Category: Talent Technology

Reducing Unconscious Bias with AI

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Last winter during a bitterly cold rush hour, a father and son were in a terrible car accident off the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago. Tragically, the man died before help arrived. Paramedics were able to successfully transport the child to the nearest hospital where he was brought into an operating room for surgery. The surgeon entered the room but immediately stopped saying, “I can’t operate on this boy, he is my son.”

Who was the surgeon? His mother. This slight variation of the surgeon’s dilemma story helps illustrate how unconscious bias works. Every day people unknowingly form opinions about others based on minimal input; this is known as unconscious bias. These thoughts are usually based on deeply held beliefs. No one wants to be biased, but it is part of being human. Unconscious bias can be related to race, gender, age, religion, sexual preference, veteran status, disability status, socio-economic status, college attended and many other attributes. In fact, at least 150 different unconscious bias types have been identified and studied.


In this article, we’ll explore ways that unconscious bias appears in talent acquisition, review how AI can be used to reduce bias in the recruiting process and share tips for how to select an AI partner that can help employers reduce bias.

Unconscious Bias in Talent Acquisition


While employers strive to uphold legal standards for equal employment opportunities, unconscious bias issues in talent acquisition still exist.


Unconscious bias can occur at many stages throughout the recruiting process. For example, a recruiter may unconsciously write job descriptions that appeal more to a certain group of people. A recruiter looking for an IT developer might advertise a role as a Java Ninja, which could discourage women from applying because the title uses more masculine language.


During the candidate screening process individuals might also experience affinity bias, a specific type of unconscious bias that occurs when someone with a certain background is favored. An instance of this might include a hiring manager seeking candidates with an MBA from a particular school. At a company level, bias can even extend to citing a company’s culture fit as a reason to hire a certain type of person, i.e., hiring only younger workers.


When unconscious bias spreads across a candidate pool, bigger risks, such as a lack of organizational diversity, may emerge. A Deloitte study found that a diverse workforce is twice as likely to meet or exceed a company’s overall financial goals. Another study by Catalyst cited a 34 percent higher return to shareholders for companies with more women in executive positions.


Without a diverse workforce, organizations run the risk of possible legal action. A recent age discrimination lawsuit against three large technology employers claimed millions of older workers were allegedly blocked from seeing Facebook job ads because of their age.


Outside of legal action, companies also face the possibility of accidentally harming their own recruiting efforts. Silicon Valley has long been accused of having a less than diverse workforce. However, 47 percent of millennials say they prefer working for a diverse company.

How AI Can Reduce Bias in the Hiring Process


Artificial intelligence can decrease unconscious bias in recruiting practices in two key ways.

  • First, as a sophisticated pattern detector, AI can find bias across millions of data points.
  • Second, when potential candidates are identified, AI can catalogue profiles based only on certain skill sets. AI can also be programmed to ignore all demographic information, like zip codes, race or gender.

While many vendors today offer AI-enabled capabilities for tasks such as interview scheduling or candidate communications, using AI specifically to reduce the challenges of unconscious bias is still emerging. Montage recently launched Unbiased Candidate Review that helps companies reduce discrimination during the selection and interview process. Unbiased Candidate Review, part of Montage’s on-demand voice and video interviewing solution suite, includes hiding the candidate’s identity and voice until a hiring manager enters feedback on the candidate.


Another example of fighting bias through AI includes the story of entrepreneur Iba Masood. As a native of Pakistan that graduated from college in the United Arab Emirates, Masood had a difficult time finding a tech job after graduating. She was not from the traditional pool of young, male, Ivy League candidates that seek developer roles. So she created her own AI solution, TARA, to combat bias in the tech recruiting process. Today, candidates that use TARA’s online freelancer marketplace are judged only by the code they produce. Companies looking to find project-based developers bid based on the current skills needed for a project with no knowledge of the candidate’s socio-economic or previous professional background.

Potential AI Risks


While promising as a solution, AI algorithms need to be built appropriately and monitored frequently to make sure AI does not perpetuate the bias it was programmed to erase. As AI emerges to help reduce unconscious bias, several groups, including federal agencies, are observing AI’s impact to make sure risks are appropriately addressed.


Some of these groups include the following:

  • The AI Institute, which reviews AI’s ongoing impact on society.
  • Explainable AI, which focuses on tracing the reasoning of AI algorithms back to its human creators so links are not lost.

In addition to these formal groups monitoring AI, organizations can take steps to make sure the correct AI processes are in place. Because AI is constantly evolving, errors in an AI platform’s logic can quickly grow, making problems hard to trace. This is especially true if errors are made at the beginning of the process causing the common problem of garbage in, garbage out. However, there are strategies teams can put in place to reduce risk:

  • Recruiting teams can combine their expertise with data gathered from AI to produce more inclusive job descriptions and candidate pools in the future.
  • Bias can also be reduced by setting strategies internally to identify and eliminate bias through training and other programs.
  • Organizations should assign diverse teams to build AI algorithms so a wider set of ideas is represented in the AI’s output.
  • Finally, companies should conduct ongoing audits of AI algorithms to test that efforts related to AI are progressing appropriately.

How to Select and Evaluate an AI Provider


When assessing enterprise AI partners for your organization, make sure to review the following:

  1. Ask questions. If a potential partner isn’t willing to explain how its algorithms work, walk away. A good partner is prepared to support your business and will be able to articulate how the solutions work in terms you understand.
  2. Understand the vision. Not all partners will be experts in your industry. However, from a technical perspective, ask to see a long-term product roadmap to understand plans for the company’s product evolution and what kind of influence you may have into the roadmap features.
  3. Agree on the support model. Make sure the partner has a thorough understanding of how you operate and how AI folds into that process. Share what is critical to you and ensure they’re ready to commit to supporting those items for you. Without this, your support of your own clients could be affected.

Expanding the Talent Landscape by Recruiting Virtual Employees

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With very low unemployment in many of the world’s major economies, those seeking to attract talent should explore the benefits of recruiting employees that work from home. Since a number of these countries, such as the United States and the UK, are considered to be at “full employment,” where nearly everyone who wants a job has a job, the traditional formula of recruiting in the market where a company is located may no longer be as effective as it has been in the past. And since the top reason for quitting a current job is to increase wages, employers face the challenge of meeting candidate expectations for higher pay based on local salary ranges.

While remote work may not be viable for some positions, expanding the pool of candidates outside a specific geographic area allows employers to take advantage of the growing trend in telecommuting as well as potentially reduce attrition, decrease cost-per-hire and even improve productivity.

The Virtual Workforce is Substantial (and Growing)

A study by Global Workplace Analytics and FlexJobs released earlier this year reported that 3.9 million U.S. employees, or 2.9 percent of the total U.S. workforce, currently work from home at least half of the time. This number is up from 1.8 million in 2005, an increase of 115 percent. And as of 2017, 43 percent of U.S. workers worked remotely at least occasionally, up from only 9 percent of workers in 2007.

Growth in remote work is not limited to the United States. In the UK, one in seven people work from home, according to the Office for National Statistics. In Canada, nearly half (47 percent) of employees work from outside one of their employer’s main offices for half the week or more. And in Australia, the number of people who work from home has risen to 30 percent. The significant percentages of telecommuters is not the case for all economies. Eurostat reported earlier this year that working from home was slightly more common in the Eurozone than in the EU as a whole. And some non-Eurozone countries have a negligible virtual workforce. Bulgaria has only 0.3 and Romania just 0.4 percent of its workers working from home, as an example.

A Deloitte study on Global Human Capital Trends reported that 70 percent of employees value telecommuting, but only 27 percent of employers offer this option. Therefore, companies that provide opportunities for telecommuting may have a competitive advantage in attracting talent.

Reducing Employee Turnover and Increasing Productivity

While study results vary, there is evidence being offered that working from home can increase employee retention. One study by OwlLabs found that companies that support remote work have 25 percent lower employee turnover than those that don’t.

A study conducted by a Stanford University professor set up a control group between office-based workers and those were allowed to work from home. As the Harvard Business Review reports:

“Half the volunteers were allowed to telecommute; the rest remained in the office as a control group. Survey responses and performance data collected at the conclusion of the study revealed that, in comparison with the employees who came into the office, the at-home workers were not only happier and less likely to quit but also more productive.”

The professor noted that “The results we saw at Ctrip, (the company studied, which is the largest online travel agency in China and the owner of other travel sites worldwide including Trip.com) blew me away. Ctrip was thinking that it could save money on space and furniture if people worked from home and that the savings would outweigh the productivity hit it would take when employees left the discipline of the office environment. Instead, we found that…Ctrip got almost an extra workday a week out of them. They also quit at half the rate of people in the office—way beyond what we anticipated. And predictably, at-home workers reported much higher job satisfaction.”

Providing the option of working virtually can be a crucial factor in retaining valuable talent. If an employee needs to relocate temporarily for family reasons, such as caring for an older parent, or permanently due to a spouse’s job transfer, the employee can remain with the company by working remotely. Having this option available allows the employee to remain with the organization while the employer retains experienced talent and saves the costs of hiring and training a new worker.

Cost Savings for Employers and Employees

This same Stanford study showed that the company saved $1,900 per employee working from home over nine months. Remote workers allow employers to save money on furniture, parking, office space, insurance costs and other expenses. Global Workplace Analytics’ research shows that a typical employer can save more than $11,000 per year for each half-time telecommuter, the result of a combination of increased productivity and reduced real estate, turnover and absenteeism.

The cost benefits of remote work also extend to employees. Those working remotely save on commuting expenses, depreciation on their vehicles if they drive and gain the time back that would normally be spent going to and from work.

Can Remote Work Be a Solution for Your Business?

The difficulties of recruiting locally and the potential returns of developing a remote workforce may be attractive, but it is also uncharted territory for many companies. How would you source candidates throughout the nation and even beyond? Can you develop recruiting processes, including interviewing, that are effective using video and other tools if you have only relied on face-to-face meetings until now? And once a candidate is hired, how will you manage the onboarding process remotely? The answers to these and many other questions confronting a company exploring a remote workforce option can be provided by a recruitment process outsourcing company (RPO). An RPO can provide the experience, technology and expertise to ensure your success as you remove the geographic limits of your talent pool.

Healthcare Workforce and Recruiting Trends to Watch

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The healthcare workforce is highly specialized. As a result, the healthcare workforce and labor market are uniquely competitive. To gain a competitive edge, healthcare organizations are looking for innovative recruiting solutions to find top-quality candidates who provide world-class care for patients.

In this post, we examine the trends in the healthcare workforce that will influence the future of healthcare recruitment.

Employer Branding for Healthcare Workforce

Top healthcare candidates have many options when it comes to employers and can easily research the experiences of employees in your organization on career sites such as Indeed and Glassdoor.

In fact, a survey conducted by LinkedIn found that 75 percent of job seekers consider an employer’s brand before applying for a job. What’s more, a study conducted by Healthcare Recruiters International found that over 90 percent of candidates think employer branding is an essential recruiting resource. So, how can you ensure you have an impactful employer brand?

How RPO Can Solve The Top Challenges In Healthcare Talent Acquisition

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Conduct an Employer Brand Audit

Before developing your employer brand, you should conduct an employer brand audit. Your employer brand audit will help you understand how your brand distinguishes itself from competitors and provide a starting point from which you can build your strategy. Below are key questions to ask yourself during the audit:

  • Why would someone want to work for you?
  • What is the perception employees and candidates have about your organization?
  • What percentage of your employees would recommend your company as a great place to work?

Set your Employer Brand Strategy

Prospective healthcare employees are similar to patients in that both select the healthcare provider they feel most comfortable with. Your employer brand strategy should help make a candidate’s choice easier and provide assurance that he or she has chosen the right employer. Your employer brand strategy should contain the following three components:

  • Differentiators: A list of the benefits and unique qualities that are different or better about working at your healthcare facility.
  • Employee Value Proposition: Using your list of differentiators, craft a brief paragraph that positions your organization against other healthcare employers and demonstrates why candidates view you as an employer of choice.
  • Employer Brand Promotional Plan: Develop a plan to share your employee value proportion with candidates, including the tactics you will use, the tools you need and the schedule you will follow to attract potential new hires and retain current employees.

Promote Your Employer Brand to the Healthcare Workforce 

Once you have established your employer brand, it is time to promote it. You can promote your employer brand by highlighting your workplace benefits and culture in recruiting materials, on your website and social media channels and in your job postings and candidate outreach emails. Some examples of ways to promote your employer brand include:

  • Sharing videos and pictures of your workplace to show what working for your healthcare organization is like.
  • Leveraging your social channels to show off your workplace and company perks so that a candidate can assess what you have to offer.
  • Building a career site that makes visitors feel welcome and gives applicants the information they are looking for, such as details about employment opportunities, company culture and work environment.
  • Telling engaging stories from current and former employees to better attract the type of healthcare candidates who could see themselves in those stories.

Diversity in the Healthcare Workforce

Healthcare is experiencing a shortage of workers, and professionals of diverse backgrounds are particularly underrepresented in many occupations and in the upper ranks of many healthcare organizations.

Minority Workers in the Healthcare Workforce

With demand in many healthcare professions at record levels, career opportunities abound for individuals of all backgrounds. However, Black, Hispanic and Indigenous Americans make up almost a quarter of the U.S. population, yet as a group, they account for only 6 percent of physicians, 9 percent of nurses and 5 percent of dentists according to the Sullivan Commission on Diversity.

Healthcare organizations can play a significant role in addressing this issue by:

  • Promoting healthcare careers to diverse populations via school programs and community organizations.
  • Encouraging students to shadow healthcare professionals and explore careers in healthcare.
  • Recruiting ethnically diverse individuals for every-level positions to increase current minority representation.
  • Offering internships, residencies and fellowships to ethnically diverse students. For example, the Institute for Diversity in Health Management in Chicago offers summer internships to college students.

Healthcare Workers with Disabilities

Individuals with disabilities can pursue successful careers in the healthcare field. Opportunities are available, but so are obstacles, from expensive equipment to accommodate workers to licensing requirements.

Some disabled healthcare workers take advantage of programs specifically designed to recruit those with disabilities. Project Search at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center gives high school students with disabilities the opportunity to learn about careers in healthcare. Healthcare organizations can also provide assistance to workers with disabilities by:

  • Creating formal policies and procedures on accommodations for staff with disabilities. Invite employees with disabilities to work with on these policies.
  • Making the online application process easier to use, with fonts that can be enlarged or a site that can be used with a screen reader.
  • Advertising your healthcare organization as an equal opportunity employer and including contact information for anyone having problems accessing your organization because of a disability.

Aging Healthcare Workforce

According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing the median age of a Registered Nurse (RN) is 46 years old. Plus, more than a quarter of RNs report they plan to retire or leave nursing over the next five years. These demographic trends portend significant employment challenges in the near future in the U.S.

Healthcare employers will need to rethink their current employment policies and practices to simultaneously retain talented older staff and create job opportunities for new workers of all ages. Many healthcare organizations are taking proactive steps to confront the problems that will occur as the healthcare workforce matures. Some of these strategies include:

  • Developing strong outreach mechanisms to attract promising senior candidates to healthcare management careers.
  • Publicizing career advancement opportunities, such as continuing education, professional development organizations, networking events and vacancies inside the organization, in a manner that appeals to everyone, especially older individuals.
  • Creating environments that encourage retention, development and promotion of qualified elderly or senior employees.

Greater Use of Technology

As technology continues to become more sophisticated, it will play an increasingly important role in finding and hiring talent in healthcare. In fact, according to Ideal, 96% of senior HR professionals believe AI has the potential to greatly enhance talent acquisition and retention.

AI can help reduce unconscious bias during the hiring process by anonymizing candidates and focusing on skills, not age, gender or race, auto. AI technology can also be used to improve the screening process and manage interview scheduling.

Drafting Better Job Posts

Finding the right candidate in the healthcare workforce begins with the right job posting. In fact, it is often the first thing candidates see from your organization, so it is important to make a good impression.

Today, AI technology can utilize algorithms to assess and analyze language patterns in job postings to determine why some fail and others succeed and suggest keywords to make job descriptions more appealing to candidates. As the AI technology analyzes more job posts, it becomes more accurate with its language suggestions, helping employers draft precise job descriptions.

While there may never be a perfect job posting, AI technology is getting us closer.

Advanced Candidate Screening

Traditionally, candidate screenings begin with reviewing an applicant’s resume followed by a brief phone call. This means that recruiters and hiring managers have only their judgment of a resume to assess whether a healthcare candidate would make a good hire.

Healthcare recruiters know that resumes are an incomplete picture of someone’s skills, achievements, capabilities and most importantly, personality and culture fit.

AI technology can also be used to cull data and metrics healthcare organizations have on their employees to build predictive models and personality profiles that help lead to candidates who fit the company culture and job requirements more accurately and can reduce time-to-fill metrics.

Automating Recruiting Tasks

In healthcare recruiting, administrative tasks such as resume screenings and scheduling interviews can be time-consuming. With the assistance of AI, recruiters and hiring managers can reduce their time spent conducting administrative work by using AI and Robotic Process Automation technology to automatically screen candidates’ resumes using keyword and qualification searches.

AI can also help schedule interviews with candidates through email or chatbot programs that bring more personalization to the communication process. Not only does this save time that recruiters can spend on more critical tasks, it also accelerates the interview process, helping reduce time-to-hire and ultimately providing healthcare organizations with an advantage when competing for talent.

Conclusion

Your healthcare organization’s success depends on your ability to adapt to changes in recruiting and healthcare talent management. Healthcare RPO is one way the sector is staying on top of a difficult hiring environment.

How to Leverage Workforce Analytics and HR Data in Workforce Planning

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According to a survey conducted by Harvard Business Review, 15 percent of respondents said they use “predictive analytics based on HR data and data from other sources within or outside the organization,” while 48 percent predicted they would be doing so in two years.

While organizations are increasingly incorporating data into the HR mix, there are still areas for improvement and to further adopt workforce analytics. Below, we outline some of the best practices for building an analytics-oriented workforce planning program along with some of the analytics processes essential for success.

Building an Analytics-Oriented HR Data Team

Organizations need to solicit input from a variety of stakeholders like talent acquisition program managers, human resource leaders, data specialists, budget and finance leaders and IT specialists to create a multidisciplinary team. When building your team, considering the following:

  • Does your organization have an individual with experience and expertise in data analysis with the leadership skills to manage a workforce analytics team?
  • Does the team you have assembled include analysts with data management, statistics and data visualization skills?
  • Do you have your IT department’s support to choose the right tools to integrate HR data with other data sources in the organization?
  • Can your team confidently present data-oriented solutions to senior leadership even if the solutions are counter to past workforce plans?

Collecting the Right Data

Collecting essential data points is a key step in a data-driven HR program. The data needed for analysis may come from multiple divisions within an organization. Organizations need to communicate the importance of sharing data with leaders organization-wide. Evaluating current internal HR data can help organizations identify future needs and draft a workforce strategy around them. Below is a list of data needed for workforce analytics.

Internal HR data:

  • What are the demographics of the current workforce? (Gender, ethnicity, disabilities, full/part-time, etc.)
  • How many people work in each position?
  • Where are positions located?
  • What is the employee to supervisor ratio?
  • What are the pay rates of current employees?
  • What is the likelihood of attrition through retirement?
  • What recruitment activities have been completed in the last two to three years?
  • What recruitment activities and resources were used?
  • How many qualified applicants were found?
  • Where did the most qualified applicants come from?
  • What do new employees think of your recruitment practices?
  • How many employees are needed to fill each position?
  • What knowledge, skills, competencies and abilities are needed to perform anticipated job functions?
  • What processes could be done more efficiently or effectively?
  • What are the organization’s strategic objectives?
  • What are the organization’s diversity objectives?

External Data Sources

Many organizations have inward-focused approach to workforce analytics and HR data and do not take into account what is going on outside the organization. The labor market is rapidly changing. Labor market data can inform organizations about talent supply in different locations and provide critical market intelligence on issues like competitiveness and salary range.

Data and job projection reports from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, can lead to a better understanding of the supply and demand for essential occupations and the competitiveness of the job market.

Putting HR Data in Action  

Organizations should take the insights gained through workforce analytics initiatives and develop a workforce plan to fill the gaps between current and future hiring needs. Some strategies and considerations when drafting a data-oriented workforce plan include:

  • Plan for employees to receive skills training when needed to prepare for changing roles within the company.
  • Hire and retain employees with skills that are critical to the success of the business.
  • Create programs focused on employee retention.
  • Increase efficiencies in recruitment and hiring processes by proactively identifying vacancies through succession planning and forecasting future business requirements.
  • Identify training needs, classification and compensation issues, organizational or position changes that may affect employee retention.
  • Create workplace diversity strategies to reach organizational diversity goals.

Managing a Workforce Analytics Program and HR Data

Workforce analytics is a continuous process that is highly susceptible to changes in the economy and labor market. To stay on top of new developments, organizations need to ensure their workforce analytics process is managed properly. Below, we share advice on how to best manage a workforce analytics program.

Prioritize Business Goals

For workforce analytics to drive real value, it has to be aligned with an organization’s business goals. Everyone contributing to workforce analytics process needs to be briefed on the overarching business strategies, so they can understand how their analysis contributes.

Common workforce goals include:

  • Reduce turnover on a particular team or organization-wide
  • Retain high-performing individuals
  • Improve staffing and recruiting efficiency
  • Lower the cost of operations
  • Ensure the organization has talent aligned to expansion plans or planned new product offerings

Stakeholder Management

Because workforce analytics involve stakeholders from HR, finance, IT and others within an organization, clear and open communication should be emphasized early in the process. This will help stakeholders and their teams understand expectations up front and establish relationships between teams for success.

Data Quality

At the start of a workforce analytics initiative, it makes sense for organizations to conduct basic data hygiene practices like assessing the quality of data, gauging the need for data clean-up and documenting data-gathering and reporting processes.

Data Governance

Because employee data is personal, privacy rules must be respected. Proper data governance should be the responsibility of everyone involved in workforce analytics. However, someone should be assigned ownership to ensure that data and HR teams are following the processes established for data security.

Flexibility

Economic and business climates are not static; even the best workforce analytics program may miss emerging talent shortages or inadequately take certain contingencies into account. To make sure workforce analytics program reflect the latest internal and external developments, organizations should regularly re-calibrate and revise assumptions made from previous HR data analysis.

RPO Providers Can Assist Organizations with Workforce Planning, HR Data and Analytics

There is no one-size-fits-all workforce planning program, even for global organizations that have similar needs. What’s right for one organization may not be what another organization needs.

However, workforce planning does not have to be mysterious or complex. Organizations more than likely have a lot of the data they need, it is just a matter of creating the right management and reporting practices to interpret the data in meaningful ways.

The right RPO partner can help organizations make sense of their workforce analytics with their experience and deep understanding of labor market data and trends. An RPO partner can also work with an organization to create methodologies adapted to suit their needs. Click here to learn more about PeopleScout’s RPO solutions.

Strategies for Building an Effective Talent Community

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Competition for talent is increasing across the globe, and employers are looking for innovative strategies to stay ahead of the competition. To gain a competitive advantage, employers are deploying a variety of methods. Wages are on the rise after years of slow growth. New graduates face strong prospects for employment. Even retirement is starting to look different for older workers with important skills. Finding new ways to source and attract workers with the skills of the future is a growing need.

In the U.S., years of job growth have led to the lowest unemployment rate in decades. Around the world, favorable job conditions are making it more difficult for employers to hire the talent they need. Adding to the challenge, employers are facing a skills shortage as they look to hire candidates who have the training, education and experience to bring their workforce into the future. This pressure is even greater in industries that are currently adapting to disruptive technology, like the auto industry. While reskilling and future degree programs can help increase the size of the talent pipeline in the future, employers still need to find and hire talent today. Building a talent community is a promising solution.

What is a Talent Community?

A talent community is a sourcing strategy that is an ongoing, multifaceted approach to candidate engagement that creates employment brand ambassadors and a talent pool that begins to feed itself. It is a process rather than an event and takes continual effort to maintain.

Traditional sourcing starts with a job opening. From there, a job description is written and disseminated. A sourcing specialist may search their contacts and social media to find a candidate with skills that match, but the process largely involves posting a job and waiting for the right candidate to find you.

In a talent community, the process is cyclical. It starts before a job requisition is created, and it doesn’t stop when a candidate is hired. Employers consistently build profiles of the types of candidates they would like for roles they may need to fill in the future. Then, employers need to build pipelines through technology, partnerships and employer branding initiatives to connect with those people, whether the employer currently has a job opening for that candidate or not. Finally, when a candidate gets to the point of applying, the experience throughout that process needs to be so strong that even candidates who do not make it through the process will become ambassadors for that brand and continue to apply for open positions in the future.

Building a talent community sourcing strategy has a host of benefits for employers. A community is sustainable. It can feed itself. This means decreased time-to-fill and cost-of-vacancy because candidates who are interested in working for an organization are waiting for a job to be posted rather than a recruiter posting a job and waiting for the right candidate to apply. It also leads to increased quality of hire because the employer has already determined the ideal candidate persona and has built a pipeline to find those people. When more qualified candidates are in that pipeline, the likelihood of making a strong hire goes up.

Why Talent Communities Alone Aren’t Enough

  • They have to be combined with great employer branding.
  • Your content has to be engaging and of value to the audience.
  • You have to have the right mix of viable candidates with the skills and experience that your company values, and ambassadors for your employer brand.
  • It is what you put into it, not what you take out–you have to cultivate the community or it will stagnate.

Using Employer Branding to Build a Talent Community

As employers work to create a talent community they need to build an employer brand that stands out from other organizations they compete with for talent. Organizations with a strong employer brand can stand out in a crowded landscape and draw in more candidates. There are several strategies employers can use to build their brands.

Online Talent Communities

An online talent community is a way to continue to communicate with candidates who may be interested in working for you in the future but can’t find a job opening that meets their skills and needs right now. It is also a way to engage with candidates who apply to jobs they aren’t qualified for yet but still have potential. An online community allows candidates to provide their contact information, resume and job interests. Then, the organization can search those resumes when a position opens, and it can send matching job openings to the candidate. This keeps the employer at the front of a candidate’s mind and provides recruiters with a slate of candidates every time a requisition opens.

Recruitment Email Marketing

Many organizations use email marketing as a part of their traditional marketing strategy, but it is also important in employment branding. Email marketing can be used in partnership with an online talent community. Organizations can send recruitment marketing emails to share job openings, as well as information about their culture. One caveat to using email marketing as a part of an employer branding strategy is that the emails should be as personalized as possible. A candidate who has provided their resume should only receive job openings that correspond with their skillsets. Data about candidates can also be used to personalize how often candidate receive emails or at what time of the day they are sent. Regulations like CAN-SPAM in the U.S. and GDPR in the EU regulate email marketing, and we discuss those later in this post.

Social Media

Every organization should have a strategy for sharing its employment brand on social media, though that strategy may look different for different companies. One option is to create a separate “careers” social media page where the organization can post job openings and information about the workplace, culture and current employees. At PeopleScout, we recommend this strategy to our clients and work with them to optimize their existing pages to showcase their employer brand. This strategy works well for employers with a strong brand presence and large volume of hires. Another option, especially for smaller organizations, is to include some employer branding on their traditional social media accounts. In this approach, employer branding related posts that share information about the workplace and culture should be interspersed between standard social media posts.

Video

Many employers are familiar with video interviewing, but video can enhance employer branding in several additional ways and doesn’t always need high production quality. One example is video job descriptions. A job posting could include a short video of a hiring manager talking about the job and what they are looking for. A video like this gives a candidate a better understanding of the job and gives them a glimpse into the culture of the organization. Additionally, organizations can use video to show workplace tours, so job seekers get an idea of what working for an organization might look like. If an organization is hiring for a lot of entry-level roles but frequently promotes within the company, a video that shows an employee’s career path from entry-level to a leadership role can also motivate candidates to apply for hard-to-fill entry-level jobs.

Chatting and Text

Another method of building a strong employer brand is communicating with candidates in the ways candidates want to communicate. Chat and text are growing in popularity. Some employers are deploying chatbots throughout their recruitment process. For others, a chat window with limited hours but access to a live recruiter can be successful. While many employers may be cautious to start a system to text messages candidates, several PeopleScout clients have found success and higher rates of candidate engagement.

Using Innovative Technology to Power a Talent Community

While a compelling employer brand is important for attracting strong candidates, it’s not enough to stay ahead in the current competitive landscape. Innovative technology solutions can help employers source top talent faster than the competition.

Geofencing

Geofencing can be used in a few different ways during the sourcing process. Much like targeted ads for restaurants or stores can be delivered to a person’s cell phone or computer based on where that person is located, job ads can be targeted to candidates in a specific geographical area as well. This can be valuable to employers that have a variety of locations spread across a large geographical area. Geofencing can be used to target job ads at candidates near specific branches. It can also be used for industry events or expos where a large number of potential candidates could be in one location at the same time.

AI Sourcing

Artificial intelligence sourcing can provide recruiters with a solid slate of candidates as soon as a requisition is opened, giving the recruiter a strong head start to fill the role. An AI sourcing solution that uses predictive analytics modeling can also provide the recruiter with information about how well the candidate matches the job opening and how likely the candidate is to leave their current role. With this information, recruiters are able to work more quickly and efficiently, filling the role with the best talent in less time. In the end, it saves companies time and money. At PeopleScout, AI sourcing is built into AffinixTM, PeopleScout’s proprietary talent technology solution.

AI Data Tracking

AI data tracking can be used to make other sourcing and employer branding strategies more effective. Artificial intelligence and predictive analytics can understand and predict candidate behaviors. By tracking what time of day candidates apply, open emails or use social media, employers can schedule email marketing and social media posts to maximize the number of candidates who will see and click on job postings. Employers can also use this data to optimize their ad spend on job boards, so the ads appear when the best candidates are most likely to be online. One PeopleScout client had data that showed most of its applicants applied after lunch on Wednesdays. By posting jobs just before that timeframe, the employer saw a 15 percent increase in applications.

Finding a Partner

As employers work to build their own talent communities, an RPO provider can be a valuable partner. The right RPO partner will have a wealth of knowledge gleaned from experience solving a wide variety of problems and successfully sourcing and recruiting in a number of markets and industries. Employers can benefit from that collective knowledge.

Additionally, working with an RPO partner provides compliance benefits. Many of the sourcing strategies addressed in this article are impacted by GDPR, CAN-SPAM and other regulations, as well as regulations by the OFCCP. RPO providers have years of experience with these regulations and strong checks in place to ensure all sourcing strategies are compliant. This can provide peace of mind for employers.

Employers working with RPO partners will also see financial benefits, including reducing or eliminating agency spend. At PeopleScout, some clients have gone from agency usage as high as 25 percent or more to zero. To accomplish that, employers need to be committed from the top down to building the sourcing infrastructure to implement a talent community.

To find an RPO partner who is a good fit, employers should look for providers who possess customizable offerings that can be adapted to meet every need. A one-size-fits-all approach ignores the specific needs of employers in different industries and the unique challenges that can arise in recruiting in different markets. To build a strong talent community, employers should look for an RPO partner who can successfully deploy and manage these innovative sourcing strategies.

Workforce Planning: Leveraging Workforce Analytics for Deeper Insights

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Workforce analytics are changing the game. To stay competitive in the modern and complex business landscape, organizations need to leverage technology to make more strategic decisions. Many are using big data and analytics to achieve these aims. In fact, 80 percent of executives say their big data investments have been successful, and almost half say their organizations can measure the benefits from their projects.

What’s more, according to Harvard Business Review, organizations that excel in data-driven decision-making are more productive and more profitable than their competitors on average.

Workforce analytics combines statistical analysis and predictive modeling to help organizations make fact-based talent acquisition and management decisions. In this post, we outline how to leverage analytics as part of the workforce planning process.

What is Workforce Planning and What Role do Analytics Play in the Process?

workforce analytics

Traditionally, workforce planning has been a reactive way of assessing workforce needs. Organizations typically make annual talent forecasts for how many hires are needed in a role, and those estimates happen before the end of a fiscal year as part of the budget-planning process. This approach to workforce planning lacks the flexibility needed to remain agile and competitive in an evolving and dynamic labor market.

Modern, data-driven workforce planning focuses on the future by assessing current hiring needs and modeling how those needs will evolve. Workforce analytics is the cornerstone of modern workforce planning.

Workforce analytics gathers and analyzes data to better inform decisions made in of the process of workforce planning, resulting in the formation of a strategic plan to address workforce challenges. This data-focused approach can assist organizations to match talent forecasts with analysis of the talent pool to create a realistic view of the labor market.

When workforce planning is combined with workforce analytics, organizations are better able to predict future leaders within the organization, craft succession plans for critical positions and recruit the right talent.

Types of Workforce Analytics

Data analytics has become common across many business functions, from logistics to finance. As organizations look to overcome the skills gap, full-employment and record retirement, they need to develop a systematic process for identifying workforce needs, develop strategies to meet those requirements and implementing them effectively. Below we list three data analytics techniques essential to workforce planning that can help organizations meet changing demands now and in the future.

Predictive Analytics 

Predictive analytics leverages historical data to create predictive models that anticipate what is likely to happen in areas such as employee turnover, skills shortages and shifts in the labor market. By incorporating predictive analytics into workforce planning, techniques such as regression analysis, forecasting, multivariate statistics and pattern matching enable an organization’s leadership to understand likely talent outcomes and needs of the future.

Diagnostic Analytics

Diagnostic analytics helps contextualize past performance by evaluating performance-based metrics in an attempt to discover the reasons behind past workforce successes or failures. Diagnostic analytics is essential in workforce planning because it can provide organizations with a clearer picture of key workforce performance metrics and trends. The data can then be leveraged to identify unseen workforce performance issues. Armed with insights gleaned from diagnostic analytics organizations can better optimize their workforce plan to align with performance goals.

Prescriptive Analytics 

Similar to predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics uses the same sets of historical workforce data to anticipate the likelihood of specific results or events. What makes prescriptive analytics different is that the data is then leveraged to plan the best next actions based on those predictions. Prescriptive analytics is extremely valuable in workforce planning because it uses available data to recommend measures that could increase the likelihood of desired business and staffing outcomes occurring.

These techniques can provide organizations with concrete and actionable insights on workforce data and help drive better talent strategies. Talent technology solutions such as PeopleScout’s propriety technology, Affinixtm, can help organizations better leverage these techniques and deliver additional value to workforce planning.

Benefits of Workforce Analytics

While the most obvious benefits are related to time savings, dollars saved and earned, percentage changes, and proof of ROI, there are less tangible benefits of workforce analytics that HR leaders often discover after they have started with their solution. These are benefits related to organizational alignment, team cohesion and company culture. While these benefits are more difficult to measure in concrete terms, they are definitely connected to business outcomes. In the following section, we outline two ways workforce analytics can improve and organizations talent management and recruiting programs.

Improving Retention and Employee Performance

Detailed analytics can help organizations identify top performers, foster successful employee retention and talent recruitment programs and ensure the proper workforce is in place to accomplish business goals and objectives.

Furthermore, an employee’s performance data could be used by hiring managers to identify what motivates an organization’s top talents. This data not only provides more insights about the employees but also shape the strategies to boost the employee morale, retention and engagement.

Improved Hiring Decision With

Workforce analytics make predictive analysis easier and helps HR to make a better choice based on historical data. A great HR analytics tool can make the difference by making the HR easily derive the best candidate to hire from the historical data.

For example, if an organization hired 20 candidates and 10 out of them are from a particular background failed at it, organizations can avoid hiring candidates from a similar background. Moreover, workforce analytics also allows recruiters to learn more about candidates through an online resume database, applications, social media profiles to learn which traits and attributes are associated with top performers in a certain role.

Conclusion

Today, HR leaders make use of analytics solutions to realize deeper insight into the workforce in order to fuel evidence-based decisions and improve business outcomes. An experienced RPO partner with a consultative approach can help organizations better understand their workforce and tailor talent acquisition strategies to match the client’s goals and objectives and which metrics can best determine the desired impact.

How Robotic Process Automation is Reshaping Recruiting

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Automation is one of the most popular emerging technologies currently being deployed in business. According to the Global Future of Work Survey, conducted by Willis Towers Watson, employers expect that 17 percent of all work will be automated by 2020. What’s more, 94 percent of U.S. organizations currently utilizing AI and robotics will increase their use of automation in the next three years.

The increased focus on automation is shifting the way organizations think about business processes such as IT support, data entry, scheduling, workflow and resource management. Beyond these functions, business leaders realize the value of automating HR and recruiting processes. According to research conducted by PwC, 40 percent of the HR functions of international companies are currently using AI-applications. One form of AI — robotic process automation – uses AI to automate business processes to human-like efficiency and effectiveness, making workers more productive. In this post, we outline what robotic process automation technology is, how it can benefit recruiting and how to successfully implement a robotic process automation solution.

What is Robotic Process Automation?

Robotic process automation (RPA) refers to technology that utilizes bots to replicate human actions for time-consuming but straightforward back-office administrative tasks. RPA software allows users to configure bots to collect data, trigger responses and communicate with other business systems. RPA software integrates with existing tools, so it does not require a complete update of a legacy system; rather, RPA acts as a supplemental enhancement. RPA applications can handle automations that range from a simple task such as automated email responses to managing thousands of bots that complete individual tasks.

According to the Institute for Robotic Process Automation, the top five business departments deploying RPA software are:

  1. Financial operations
  2. Human resources
  3. Information technology
  4. Procurement
  5. Data and analytics

The Recruiting Case for RPA Adoption

Automation and AI technology have been gaining traction in HR and talent acquisition. In fact, according to a LinkedIn survey on talent trends, 35 percent of talent professionals and hiring managers say that AI is the top trend impacting how they hire.

For organizations looking to optimize their recruiting, RPA software can provide time savings, increase recruiting accuracy and help reduce bias in the recruiting process. RPA technology can also be utilized for high-level repetitive tasks such as candidate and resume screening. RPA systems can work every hour of every day to source, screen and organize candidates. This gives recruiters more time to establish a more consultative relationship with clients and better engage candidates in a personal one-on-one relationship.

An RPA software solution can help optimize an organization’s HR department and recruitment initiatives through the automation of tasks such as the following:

  • Sending automated communications such as auto reply emails and texts to candidates.
  • Collecting, processing and organizing candidate information and storing it in an organizations ATS system.
  • Recruiting process such as candidate sourcing and screening.
  • Answering simple questions from candidates and providing automated application instructions.

HR and Recruiting Applications for Robotic Process Automation Technology

Learning and understanding the value of RPA and HR automation provides forward-thinking organizations and talent acquisition professionals additional tools to improve recruiting efforts. Below, we list several HR applications of RPA technology and how they can improve HR and recruiting functions.

Sourcing Candidates

According to a LinkedIn report, 90 percent of global professionals want to hear from recruiters to talk and learn more about opportunities. With so many candidates willing to entertain prospective job opportunities, it can be nearly impossible for recruiters to engage with every qualified candidate. RPA technology can automate the online sourcing process by canvassing hundreds of talent pools and databases for quality candidates.

With bots sourcing candidates on the web, recruiters can spend more time consulting clients on talent acquisition strategies such as improving employment offers and bolstering recruitment marketing campaigns. With bots sourcing candidates and expert talent acquisition professionals offering guidance, organizations will be better positioned to extend attractive employment offers to top talent.

Chatbots

RPA technology can deploy chatbots that leverage sentiment analysis and computational linguistics to interpret a candidate’s communication and to formulate an appropriate response. Chatbots enable organizations to offer a more responsive and engaging candidate experience by eliminating the downtime between a candidate submitting an application and receiving a response from a recruiter.

Chatbots can also perform the following tasks:

  • Ask candidates for their resume, cover letter and contact information
  • Ask pre-screening questions regarding a candidate’s education, experience and skills
  • Answer candidates’ FAQs about advertised jobs and the application and hiring process
  • Schedule an interview with a recruiter or hiring manager

Enhancing Recruitment Marketing Campaigns

RPAs can help organizations by reliably engaging and communicating with candidates. Recruiters can design attractive email campaigns that can be sequenced and programmed to “drip” messages to both passive and active candidates, creating a higher level of engagement. Automating recruitment marketing campaigns ensures regular correspondence and delivers relevant job postings and content to multiple candidates. This builds more robust talent pipelines and strengthens an employer’s brand.

Interview Scheduling

RPA technology can also assist both an organization’s HR team and candidates with the interview scheduling process. RPA bots can provide candidates with real-time access to a recruiter or hiring manager’s calendar and suggest specific time slots based on availability. After a candidate selects an interview time, an automated invite is sent to both interviewers and interviewees and the scheduled time becomes unavailable for other candidates. What’s more, if an organization utilizes a video interviewing platform, bots can send automated emails containing links and instructions on how to complete the video interview. Hiring managers can then review interviews and select the best candidates for in-person follow-ups.

Enhanced Candidate Experience

With RPA tools, organizations can better manage their candidate experience. Bots can be used to collect real-time data throughout the candidate experience and monitor candidate satisfaction in each stage of the hiring process. Recruiters can program bots to generate emails soliciting feedback or short surveys as candidates progress through the process.

While automation can help improve and monitor candidate experience that does not mean every component in the process should be turned over to technology. Talent acquisition leaders need to remember that humans make a difference when it comes to engaging candidates.

Affinix

Affinix®, PeopleScout’s proprietary total talent suite, utilizes many of the automated functions made available through RPA software like AI-enabled software, automated email drip campaigns and chatbots. Click here to learn more about Affinix and its automation capabilities.

Best Practices for Integrating Robotic Process Automation Technology into the Recruiting Process

While RPA technology can make HR and recruiting functions more efficient, organizations need to be aware of how to successfully implement the technology into their current systems. Below, we outline a three-step process to successfully implementing an RPA tool into your recruiting and hiring process.

Best Practices for RPA Process Selection

The RPA implementation process begins with identifying the recruiting processes that would most benefit from automation. To begin, HR leaders should conduct a high-level assessment of potential recruiting processes for automation and document the efficiencies and cost-savings that could result from automating each process. This step helps HR leaders, IT and an organization’s leadership decide which recruiting functions will benefit the most from automation. Not all HR and recruiting function are a good fit for RPA, so identifying the right ones depends on the unique needs of an organization.

More process selection tips include:

  • Research RPA capabilities to learn what’s possible through automation.
  • Outline project team members and their roles and responsibilities during the preliminary assessment process (i.e., stakeholders, recruiters, SMEs, technology evaluators).
  • Research the compliance risks associated with each recruiting process, for example, CAN-SPAM rules governing commercial emails.
  • Collaborate with stakeholders for guidance and strategic direction regarding establishing automated processes.

Best Practices for Implementing an RPA Solution

HR leaders need to make sure that HR, IT and talent acquisition personnel are trained and prepared to execute the implementation plan. Moreover, each implementation activity should be documented, tracked and completed per the plan.

During this step, those responsible for implementation need to thoroughly go over the end-to-end automation of selected recruiting functions to learn the full scope of the RPA solution. If errors and missteps occur in an automated process, organizations need to work with their RPA partners to refine and make final modifications before implementing the new processes. No matter how well an organization implements an RPA solution, it is still important to monitor and periodically amend the RPA program to ensure long-term success.

Conclusion

Robotic process automation is a valuable tool for streamlining the recruiting and hiring process. Leveraging automation in recruiting empowers talent acquisition and HR professionals to make the right hiring decisions faster by increasing efficiency across recruitment functions. However, for RPA technology to have a positive impact on an organization, it is important to remember that human interaction with candidates is paramount. Organizations need to find the right balance between talent technology and human interaction.

Predictive Analytics: A Powerful Talent Acquisition Tool

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In this tightening talent market with unemployment rates at record lows, predictive analytics is emerging as an essential AI tool for employers looking to stay ahead of the competition. Applications of artificial intelligence are transforming the talent acquisition process. As an AI tool, predictive analytics allows employers to use the power of data to make predictions about candidates and drive efficiencies throughout the entire talent acquisition process.

What is Predictive Analytics?

Predictive analytics is a type of data analytics that uses data to find patterns and then uses those models to attempt to predict the future. Predictive analytics can’t tell you what will happen, but it shows what is likely to happen based on past trends. It’s as close as employers can get to predicting the future.

The ability to make these predictions helps shorten the entire recruiting process while making stronger hires. In a competitive talent market, this allows employers to identify the top talent for a particular role and make an offer to the best candidates faster than the competition. For employers, this results in improvements in time-to-hire and quality-of-hire, and for candidates, it builds a better experience, leaving a positive impression that will factor into their decision to accept an offer.

Using Predictive Analytics to Improve Sourcing

During the sourcing process, predictive analytics models can identify stronger candidates more quickly and accurately than traditional methods. AI sourcing that uses predictive models can provide recruiters with a solid slate of candidates as soon as a requisition is opened, giving the recruiter a strong head start to fill the role. An AI sourcing solution that uses predictive analytics modeling can also provide the recruiter with information about how well the candidate matches the job opening and how likely the candidate is to leave their current role. With this information, recruiters are able to work more quickly and efficiently, filling the role with the best talent in less time. In the end, it saves companies time and money.

To roll out a predictive analytics sourcing tool, employers first need to establish what makes a good hire. This requires looking back into data from previous hires that demonstrates how well those hires performed. This step is critical because employers may find that the factors that predict success are not what they thought. For instance, when filling certain roles, employers may prioritize candidates with advanced degrees. However, data may show that an advanced degree is not a reliable predictor of success. Instead, industry experience or high scores on a pre-employment assessment may better predict the success of a candidate.

Once an employer has the data to identify qualities that predict success, the predictive analytics technology that’s part of an AI sourcing tool can use that information to identify candidates who match that criteria. The technology can scour social media sites, job boards, talent communities and networking and career sites to find the best talent. Using available data, the tool will make predictions about the candidate, and the recruiter can use those predictions to determine which candidates to target for more personalized communication.

As recruiters use the predictive analytics tool, they constantly feed more data into the system. This means that over time, the technology is able to learn more and make even more accurate predictions about candidate success. At PeopleScout, AI sourcing using predictive analytics is a key component of AffinixTM, our proprietary talent technology.

When implementing a predictive analytics sourcing tool, there are a few important considerations to ensure success. The first is making sure that data you use is good, accurate data. You need accurate information about previous hires, including pre- and post-hire information. Since an RPO is only engaged through the hiring and onboarding process, if you’re using an RPO to manage your talent acquisition, it’s important to share post-hire data that demonstrates whether the candidate made a strong employee. Knowing about performance or employee tenure will make predictive analytics tools more powerful. To make that data work for you, it is key that you share that post-hire data with your RPO partner.

Using Predictive Analytics to Make Your Recruitment Funnel More Efficient

In addition to sourcing, predictive analytics can be used throughout the entire recruitment process to drive efficiencies in an employer’s recruitment funnel. A recruitment funnel encompasses all of the steps between when a candidate applies for a position until that candidate is hired. At different steps in the recruitment funnel, candidates will either be eliminated from consideration or move along in the process.

For instance, in a recruitment funnel, an employer may receive 100 applications. During the initial resume screen, a portion of those candidates will be eliminated. After a phone screen, more candidates will be eliminated. The process continues until there is one candidate left and the employer makes the hire.

By analyzing the recruitment funnel, you can work backward to learn how many applicants are necessary to make one hire. To accomplish this, you need multiple data points from a large number of hires. The more data you have, the better and more accurate a prediction will be. That data will give you an understanding of what your recruitment funnel looks like now, and from there, predictive analytics technology can make the process more efficient, which means you would need fewer applicants to hire the right candidate. That turns into decreased time-to-fill and cost-per-hire, while increasing the quality-of-hire.

As in the souring process addressed above, you need to start by evaluating and analyzing existing data. Again, this is a process where the quality of the data will determine the outcome. By analyzing data about factors that can predict successful hires, the predictive analytics tool will learn what qualities make for a strong hire. Like in the sourcing process, the data may tell a story that you don’t expect about what makes a good employee. For instance, you may expect your strongest hires to come from a specific degree program at a nearby university, so you spend significant time and money recruiting those graduates. A predictive analytics tool could help identify other university programs that produce candidates who also match your hiring needs.

With the data about candidate success, you can tailor the entire application process. If the best candidates come from certain sources – job boards, employee referral programs, etc. – you can target your recruitment marketing spend to connect with those candidates and decrease or eliminate advertising that doesn’t yield strong results. When you start with stronger candidates, you need fewer applicants to make a quality hire.

Predictive Analytics Considerations

You should also ensure that your RPO partner uses a technology that is programmed to prevent discrimination and has external checks in place to be sure that isn’t taking place. The technology cannot take factors like gender, race or disability into account as it combs the web for candidates, as this could violate anti-discrimination laws. Additionally, you must take care that the technology does not learn biases from the people who use it. When used correctly, predictive analytics technology can help eliminate discrimination from the recruiting process. It is important to look at variables like race and gender to measure potential bias, but the technology should not use that information to target or exclude candidates. To help prevent discrimination, combining the technology with the intelligence of the recruiter is the differentiator.

Finding a Partner

When looking for a predictive analytics technology solution, it is important to work with a partner with deep expertise of not only the technology but the entire talent landscape. You should look for an RPO provider that can respond to the unique challenges of your industry and that has an end-to-end technology solution that can be customized to your needs.

In an industry-leading technology solution, predictive analytics should be integrated throughout the entire process so that you’re able to harness the full power of the data. If your data analytics tool in the sourcing process operates independently of the data analytics tool that operates later in your recruiting funnel, you risk losing valuable insights. PeopleScout’s Affinix combines the best recruitment technology in the industry, and fully integrates the entire process. With Affinix, our clients get the most out of their data.

When working with an RPO provider, employers will also benefit from the data that the RPO has across its entire client base and in your industry. You can use that data to benchmark and improve your own programs. To get the most out of the partnership, it is important to work out an agreement where you share post-hire data with your RPO provider. Data is valuable, and good data is what makes a predictive analytics program successful. Sharing data with your partner ensures you have the strongest possible souring and recruitment solution.

Predictive analytics should be a part of an overall talent acquisition program and a complete technology solution. To stay ahead in a tight talent market, employers should use the power of data to make better hires, faster.

Healthcare HR Technology To-Do List

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Marc Miller, president and founder of Marc S. Miller Associates HR Technology Consulting, gave the presentation “HR’s Strategic Shift: How to leverage HR technology to drive results for your Healthcare organization” at the Healthcare Talent Acquisition and Management Summit held in New Orleans earlier this year. Miller’s presentation covered a wide range of topics related to HR technology and its impact on healthcare HR professionals. Below, we take three items from Miller’s HR technology “to-do” list and explore the ways in which emerging healthcare HR technology is helping achieve success in these areas.

Leverage Healthcare HR Technology to Reduce Time Spent on Administrative Tasks

Administrative tasks are the backbone of a well-run healthcare organization’s HR department. They put into action the ideas and concepts developed during HR strategic planning and include educating employees on benefits, keeping employment records and processing essential paperwork, from job applications to time sheets and travel per diems.

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Keeping up with administrative tasks can be daunting for healthcare HR professionals. This may be why more and more HR professionals are turning to HR technology to alleviate some of the burdens. A robust HR technology platform can help manage many basic HR functions — including payroll, benefits, employee onboarding and time off tracking. An HR technology platform will also organize these tasks into categories so users can easily navigate information from a single platform. With multiple HR functions organized in one space, healthcare HR departments can be more efficient and productive in handling administrative tasks.

Before sitting down with potential vendors, healthcare staffing teams should outline a list of questions including:

  • Will the platform integrate with current systems?
  • How secure is employee data inside the platform?
  • Will the vendor or a third party be involved in training staff on the technology?
  • What proprietary features does this platform offer?
  • Is the interface easy to navigate?
  • How customizable is the platform?
  • What ongoing support can be expected of the vendor?

Outsource Important HR Functions to Tech-Capable Partners

While HR professionals are adept at managing a wide variety of critical HR functions, there are only so many hours in a day to get things done. Outsourcing HR functions to companies who possess the know-how and technology to manage them efficiently can help maximize productivity. In fact, according to a SHRM survey, 18 percent of companies surveyed outsource HR functions to take advantage of technological advances.

For instance, in the healthcare industry, attracting and retaining qualified talent can be challenging. Competition is fierce. The Bureau of Labor Statistics believes the total healthcare labor market will grow to 22 million jobs, or a 29 percent increase in overall employment, in the next decade. What’s more, according to a SHRM survey, 46 percent of HR professionals reported it was “very difficult” to fill full-time roles for high-skilled medical positions such as nurses, doctors and specialists.

To brace for the looming surge in demand for healthcare talent, HR professionals should look to recruitment outsourcing as a viable and necessary solution. Talent acquisition experts at recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) companies can manage healthcare recruitment. A healthcare RPO provider can deliver a comprehensive assessment of the whole talent spectrum and can source and hire clinical and non-clinical healthcare workers.

The right RPO provider can employ cutting-edge talent acquisition technology to help manage all aspects of the recruiting process, from identifying talent to creating a more efficient applicant experience. For example, AffinixTM, PeopleScout’s proprietary talent technology platform, combines AI, predictive analytics and machine learning to deliver speed and scalability to a user’s recruitment process. Affinix can also improve candidate experience with a mobile-first application process, digital assessments and video interviews. If you would like to learn more about Affinix, please download our fact sheet here.

Use Healthcare HR Technology to Organize and Track Metrics

Tracking HR metrics is important for healthcare HR professionals and leadership teams looking to better understand the health and vitality of their organization and its workforce. However, according to research conducted by XpertHR, 95.5 percent of HR professionals have experienced problems gathering and analyzing HR metrics data.

HR technology can make tracking, measuring and analyzing the value of employees easier. Advances in technology such as HR dashboards allow organizations to gather data better. An HR dashboard can be used to analyze performance and identify areas for improvement in an organization. Executives and HR leaders can work together to review the data they need in order to make fact-based decisions when it comes to the development and management of HR and personnel resources. We have outlined some measurement best practices:

Keep HR metrics focused

Even though technology has made it easier to gather and report HR metrics, it is still important to be discerning and careful about what metrics are measured and reported on. Healthcare HR professionals should focus on tracking metrics that directly impact key performance indicators. This can be achieved by determining the key factors impacting an organization’s staff from turnover to employee satisfaction to tell the story of what is happening with employees.

Align reports with the organization’s strategic goals

Healthcare HR professionals need to be deliberate about aligning metric analysis with overall organizational goals. This is important to show how HR programs are driving progress and helping the organization reach its strategic goals as well as illustrating the value and impact employees make every day.

Use metrics to drive executive action

One of the main objectives of reporting key metrics is to compel the executive team to take action on HR-related issues that may need attention and improvement. Healthcare HR professionals need to be sure to illustrate where employees are struggling as well as the progress of HR programs to give leadership a clear picture of where to allocate resources.

Conclusion

The world is rapidly evolving with apps, big data, real-time communication and increasing use of artificial intelligence, chatbots and predictive analytics playing a larger role in our everyday lives. These technologies are quickly bringing new functionality to the world of HR. The future success of healthcare HR professionals will be directly linked to how well they adapt to new developments to create and design the healthcare workforce and employee experience.

How to Improve Your Candidate Experience

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Candidate experience is becoming a popular topic of discussion in the talent acquisition and recruiting community—with good reason. According to a CareerBuilder survey, 78 percent of candidates say the overall candidate experience they receive is an indicator of how a company values its staff. What’s more, the same survey found that 86 percent of job seekers believe employers should treat candidates with the same respect as current employees.

The results of CareerBuilder’s survey illustrate that the lines between the candidate and employee experience are blurring, making it critical for organizations to strengthen their candidate experience. In this post, we outline the importance of improving the experience of your candidates and how organizations can streamline the hiring process.

What is the Candidate Experience, and Why Does it Matter?

In order to build a strong candidate experience, it is important to understand what is and why it matters.

So, what is the candidate experience?

The candidate experience is the sequence of interactions a job candidate has with an organization throughout the recruiting and hiring process. These interactions can include correspondence that a candidate receives from an organization’s HR department, recruiters and its software systems.

Common candidate experience touch points include:

  • An organization’s career site
  • Job advertisements
  • The online job application process
  • Any communication from an applicant tracking system
  • An organization’s interview process
  • Any correspondence with HR professionals, team members or leadership
  • Notifications about a candidate’s application status
  • Candidate rejection letter or job offer

What is a positive candidate experience?

According to Talent Board’s CandE Research Report, candidates rated “communication” as the number one way to engage talent. So, organizations looking to craft a positive candidate experience should communicate clearly and honestly with job seekers to create the type of candidate experience they value.

A positive candidate experience meets the following standards:

  • Communicates realistic expectations for the job and work environment
  • Clearly communicates an organization’s employee value proposition
  • Outlines all of the employment details to candidates upfront
  • Provides an easy and mobile-friendly application process
  • Respects a candidate’s time at all stages of the application process
  • Provides a pleasant and smooth interview experience
  • Seamlessly transitions selected job applicants into new employees
  • Maintains a kind and respectful process for rejecting job applicants

What are the Benefits of Improving Candidate Experience?

Improving candidate experience not only benefits candidates and job seekers, but it can also have a positive impact on an organization’s workforce. Below, we outline three ways a strong candidate experience improves the overall talent acquisition process.

Improve applicant retention  

According to research conducted by Indeed, applications with 45 or more screener questions lose 88.7 percent of their potential applicants to application abandonment. Improving the candidate experience often begins with refining the application process. A short and streamlined job application process will increase the likelihood of job seekers finishing job applications, thereby increasing an organization’s applicant pool.

Create a better first impression

Research from labor economists Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger suggests a growing interest in joining the gig economy. The number of Americans working these “gigs” has risen from 10.1 percent a decade ago to 15.8 percent in 2015. Nearly 40 percent of workers in these jobs have a bachelor’s degree or higher. This means that organizations are not only in a battle with competitors for skilled talent but also with the candidates who may want to work for themselves.

To win the war for talent, organizations need to see the experience of candidates as more than just a part of the recruiting process; it is also a sales tool that can help win over top talent. A job application is often the first interaction a candidate has with an organization. So, making a great first impression on top talent with a superior candidate experience will help organizations differentiate themselves and stand out as great places to work.

Increase brand awareness

The candidate experience affects more than just job applicants; it also plays a significant role in how consumers view an organization as a whole. If an organization offers an exceptional experience, candidates are more likely to share the experience with colleagues and write about it online. What’s more, a survey conducted by Software Advice found that 71 percent of candidates are more likely to purchase from a company they feel treated them well throughout the recruiting process.

How Technology Can Help Improve the Candidate Experience

Technology continues to shape the way job seekers search for work and how organizations find and hire qualified talent. The rise of social and professional networking sites, mobile devices, job boards and online applicant systems means that creating a meaningful candidate experience often begins with crafting a technology-first approach. Below we list three ways in which organizations can use technology to improve their candidate experience.

Offer a mobile-friendly candidate experience

Research conducted by Indeed found that 78 percent of Millennials, 73 percent of Generation Xers and 57 percent of baby boomers conduct job searches from their mobile devices. This means that organizations looking to improve their candidate experience should look to create a mobile-friendly recruiting environment for job seekers. Organizations should make sure that their career website and other resources candidates may need while applying for job openings are mobile-friendly.

Affinix®, PeopleScout’s proprietary talent technology, is designed as a mobile-first platform for both candidates and recruiters, ensuring seamless engagement from any mobile device at any time throughout the application, scheduling and screening process.

Quick questions to ask yourself to improve the mobile the experience for candidates:

  • Is career-related text and content easily readable on mobile devices?
  • Are job pages optimized for better visibility in mobile search?
  • Is navigation of the career site and job application simple on mobile devices?
  • Will candidates have to go through trial and error to complete applications on mobile devices?

Clear Communication

Establishing timely and clear communication between candidates and recruiters is essential for developing a positive candidate experience. However, many candidates are left without feedback or status updates on their application. In fact, a Talent Board report found that 47 percent of candidates were still waiting to hear back from employers more than two months after they applied.

The right technology platform can help by sending automated messages to candidates via email or chatbot technology letting them know their application status. You can even craft messages letting a candidate know if they did not get the job. While missing out on a job is never pleasant, receiving prompt feedback communicates to a candidate that their application and time were respected.

Social Recruitment Marketing

Enhancing the candidate experience also means reaching candidates where they are. According to Social Talent’s 2016 Global Recruiting Survey, 37 percent of survey respondents said that social media is the primary source of finding candidates. This shift towards a digital hiring model has seen the traditional résumé be displaced by the online footprint of candidates which showcases their skills and experiences.

PeopleScout’s Affinix platform can help organizations reach digitally native candidates with customized ads, optimized job descriptions, personalized landing pages, career portals and recruitment marketing that elevates job postings with robust content and campaign management.

Conclusion

Learning from past mistakes and successes is essential to improving the experiences of your candidates. While there is no such thing as a perfect hiring process, learning and evolving processes and procedures will improve an organization’s ability to attract great talent and retain the strongest workers.