual techniques and provide tips for how to create a hybrid hiring strategy that works for your organization.
What is a Hybrid Hiring Strategy?
Hybrid hiring—or hybrid recruiting—is a strategy that allows organizations to maximize the benefits of both in-person and virtual hiring techniques. Specifically, a hybrid approach allows employers to leverage the advantages of virtual recruiting where it makes sense, while simultaneously using strategic, in-person methods to add value to the candidate experience along the way.
Granted, hybrid hiring isn’t new; many organizations employed a mix of virtual and in-person techniques prior to 2020. However, COVID-19 rapidly accelerated the need for safe, efficient hiring models, thereby leading to greater adoption of virtual strategies. Now, because employers have seen the advantages of virtual recruiting, the benefits of a hybrid model have become clear. Depending on the type of role you’re hiring for, having a strong hybrid hiring model in place makes it easy to recruit staff 100% virtually if and when it’s needed, or with a blended approach.
Leveraging a hybrid hiring strategy means you get the best of both worlds. But, what does that entail? Here are some of the biggest benefits of both virtual and in-person hiring techniques—and how they’ll play out post-pandemic.
Benefits of Virtual Hiring Techniques
Reduced Cost & Greater Efficiency
When you remove the physical component of recruiting, you see a greatly improved speed-to-hire and an overall reduction in costs. For example, PeopleScout helped this retail client reduce time-to-hire by more than 20% by implementing a mobile-first, shortened application process. Plus, expenses that would normally be spent on hosting recruiting events—such as travel costs, venue fees and printed materials—suddenly drop to zero. Additionally, your employees save time by hosting events remotely and also reap the benefit of having more candidates in attendance.
Expanded Reach & Reduced Bias
With travel out of the equation and with remote job options in place, employers can then expand the geographies from which they source talent. This offers greater opportunities for candidates and also opens up the candidate pool to top talent who may not have been on your radar previously.
Virtual hiring also reduces the amount of hiring bias experienced during in-person interviews. As humans, we judge people on many things (unconsciously or not), including how a candidate may look. But, with virtual interviews, recruiters are able to focus less on a candidate’s appearance and more on what they have to say.
According to the American Psychological Association, when it comes to height, every inch counts—in fact, in the workplace, each inch above average may be worth $789 more per year. This is the kind of bias that can be eliminated with virtual interviewing techniques.
Overall Convenience
Virtual interviews and other virtual recruiting tactics are convenient for both candidates and recruiters alike. For example, candidates can schedule on-demand interviews at a time that is most convenient for them, and recruiters can watch those recordings at their own convenience. What’s more, through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, candidates can also self-schedule follow-up interviews, ask questions and receive real-time responses that would have previously taken much longer without the technology that has come from the rise of virtual.
Benefits of In-Person Hiring Techniques
Showcase Your Company Culture
One challenge of virtual recruiting is the ability to effectively showcase your company’s culture. While there are certainly ways to do so, nothing quite compares to experiencing how individuals in an organization interact with one another in-person. Especially for roles that are required to work in an in-person or office setting, providing a time to come in for an in-person interview or assessment can be a great way to show your candidate what it would really be like to work for your company on a day-to-day basis.
Human Touch
While AI and automated tools help with efficiency, improve candidate experience, and speed up the overall time-to-hire, today’s talent pool can also find benefits from a blended model. In fact, candidates today are feeling more confident, in general, and more comfortable negotiating their salary when meeting face-to-face. A phone call and video interview can get the candidate in the door, but an in-person conversation can seal the deal—especially when it comes to hiring senior talent who would really appreciate being brought in for the final stages of the interview process.
Source: Workest by Zenefits
Added Value
Furthermore, utilizing in-person techniques can also add value to the candidate experience overall. From office tours to final interviews, it’s difficult to recreate human touch and company culture completely virtually. To that end, where it makes sense, in-person meetings can help sell a candidate on why they should work for your organization, as opposed to the competition.
How to Recruit People Now: Balancing Your Post-Pandemic Hybrid Hiring Strategy
Your hybrid hiring strategy will likely depend on your organization’s needs and what your workforce will look like on the other side of the pandemic.
For example, if some or all of your teams will work entirely remotely, it would make the most logical sense to complete the entire recruiting process virtually. Inevitably, bringing the candidate in for an in-person interview or office tour would waste time and money, and would likely confuse the candidate and, therefore, lead to a poor candidate experience. Instead, recruiting for these roles completely virtually and providing opportunities for human interaction and culture along the way can help candidates feel like they know what it will be like to work remotely for your company.
“How do we show candidates our company culture when we can’t invite them to the office? We send personalized, handwritten cards to candidates before their start date (as well as some swag!). We want to give them a feeling of being really welcomed into the company—which is what we’re really about.”
Ewa Zajac, Recruiting Operations Manager at Zendesk
On the other hand, if some of your teams will be working both from home and from the office, a hybrid approach would be the best fit. Virtual options save a lot of time and money in the beginning stages of sourcing, screening and interviewing, and candidates will want the flexibility to complete those initial interviews and assessments from the comfort and convenience of their own homes.
Then, when it comes to final interviews with candidates you’re very excited about, bringing them in for an in-person interview can be the final step before extending an offer. The candidate will appreciate the time you’re investing to bring them in, and they’ll get a taste of what it will be like when they work in-person. This will be especially important for roles that will be primarily in the office or in which relocation is necessary.
In the end, hybrid hiring won’t be a one-size-fits-all strategy. Whether your organization opts to keep recruiting fully virtual or works in opportunities for in-person techniques, the candidate experience will need to remain at the forefront of any model. Think about what candidates will want and how the recruiting process will make the most sense for the role you’re trying to fill.
Hospitality staffing teams and retail recruiters are finding it more challenging than ever to recruit and retain employees. While recruitment and retention issues have long beleaguered the retail and hospitality industries, the pandemic has exacerbated long-standing difficulties:
According to the National Restaurant Association, 75% of operators listed recruiting and retaining talent as a top business challenge, an all-time high.
The American Hotel and Lodging Association estimate the accommodation industry is not expected to reach previous employment levels until at least 2023, eliminating more than 10 years of job growth in the industry.
In this article, we’ll look at the hiring challenges that retailers and hospitality organizations are facing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and provide talent acquisition strategies to overcome them.
The Retail Recruiting and Hospitality Staffing Landscape
With so many jobs available, why are retail recruiters and hospitality staffing professionals having trouble finding applicants? While there are numerous reasons why employers are finding it harder to fill these vacancies common candidate concerns include:
Patrons are not as generous as they once were. According to a Harris Poll conducted for Fast Company, 19% of Americans said they tip less now than before COVID-19. Even amid loosening restrictions, many restaurants still operate on a drive-thru or carry out-only basis – and tipping isn’t as generous or common. With waitstaff making an average of $7.00 per hour, tips are an essential portion of overall compensation. That bleeds through to hotel staff, too, as cleaners, bartenders and servers also rely on tips to supplement their salaries.
Loyal long-term employees who were let go may feel let down and underappreciated by their former employers and may be hesitant to reenter the hospitality or retail industry.
It’s a candidates’ market, despite unemployment numbers. With lessening restrictions, many businesses are re-opening – and they are all hiring at the same time, creating more competition for the same pool of talent.
To tackle these challenges, talent leaders must think outside the box. This means identifying new and non-traditional ways to incentivize potential candidates to apply for open positions. While improving compensation and benefits is a critical component to recruiting in the current talent market, there are additional strategies you can deploy. Below, we cover key retail and hospitality recruiting challenges and how your organization can overcome them.
Hospitality and Retail Recruiting Challenges and Solutions
Challenge: Hospitality and Retail Recruitment is Highly Decentralized
Large retailers and hospitality chains often have a decentralized recruiting process where managers are solely responsible for making recruitment decisions within their store or geographic location.
Decentralized recruitment processes vary from organization to organization. However, a common theme of this talent acquisition strategy is that it allows for greater autonomy and decision-making freedom for frontline managers. What’s more, a decentralized recruitment strategy is effective for geographically diverse organizations where each location may have specific, localized hiring requirements, labor laws and talent demographics.
Unfortunately, decentralization can lead to obstacles during turbulent labor markets. A lack of consistency, discipline and standardization across various locations can lead to a disorganized hiring process with varying policies, pay grades and a lack of coordination across geographies. This decentralization can make it difficult for talent leaders to ensure hiring practices are unbiased and ethical for every location within their organization.
Moreover, decentralization can run counter to an organization’s wider goals such as increasing compensation, diversity and inclusion initiatives and ensuring that new pandemic-related policies are being closely adhered to.
The Solution: Consider Centralizing Talent Acquisition
Centralized recruitment is a popular strategy among many employers outside of the retail and hospitality industries.
Operating within a more centralized recruitment infrastructure allows internal recruiting teams to develop reliable policies and universal standards for the hiring process across locations.
When hiring processes are standardized across an organization, all employees are hired using the same criteria, making it easier to share team members across locations if there is another store with employees capable of doing the same job.
What’s more, some organizations take a hybrid approach by having both centralized and decentralized recruiting functions, with some decisions and hiring policies deployed across the organization while others are implemented locally.
Whichever recruitment model you decide to pursue, a recruitment process outsourcing provider (RPO) can help retail recruiters and hospitality organizations centralize or hybridize their recruitment function. RPO providers work closely with internal talent teams to build out talent acquisition infrastructure and best practices enterprise-wide. RPO providers also lend support in sourcing, interviewing and hiring talent and can deploy advanced talent analytics technology for deeper insights into workforce trends.
Challenge: Hospitality and Retail Recruitment is Often Conducted Face-to-Face
Traditionally, most candidates apply for retail and hospitality roles in person. However, as the pandemic persists, some would-be applicants may be hesitant to apply or interview face-to-face.
Solution: Take Hospitality and Retail Recruiting Interviews Virtual
Incorporating video interviewing into your talent acquisition toolbox can save your team hours of candidate sourcing and phone screens.
Virtual interviewing technology allows employers to have live, two-way video or a pre-recorded video interviews that candidates can do on their own time and from the safety of their home at their convenience. Video interviewing technology can be used to support a wide range of recruiting functions from candidate screening to offers and onboarding.
Virtual interviewing, when paired with technologies such as text recruiting tools, offer enormous opportunities to improve recruiter efficiency, time to hire and build stronger relationships with candidates.
Challenges: Sourcing Hospitality and Retail Candidates with the Right Skills and Experience
According to a recent McKinsey Global Survey, the COVID-19 pandemic has made the question of how to address the skills gap more urgent. Nearly 90% of executives surveyed said current skills gaps are expected to increase in their workforce within the next few years, but less than half have a plan to address the issue.
To find the right employees, you should strongly consider expanding your definition of what qualifies as relevant experience. For example, if you have an applicant with no experience in retail, no experience operating a point-of-sale system and no experience managing other employees, you might be quick to write them off as an under-qualified candidate. However, you may be missing out on an ideal potential employee with the right soft skills to excel in the role, skills in short supply in retail and hospitality.
In fact, according to an SHRM report, talent and HR professionals in accommodation, food services and retail/wholesale were more likely than those in other industries to say that candidates did not have the right workplace soft skills such as problem-solving, interpersonal skills, communication, teamwork and leadership.
The Solution: Expand Your Talent Pool with Non-Traditional Candidates
A candidate who might not have the “right skills” at first glance could potentially become a top performer with a little on-the-job training and instruction. Instead of focusing so much on hard retail or hospitality skills and experience, keep your eyes open for candidates with transferable experience and skills such as customer-facing roles, managing finances, organizational skills 2 0789uiand other skill sets that may translate well. A Harvard Business Review article exploring the challenges employers face in “hiring low-skill, entry-level workers when economic conditions improve” highlighted how forward-thinking retail and hospitality organizations are boosting talent and business outcomes by adopting a recruiting model known as open hiring.
Open hiring looks for reasons to hire a candidate, rather than finding ways to exclude them. Major retail employers, including Ben & Jerry’s, Whole Foods and The Body Shop, have had success through open hiring strategies, including improvements in turnover, increases in productivity and a more resilient business continuity plan.
Has this person shown an ability to learn new skills quickly?
Does this person exhibit a positive attitude and the ability to work on a team?
Has this person displayed an aptitude for solving problems efficiently?
Hospitality Staffing and Retail Recruiting Is Crucial for Recovery
In retail and hospitality, every unfilled position represents missed opportunities to better serve your customers. While recruiting for retail and hospitality staffing at the moment might seem like a daunting task, implementing the right strategies and technology might just be the key to providing hiring managers and candidates alike with the tools to better navigate the industry’s new normal.
It’s no secret that the pandemic greatly impacted the labor market over the past year and a half. First, job openings plummeted, and unemployment skyrocketed. Now, we’re amid the Great Rehire and organizations are finalizing plans to reopen offices and get back to business as usual.
As lockdowns ease, vaccination numbers rise and consumers get back to spending, job openings are at an all-time high—as a result of millions of prime-age workers leaving the labor market or switching to part time. Employers in industries like leisure and hospitality, healthcare, manufacturing and more are struggling to fill open positions with qualified talent.
So, with all these open jobs, how can employers stand out above the competition to attract the next generation of top talent? It starts with focusing on key ideal candidate touch points—from your employer value proposition (EVP) and employer brand to your recruitment marketing strategy, careers site and application process.
In this article, we’ll take you along the candidate journey and touch on each aspect you should address to make your open roles stand out in a sea of job openings.
Create an EVP and Employer Brand that Speaks to Your Ideal Candidate
Your EVP and employer brand carry a lot of weight for the next generation of top talent, because they serve as differentiators between your brand and competitors and allow you to align your organization’s purpose with your candidates’ passions. It is important to do your research and be aware of what candidates hold in high regard, such as the opportunity for growth personally and professionally or the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. Learn what drives your ideal candidate, identify what drives your organization’s mission and values, and establish an EVP and employer brand that speaks to both.
Building an Employer Brand for the Lawyer of the Future
The Situation: Linklaters approached us with a talent problem for the ages. They needed an entirely new type of lawyer. The profile Linklaters recruited for in the past would no longer bring them the ideal candidates necessary to secure and expand on their position as a heavyweight global law firm.
The Research: We conducted one-on-one interviews and focus groups with hundreds of professionals in 20 Linklaters offices across Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific. The output of these interviews gave us everything we needed to create the EVP and the framework of the brand on which to build our global advertising campaign.
The Solution: We created an employer value proposition that was a combination of big picture philosophical and a Linklaters-specific selling point.
GREAT CHANGE IS HERE
Message: Change is healthy and exciting, as well as unavoidable. Join this modern, international, hugely diverse cohort and you’ll have a truly influential voice that redefines the legal sector and sets you up for an ever-evolving career.
The Results: Glassdoor scores for Linklaters have risen by 8% in the last two years and, importantly, applications from female lawyers – which was a key objective – have increased since the EVP launch.
When it comes to increasing awareness with recruitment marketing, you want to reach ideal candidates and promote your organization as desirable. To ensure you are marketing yourself properly, it can help to create content that drives a potential candidate to come back to your site, even if they aren’t actively looking for a job.
For example, acknowledging company accolades and awards can spark interest in your organization for both active and passive candidates, like this Instagram post from HubSpot. However, content at this stage does not need to be directly correlated to your organization to be effective. Content regarding professional development and motivation can also lead ideal candidates to inquire further on your website, such as these resume tips from Nestle Purina.
Stage Two: Generate Interest
Now that you have increased awareness, the next step is to generate interest. You have succeeded in showcasing your organization’s knowledge and place in the industry, now it’s time to show what it is like to work at your company. This is where you stress your employer brand, especially via social media. This can give potential candidates an inside look as to what it’s like to work for your company.
Social media is a powerful tool that not only generates interest but can also increase applicants for vital roles. For example, PeopleScout helped this manufacturing client increase the number of female applicants and hires in a male-dominated industry. Through the usage of employee spotlights, videos and stories to showcase how women are integrated into the culture and integral to the company’s success, the client was able to increase female hiring by 3% annually from 2018 to 2021.
Stage Three: Nurture the Decision
After increasing awareness and generating interest in your company, it is now time to promote open positions and the benefits, perks and compensation that will come with these roles. The promotion of open roles within your organization will lead the candidate to your careers site, which will play a pivotal role in the candidate’s journey toward employment with your organization. Here, it is important to do research on your competitors to see what they are offering for similar open roles. If a competitor is offering better pay, benefits, or perks, that can be a deciding factor for an ideal candidate to choose them over your organization, despite your strong recruitment marketing strategy.
Build a Careers Site that Stands Out
At this point in the candidate journey, the potential applicant has made their way to your organization’s careers site. It’s important to remember that a careers site is not only an area for job postings, but it is also home to many opportunities to stand out above competitors. For example, your careers site is a great place to reiterate the employer value proposition you built out in your recruitment marketing strategies to ensure that message is carried through every step of the candidate journey. Your careers site should be inclusive of everything a potential candidate would like to know about what it would be like to work for your organization. Consider these key areas of opportunity when refreshing your careers site:
Ensure Accessibility
In the digital age, it is important to make sure your careers site is user-friendly for those on a computer or a smart phone, especially since 61% of applicants applied to jobs via a mobile device in 2020. If a candidate struggles to navigate your careers site, chances are they won’t be staying on that site for long. It is also important to make sure your careers site is accessible for those with disabilities. Here are some suggestions from SHRM on how to make your careers site accessible for all:
Screen reader compatibility
Alternative text for images
Color contrast
Keyboard accessibility
Controls for moving content
Captions
Controls for timed content
Labeled forms
Accessible downloadable files
Plain language
Search Engine Optimization
It is important to utilize search engine optimization on your careers site. This can play a pivotal role in your careers site showing up first over a competitor on major search engines. The usage of keywords and traditional, highly searched titles will play an important role in helping your roles stand out above your competition. Research of popular keywords can boost your place among major search engines, leading potential candidates to your careers site first. Google Analytics and UTM tracking codes are important tools to utilize in your SEO journey to track and report where your clicks are coming from.
Provide a Personal Touch
On your career site, adding a personal touch, such as a welcome video, can go a long way. It can help the candidate see the human side of your business; it can offer an inside look of the facility and it is also an opportunity to showcase where these applicants may fit in within the structure of the organization.
This is a great chance to sell the applicant on working for your company and really showcase your company culture. Offer insights, quotes or firsthand experiences from senior leaders to newly brought on employees. Highlight opportunities for growth both personally and professionally and provide examples of success stories from your existing employees.
Let Applicants Know What to Expect
If the process to apply and interview is not given or discussed at all, many applicants can be led to believe their application will get lost among others. Be upfront and transparent about what the application and interview process is like and offer timelines for the applicants.
Streamline the Application and Interview Process
Although the candidate has made it this far, you’re not done yet. After all, 80% of the time, candidates don’t finish filling out job applications, according to Glassdoor. To ensure candidates complete your application and interview process, focus on these key aspects to help you stand out:
Mobile-friendly application
Quick response time
Virtual interviews
Automated chat and scheduling
Consider how technology can help streamline your process in each of the categories listed above. A mobile-friendly application, easy interview scheduling and quick response times can all be enhanced by AI and automation and provide a superior candidate experience.
Standing Out Beyond the Application
Despite having a well built out EVP and employer brand, recruitment marketing strategy, careers site and application, the deciding factor for an ideal candidate to choose your organization will often come down to a strong employment offer. It’s important to keep in mind that if your compensation, perks and benefits (like flexible work options) don’t match up to competitors, ideal candidates in today’s market have the ability to choose to work elsewhere.
That said, by creating ways to stand out and showcase your EVP and employer brand at each stage of the candidate journey as outlined above, you will be one step closer to securing the top talent your organization needs.
Jose Carbia is an effective communicator. That label can mean a lot of things, but in his role as vice president of talent acquisition at Change Healthcare, it means leading a team that spends a lot of time actually talking to candidates. It also means that good news and bad news is delivered quickly, by phone – not through email – and with real recognition of and respect for the time, work and emotional investment that job candidates put into their job search.
Jose is also a transformative leader. In fact, he has more than 25 years of experience in talent acquisition, 21 of which he spent leading and transforming recruiting functions within Fortune 500 companies. Now, at Change Healthcare, he leads a team of 48 and is responsible for more than 3,000 full-time hires and 2,000 flexible, seasonal hires every year. Jose’s latest project has been improving the candidate experience, with a focus on candidate communication, which we spoke with him about from his office in Atlanta.
Where does your passion for the candidate experience come from?
Throughout my 25 years in recruitment, I have volunteered to help job-seekers gain employment. I’ve held speaking engagements where I teach job-seekers how to effectively navigate their reemployment process, and I hear from job-seekers all of the time about the frustrations they experience when they apply to or interview for a job.
There’s nothing more frustrating than going through an interview with an employer and meeting with the recruiter or the hiring manager only to never hear back. We’ve all been through the process. We get excited about an opportunity and share the news with our spouses, friends or family. We tell them about the interview. Then, every day that goes by without hearing from an employer, it becomes torture. Candidates give employers about two or three days to hear back. At that point, friends and family start asking questions and, after a week goes by, the candidate is embarrassed. Then, they blame the employer and see the experience as a reflection of their culture and work environment.
What role does communication play in the candidate experience?
Once a candidate has a conversation with an employer, the communication channel has been opened and it needs to continue frequently throughout the process. Even if there are no updates, candidates should receive some type of communication. When candidates aren’t selected, there are automated processes that can send emails. But, if a candidate has interviewed with us, they deserve a call thanking them for their time and letting them know the final decision.
We need to treat every candidate like a customer. In the end, they already are – or they could be – a future customer. Proper communication is critical to our brand and our image.
What do you do at Change Healthcare to ensure effective communication with candidates?
We conduct a one-questions NPS – net promoter score – survey that we send to candidates who have directly engaged with us through conversation or who have been eliminated from the selection process. The candidates provide a rating and a comment and we review every comment – both positive and negative. We evaluate this feedback twice monthly and look for opportunities for improvement across the enterprise and individually.
We hold each other accountable for the experience and all of our recruiters have visibility into the data as it comes in. It’s also included as part of our recruiters’ individual performance metrics. We have a quarterly ‘most valuable player’ award that goes to the recruiter with the best experience scores, along with other talent acquisition metrics.
We launched this process back in January of 2020 and, at that time, we had a net promoter score of -50. Now, we’re trending at a score of 36, which is considered a great score, but we want it to be even higher.
It sounds like you’ve really made a cultural shift to achieve this success. Is that how you see it?
Absolutely. We’ve been able to break down barriers to create a culture and environment where we are committed to providing a valuable experience. We started with a campaign and it has really taken shape and evolved. We have a hashtag, #LeaveNoCandidatesBehind, and it has really become a part of our regular conversations. We never take our eyes off of it. We see our numbers improve month after month. It has become part of the DNA of our organization.
What role does technology play in the candidate experience for you?
The applicant tracking systems provide the opportunities for automated communications, and it’s important to ensure that those notifications are clear and that they show connection and empathy with the candidate throughout the process. Technology also allows us to better track the talent pool through the selection process and provides a vehicle for a more organized approach to communication. The NPS survey tool helps us capture the information we need to make better business decisions and, now, we’re exploring artificial intelligence technology to help from a screening standpoint.
With this process, I’d imagine you work with a lot of partners, whether those are technology partners or RPO. What role do these partnerships play in your process?
It’s a critical role. When we have partners like PeopleScout, we treat them as an extension of our team. Their leaders are in my leadership meetings. Their talent acquisition team members are included in our overall team meetings. We align our rewards and recognition programs to ensure that we are consistent in our messaging and overall performance. We want the process to be seamless for candidates and hiring managers – whether they are working with an internal employee or a vendor partner.
Our technology partners are equally important. We don’t just plug in a new technology. Our partners are truly engaged in what we’re trying to accomplish, and they work with us through each challenge. We have to continuously monitor everything to ensure that the process is effective and that we’re achieving our overall goals and objectives as an organization.
What advice do you have for other talent leaders who are looking to make similar changes at their organizations?
Data is king. You need to establish ways to measure experience and performance and then use that data to determine where to place your focus. It’s not something you can improve overnight. It’s a constant process of trial and error. Data is necessary to make those critical decisions in the experience and process.
Also, recognize that, while communication is critical, it’s not the only component in a great candidate experience. There’s also your employer brand and your careers site. Candidates today want to know about your diversity and inclusion programs and your culture. Applications need to be quick and easy to fill out. If any of these pieces are missing, candidates will get lost in the process. With the proper mechanisms in place, you can ensure all of these components are working together to create a great candidate experience.
A fairly large handful of colleagues and clients are aware that my family and I are having some fairly extensive renovation work done on our home. Partly because I have moaned about it on a weekly basis since January. Partly because the endless background sounds of drills, hammers and circular saws— and on one particularly fraught occasion, a builders exposed backside descending from a loft ladder behind me—have all permeated some of my Zoom video calls.
Now that the work is 90 percent finished, I look back on the project, and there are some aspects of it that I wish we had done differently. In doing such a lot of work at one time, we inevitably compromised on our standards in some small ways when faced with the size of the project ahead.
Hopefully, you can see where the analogy is leading. When we, or our clients, are faced with a mountain to climb in terms of the complexity or scarcity of required talent in big numbers, it’s easy to deviate away from best practice. And this is never more common than now.
As organisations switch from hiring freezes to acute growth mode, we are seeing a dramatic shift back towards a candidate-driven market. As the next 12 months play out, I personally believe this will prove to be one of the most dramatic shifts in several decades, and employers will be scratching their heads at just how they are going to close the hiring gap.
During these impending and inevitably large-scale campaigns, there are three potential risks that stand out to me:
1. Introducing new people will impact the company culture.
Firstly, hiring lots of new people can present a risk to the company culture you’ve spent a lot of effort crafting. This may be more prevalent within smaller organisations or for those hiring at the leadership level, but no organisation is truly immune. With any hiring that significantly impacts a team, you must consider not only the skills and competencies match, but also how the existing cultural makeup of that group will be affected. One way to counter this is through thorough training to help align old and new employees on the same cultural path. This should be led by leadership and serve as a catalyst for people—old and new—to embrace your organisation’s mission and values.
2. High-volume hiring can increase the risk of compromising on quality.
When it comes to high-volume hiring, hiring managers are more inclined to drop their standards on quality-of-hire. Not so much in terms of matching skills and experience, which tends to be a more objective. Plus, a deviation away from the requisite profile can be harder for the hiring manager to justify in their own mind. However, I’ve seen a “lowering of the bar” when it comes to the softer skills—the personality traits and competency matches which are naturally more subjective. One effective antidote here is robust candidate assessment practices. Backing up your gut feel with a bespoke or even “off the shelf” assessment package can help make your judgement more objective.
3. Diversity amongst new hires suffers.
Thirdly, there is naturally a risk to diversity in your hiring. We’re all hopefully well-versed on the myriad benefits that fostering a diverse and inclusive workforce can bring. But, what is a valid, primary consideration when hiring one or two team members can begin to feel like an added challenge when filling a large number of openings starts to weigh down on a manager. Is there a temptation to let diversity standards slip if the challenge of filling critical gaps on your team already feels impossible? Is one allowed to be pragmatic in the circumstances and just hire, regardless of the diversity credentials?
I would argue that you wouldn’t hire someone who has the wrong skills for your team, so you shouldn’t be any more inclined to lower standards on diversity. As we all know, the wrong hiring decision now, only costs us in the long-term when we have to re-hire down the line. Better to get it right first time, whether that be a diversity match or a skills match.
Ultimately, any short-term concessions we might be tempted to make under pressure to hire at the time will be a source of regret. So, don’t lower your standards and suffer from these pitfalls. Take it from me—the decision not to fit underfloor heating in our family bathroom will likely haunt me for the next decade or two!
As we move forward in 2021, it’s clear that safety, flexibility and a positive candidate experience are still the most critical factors in the interview process. Additionally, many talent acquisition teams are still running lean, but will see increasing hiring volumes as the COVID-19 recovery continues. Consequently, these factors necessitate an effective technology solution to support the interview process.
When the pandemic hit, many organizations fully transitioned to or increased their use of virtual interviewing technology. But now, just one year later, it’s an essential part of a long-term hiring strategy. Specifically, virtual interviewing solutions speed up the hiring process; provide a great experience for candidates and hiring managers; and save on travel budgets – in addition to the safety benefits.
So, consider this article your guide for designing the right virtual interviewing solution for your organization and the types of roles you’re hiring for.
What is a Virtual Solution?
Before we focus on specific tools, it’s important to recognize where the virtual interview falls in your overall recruitment process. This graphic demonstrates an ideal virtual solution. At PeopleScout, we believe that the candidate experience should be at the core of your recruitment process, and a strong candidate experience should be part of each aspect.
In an all-encompassing virtual solution, we start with recruitment marketing. This is your opportunity to share your employer value proposition and employer branding materials with candidates. For example, you can do this virtually with a tool that allows you to send automated and personalized messages to candidates through email, social media and text messaging.
Then, candidates move to the application. Here, they expect a mobile-first process that can be completed quickly – preferably within just 10 to 15 questions. The mobile-first nature of the application is especially important as most candidates search for jobs on their smartphones and tablets. In fact, one of our clients sees more than half of applicants come in through a mobile device.
Next, consider assessment as an extension of your application or the start of your interview process. One option is to prescreen individuals via text to identify top-tier candidates. Then, candidates can drive the process forward themselves by self-scheduling their interview, which can be completed through a variety of virtual interviewing tools. All of this ends with the hiring and onboarding process.
Virtual Interviewing Tools
There are five main options for virtual interviewing technology, which can be mixed and matched depending on your organization and the types of roles you’re hiring for.
On-Demand Text or SMS Interviews
What is it?
Candidates answer a series of yes/no, multiple choice or short-answer questions via text on their own time.
How does it work?
After completing an application, candidates receive a text message or email asking if they’d like to opt in to a text or SMS interview. Then, they’re sent a series of questions that they can answer on their own time. This process is customized and automated to move candidates quickly to the next step of the process.
What is it best for?
We recommend this option for entry-level or hourly roles. It also works well as an initial screener for high-volume roles.
Why should you consider it?
Candidates are unlikely to answer phone calls from unknown numbers – which turns an initial phone screen into a long game of phone tag. Alternatively, text interviews are quick and have high rates of completion, with some PeopleScout clients seeing completion rates as high as 80%.
On-Demand Audio Interview
What is it?
Candidates answer a series of questions by submitting audio recordings on their own time.
How does it work?
Candidates receive a link to complete the on-demand interview, in which they can respond to questions that are simply printed or recorded by the recruiter or hiring manager. Then, when the candidate is finished, they submit their answers to the recruiter for review.
What is it best for?
We recommend on-demand audio interviews for high-volume call center roles, for example, or for positions in which candidates may be currently working in non-typical shifts.
Why should you consider it?
On-demand audio interviews provide more flexibility for both the recruiter and the candidate; there’s no need to schedule a time when the recruiter and candidate are both available.
In the current world of work, it’s even more difficult for candidates and recruiters to complete an interview during a typical 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. window. Alternatively, the on-demand audio option typically takes candidates 15 to 30 minutes to complete and takes recruiters just five to six minutes to review. At PeopleScout, our proprietary talent technology – Affinix – also allows you to calibrate your interview scoring process to ensure the right numbers of candidates make it through. On-demand interviews have a completion rate of between 40% and 60%.
On-Demand Video Interview
What is it?
Candidates answer a series of questions by submitting video recordings on their own time.
How does it work?
Similar to an on-demand audio interview, candidates receive a link to complete the interview and answer questions that are written or recorded by the recruiter or hiring manager. Then, once the candidate records their answers on video, they submit them to the recruiter for review.
What is it best for?
We recommend on-demand video interviews for roles in which candidates must demonstrate their professionalism in person, such as customer service roles or flight attendants.
Why should you consider it?
Similar to on-demand audio interviews, on-demand video interviews provide flexibility for both the recruiter and the candidate. Video interviews also allow you to see how a candidate demonstrates their professionalism “in person.” In this way, it’s an ideal choice for customer-facing roles. Much like their audio counterparts, on-demand video interviews have a completion rate of between 40% and 60%.
Live Audio Interview
What is it?
Similar to a phone interview, candidates speak directly with a recruiter or hiring manager to answer a series of questions.
How does it work?
Think of the live audio interview as a phone interview with extra features. Candidates can dial in, and hiring managers and recruiters can use a conference line to bring in either multiple candidates or a panel of interviewers. The interview can also be recorded. Plus, automated reminders can be scheduled and sent out using the tool so that no one loses the number or shows up late.
What is it best for?
We recommend this for later-stage interviews with top candidates – especially when most of their work will be completed on the phone, like call center or virtual customer service roles.
Why should you consider it?
Compared to a traditional phone interview, you gain extra features and increased privacy for both candidates and interviewers with this option.
Live Video Interview
What is it?
A live video interview is the best replacement for an in-person interview. In this situation, candidates speak on camera with a recruiter, hiring manager or panel of interviewers.
How does it work?
A candidate receives a link to the virtual interviewing platform. With Affinix, candidates don’t have to download or install any applications; they simply click to join the interview. Recruiters and hiring managers can also program automated reminders for interviewers and candidates.
What is it best for?
We recommend live video interviews for professional- or executive-level roles, or as a replacement for a final, in-person interview.
Why should you consider it?
With so many safety and travel concerns, live video provides a safe option for a variety of interviews that were previously in-person. In this case, the interviews can be one-on-one; with a panel of interviewers; or with a group of interviewees. Some PeopleScout clients have also used the technology for virtual job fairs. Plus, in the event of multiple participants, it also provides additional privacy protections so that candidates can’t see the contact information of other candidates, for example.
Affinix also includes chat and screen-share options, as well as the ability to record interviews. Going forward, live video interviews also provide an alternative to travel.
Interview Scheduling
While many of these options allow candidates to complete the interviews on their own time, the live options still require the process of scheduling. Fortunately, instead of the time-consuming back-and-forth, candidates can now self-schedule interviews.
An invitation to self-schedule an interview can be automated after an application or SMS interview; it can also be initiated by a recruiter. It works by allowing recruiters and hiring managers to sync their calendars with a scheduling tool or provide certain timeslots for candidates to choose from. This allows candidates to move the process forward themselves, thereby enhancing the candidate experience and saving time for the recruiter.
Putting It All Together
Depending on your organization and the roles you’re hiring for, your virtual interview process will likely include a number of stages and tools. This graphic shows one way that these can fit together.
Implementing a Virtual Interview Solution
At PeopleScout, we recommend four steps for implementing a virtual interviewing solution. The process can be quick; in fact, in some cases, we can set up a virtual interviewing solution in as few as 72 hours.
Evaluate what you need. What portions of your process are already virtual?
Work with your RPO provider to implement the technology tools you need.
Gather branding materials and questions you need.
Train your hiring managers and talent acquisition team.
Once your virtual interviewing solution is up and running, it’s important to keep evaluating the process and testing to find the right workflow for your recruiters, hiring managers and candidates. In particular, your solution should meet the needs you have now, as well as evolve for the future.
