We’re hearing it more and more frequently now: HCM/HRIS/ERP recruiting modules hinder companies’ ability to provide an excellent candidate experience and keep TA teams from delivering upon the goals the business is asking of them. 

“Recruiting modules have not lived up to their promise,” said Allyn Bailey, Executive Director of Hiring Success Services at SmartRecruiters. “In many ways, they’ve set the industry backward, and talent teams are struggling to leverage them and get results.”

Pandemic-related hiring challenges made the shortcomings of HCM recruiting modules more apparent. “The problem is big enough now that leaders are getting headwinds from the C-Suite to find something else that would work better,” Allyn said.

Too often, the decision to use the recruiting module of a larger HCM or HRIS was made before a TA leader’s arrival or without their consultation. While the benefits of an HCM to the HR team are many, the TA team quickly learns that limited functionality, long implementation times, plus high integration fees and maintenance costs leave them unable to deliver a positive candidate experience or respond rapidly to changing market demands.

Why Invest in a Dedicated Talent Acquisition Suite Instead of a Recruiting Module

“If you want to build a high-functioning talent acquisition team,” Allyn said, “you need systems that are built natively for that application and offer a high level of innovation to support you going forward.” 

A market-leading talent acquisition suite like SmartRecruiters focuses the majority of its R&D efforts on developing features that improve the hiring process. Because 100% of our company’s success depends on our recruiting product, we strive to make our system future-proof by staying up to date on the latest hiring trends and regulations. We listen to customers and prioritize their requests for features that will improve their workflows and help them adapt to changes in the hiring landscape (e.g., hybrid interviewing and salary transparency). Finally, we partner with best-of-breed point solutions to ensure customers have access to the newest technologies that support recruitment.

“Best-in-class point solutions help companies meet important and evolving needs,” Allyn said. “Companies need the ability to test and experiment with new solutions, so a core system with open APIs allows them to be more agile. It’s much easier to tie into a talent platform than an HRIS where the connections go much deeper.”

In 5 Ways Technology Helps Talent Acquisition Maintain Its Seat at the Table, we explain how technology helps TA leaders empower recruiters, foster the candidate experience, engage hiring teams, lead with data, and adapt to changing market needs. If your HCM recruiting module doesn’t check off those boxes, getting or maintaining a seat at the table will be challenging.

“Many TA leaders are trying to figure out how to build their business case so they can swap to a standalone recruiting solution,” Allyn said. Because companies are often locked into long contracts with their HRIS, it may take them several years to build the business case, get buy-in, research vendors, fill out RFPs, and finally, choose and implement a new solution. The effort may take a long time, but it’s worth it—for the business, recruiters, candidates, and all future hires. Read on for pointers on how to get started.

Components of the Business Case for a Talent Acquisition Suite

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but components of the business case may include the following:

System Implementation & Ongoing Maintenance

• Cost of customization during implementation
• Cost of integrations with point solutions (typically lower with a talent acquisition suite than with an HRIS because the configurations are often pre-existing from the core TA suite)
• Cost of increased risks of compliance failures due to potential HCM’s lack of global focus on hiring-specific needs

Candidate Experience

• Cost of degraded candidate experience and applicant drop-off due to long applications
• Limited customization options to unique hiring needs further degrade candidate experience
• Lack of accurate, actionable reporting hinders the ability to improve candidate experience

Employer Brand Impact

• Cost of lost applicants and rejected offers due to the inability to support the employer brand by delivering a seamless candidate experience
• Cost of impact to reputation due to poor interview/employee reviews and word-of-mouth

Business Impact

• Lower recruiter productivity due to the high level of administrative work
• Decreased recruiter job satisfaction leads to high turnover
• Inability for recruiters and TA to become business advisors due to lack of meaningful metrics that hold the business accountable
• Longer than necessary time-to-hire slows the company’s ability to meet revenue goals

Spending Impact

• Inefficient job advertising spending due to a lack of centralized job board management

How to Get Started Building the Business Case

If you find yourself waiting for the HRIS contract renewal date, the time to get started making the business case is now. Here are a few guidelines to help you get started.

1. Document processes and roadblocks. Process documentation is a part of any implementation, so knowing exactly how things are currently working and what’s not working will bring the clarity you need as you make the business case. Examine the technology checklist in our Seat at the Table ebook for a full list of areas to consider. 
2. Clarify impacts. What are the potential impacts of each of the areas you’ve named? The Building Blocks of a Strategic Talent Acquisition Function listed in the A Seat at the Table ebook should help by offering signs of underinvestment and high investment.
3. Research others’ experiences Many people have done exactly what you’re trying to do: replace an HCM recruiting module with a best-of-breed TA platform. Ask vendors for references, or look to their customer success stories to get inspiration. Learn how this global media company integrated SmartRecruiters with its SAP HCM.
4. Set a North Star vision for talent acquisition. Executives will be more likely to buy in if they know where you want to take the TA organization. Your research on others’ experiences combined with impact statements will help you develop a vision that motivates others.
5. Quantify the total cost of ownership. Cost is a big motivator for the C-Suite. Quantify annual fees, system maintenance costs, and costs of integrations against the other impacts listed above.
6. Begin the vendor search. By getting product demos from leading vendors, you will learn more about what’s possible. Your RFP can be developed to highlight the use cases that will have the most impact on your company. To get started, view our RFP template, and look for vendors who respond to your requests with enthusiasm and a spirit of collaboration.

“The people making the decisions about what technology needs to be leveraged should be the people who understand the complexities of using it,” Allyn said. If you’re a TA leader, there’s no one better to do that than you. We’re here to help. To get started, read our Guide to Evaluating the Business Value of a Talent Acquisition Platform today.

Leading a team through a major technology implementation is a career milestone. Implementing a new talent acquisition platform often involves months of preparation and focused coordination of internal and external resources.

Every day, the customer service managers and implementation consultants at SmartRecruiters are busy helping one of our customers get up and running—or helping them evolve their hiring practices to adapt to new conditions. Some of these customers are so happy with the results that they take the extra step of telling their company’s story with SmartRecruiters in hopes that others can learn from their journeys.

If you think the challenge at your company is insurmountable, let the talent acquisition leaders whose stories are shared below prove you wrong. Their can-do spirit helped them achieve wins that included building a TA system from scratch, transforming high-volume hiring, attracting and retaining new talent, and supporting the success of people initiatives. If they can do it, you can too! 

You Can Start From Scratch

When Marcel Rütten joined PACCOR, a global packaging manufacturer, as the Global Director of Talent Acquisition & Employer Branding, the company had no system of record for recruiting. With careful planning, he used the time before SmartRecruiters went live to understand hiring practices in PACCOR’s 24 locations in 17 countries so that the company’s configuration and employer branding could be more effective. In PACCOR Builds Mature Recruiting Ecosystem in Less Than One Year, Marcel summed up the experience this way: 

[SmartRecruiters] gives recruiters and hiring managers everything they need to fill positions and track performance across channels.

 We have increased the maturity level within the whole organization so that everyone is capable and can use every available function. We have full transparency about our needs. We have a clearer picture of our target groups and what we need to say to them from an employer branding perspective. And we know what we need to budget.

Reporting on the full picture of hiring is a must for talent acquisition to have a seat at the table for talent decisions. Marcel’s thoughtful work in that first year set the stage for even greater maturity at PACCOR as the years progress.

You Can Transform High-Volume Recruiting

Frasers Group is a UK-based company that operates iconic brands such as Sports Direct, House of Fraser, Frasers, and FLANNELS. The company hires thousands of retail associates during the holiday season and throughout the year. Its previous system was outdated and not purpose-built for recruiting. Here’s what Adam Reynolds, Head of Talent Acquisition, said in Frasers Streamlines High-Volume Hiring with Automation in SmartRecruiters: 

We found it quite appealing that we could configure the [SmartRecruiters] system to suit all the different needs of what is, in essence, a sprawling estate: 22 countries, 30,000 employees, and 3,000 users of the system.

In the first year with SmartRecruiters, Frasers set a record of 20,000 new hires in one year. Adam added:

It was a game changer to have the templated job profiles, automated messages in our branding and tone of voice, and calendar integration. With the automation inside SmartRecruiters, we can move through high volumes of information from a high volume of candidates in a systematic way.

A great candidate experience is a hallmark of a strategic talent acquisition function. The automated and templated responses help Frasers maintain its reputation in a competitive hiring environment with candidates who are also likely to be customers.

You Can Improve Retention

When Ben Handyside, Director of Talent Management, joined Colliers EMEA, a global real estate services and investment management company, SmartRecruiters was already in place, but adoption had slowed since its implementation. Once he started digging into the metrics in partnership with his SmartRecruiters representative, “the lightbulbs started to go off,” he said in an interview. Over time, the data he brought to the table provoked discussions and moved the needle on behaviors that supported better hiring and ultimately improved retention. 

In conjunction with enhancements to its employer brand, Colliers experienced “a massive uplift in candidates,” Ben said in How Colliers EMEA Reduced Agency Spending with SmartRecruiters. The company began to attract talent from outside its conventional sources. The expansion of skillsets led senior executives to think differently about who Colliers hires, how they hire, and what the company could do to nurture that talent once they turned into employees.

The focus on hiring new types of talent resulted in a big win: Colliers EMEA saw a 25% year-over-year increase in retention for first-year hires. Ben’s experience sets an example for all TA leaders on how to maximize their seats at the table to achieve an overall talent-centric outcome.

You Can Support People Initiatives

Sustainability

Informa, a leading international events, digital services and academic knowledge group, puts a big focus on sustainability. To understand how the company’s credentials as a sustainable business factored into the choice to apply, Ben Wielgus, Head of Sustainability, set up specialized screening questions in SmartRecruiters. In How Informa Uses SmartRecruiters to Measure Sustainability Campaign Success, he said:

Because SmartRecruiters allows us to put the same questions to each candidate and rapidly deploy them to get results at scale, we’ve been able to get a much better understanding of how much our candidates care about sustainability, and how much of a difference it’s making in their choice to come to us.

DEI

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is another hiring topic on everyone’s minds, and CityFibre wanted to pave the way for more women and people from diverse backgrounds to work in its tech-focused roles. In CityFibre Hires for Diversity with SmartRecruiters, Richard Hutchinson, Head of Resourcing, explained the company’s data-driven approach:

We used [SmartRecruiters] Report Builder to create a DEI-focused report which helps us develop our attraction strategy, drive recruiter and hiring manager action, report on performance, and engage with our business stakeholders to present accurate and real-time insight into our DEI challenges and results.

Talent acquisition demonstrates its true value by supporting the direction in which the business needs to evolve. With accurate and actionable recruiting data, companies can make progress on even the most challenging goals.

You Can Start Today

What these leaders have in common is a desire to do the right thing: provide an exceptional candidate experience, deliver top talent to the business, and analyze the results of their efforts. They’re on a journey of continually growing their strategic leadership skills as market conditions change. 

In support of your journey, we’ve created a resource to guide you to getting—or making the most of—your seat at the table. Download the ebook today.

In the post-pandemic world, the rules of hiring fundamentally changed—along with the expectations for talent acquisition. When businesses struggled to hire during the rebound from the pandemic cutbacks, the star of talent acquisition rose from its historical position as a cost center in many organizations. Talent acquisition had its seat at the proverbial table, but when recession fears took hold, TA lost its place amidst layoffs and hiring freezes at some companies.

Talent needs to be center stage for businesses to adapt and thrive in 2023 and beyond. To do this, talent acquisition needs to maintain its seat at the table—or step up if it hasn’t already. Trends like flexible work, DEIB, and workplace automation have all made employers think differently about who and how they hire. 

A cost center that speaks in the language of speed and efficiency does not offer the strategic perspective organizations need to hire effectively amidst rapidly changing employee and candidate expectations. When talent acquisition earn a seat at the table for strategic talent decisions, businesses are more likely to reach their full potential.

According to the Josh Bersin Company, companies that leverage the right recruiting strategies are

• 5X more likely to delight customers
• 30X more likely to engage and retain employees
• 35X more likely to innovate effectively.

Leveraging the right recruiting strategies is not just the job of talent acquisition teams; it’s a job for the whole organization. 

A Seat at the Table Defined

Allyn Bailey, Executive Director of Hiring Success Services at SmartRecruiters, has spent decades at the forefront of global talent acquisition. In our latest ebook, A Seat at the Table: A Guide to Leading a Strategic Talent Acquisition Function, Allyn says,

“Having a seat at the table means not just being involved in decisions directly related to talent acquisition, it means providing input into all decisions that have a talent lens to them.”

If a talent acquisition leader wants to get a seat at the table, they must move from the perception of their function as a cost center to a strategic function. Allyn says,

 “A strategic TA leader is a trusted partner who can come to the table with information that tells business leaders what’s happening in the market, what’s realistic to assume, and how their decisions will impact the company’s ability to capture and keep talent.” 

The journey to becoming a strategic leader—someone who gets invited to meetings because it’s widely known that they have valuable information and perspective that can help the business make high-priority decisions—is varied and complex. It requires that a leader shift their mindset from being an order-taker to someone who provides data-backed insights.

Leading a strategic talent acquisition function is not always easy. Allyn asked, “If  you don’t have a seat at the table today, why not?” The reasons could be a blend of personal and organizational factors. She recommends that leaders get clear about why they want that seat and what they might do with it once they get there.  

To help leaders along this journey, we spent hours interviewing Allyn and two members of SmartRecruiters’ Hiring Success team: Dave Novak, Engagement Manager, and Jared Best, Regional Practice Leader. In those conversations, we uncovered a path for leaders to become more strategic and get the seat at the table they deserve. Our insights are condensed into the ebook  A Seat at the Table: A Guide to Leading a Strategic Talent Acquisition Function. 

Below we list highlights from key sections of the ebook:

Strategic Talent Acquisition Maturity Model

For each level shown in the maturity model above, the ebook offers example scenarios so that you can assess your company and start forming your own North Star vision. To get a real-world picture of how one organization moved to greater maturity, read The Incremental Journey to Talent Acquisition Transformation at Colliers EMEA.

Know Your Why: Reasons to Build a Strategic TA Function

The benefits of getting a seat at the table fall into three areas: to help your organization, support your team, and grow your own career. We expand on each of these areas and provide reflection activities in the ebook so that you can move ahead with inner confidence.

Know What You’re Signing Up For: Barriers to Becoming More Strategic

In our discovery conversation, Allyn Bailey said, “Leaders need to assess their organization’s ability to absorb them into the conversation.” She spoke of the time it takes for organizations to change and said, “Pay attention to the signals that you’re making traction. People will be asking smarter questions and start to repeat words that you’ve inserted into the conversation and adopting them as their own.”

The ebook lists eight common barriers with potential solutions and includes a reflection activity for your company’s situation. For inspiration, read our success story with KinCare which describes the growth of organizational trust after the implementation of SmartRecruiters.

The Path to Getting a Seat at the Table

Our Hiring Success experts have observed many organizations going through the stages of building a strategic function. We can’t emphasize enough that it’s not just a shift for the individual leader; it’s a shift for the whole organization, and it requires many conversations. This section outlines six stages that you can expect to go through.

The Building Blocks of a Strategic Talent Acquisition Function

A strategic TA leader oversees seven critical components of talent acquisition. Your company may be more invested in some than others. Here you’ll find a list of signs of under-investment and high investment. Looking at the list can help you get clear on where you need to start so that you can generate a small win and develop a plan to address larger issues.

How to Change the Narrative to Become More Strategic

Being perceived differently means talking about different things. In the case of talent acquisition, it means understanding what the business cares about and bringing valuable information to the table. “The biggest thing a leader can do is change the narrative,” said Jared Best. “Move away from talking about transactional data and focus on data that ties back to organizational objectives.” This section offers three strategies to do just that, plus a reflection activity.

People Support for Your Seat at the Table

As a strategic leader, you will need the help of not only your team but also others within the organization. Here you’ll find a list of 10 key roles on your support team and their responsibilities.

Technology Support for Your Seat at the Table

Your recruiting tech stack may or may not be optimally configured to support your strategic priorities. To help you clarify what technology concerns you may need to address, we created an 8-point technology checklist for building a strategic talent acquisition function.

We’d love to say that there’s a magic wand you can wave and have a perfectly functioning TA team that attracts and hires the best candidates, facilitates recruiter productivity, and engages hiring managers—while increasing employee retention and profits. Instead, we live in a complex reality, and we hope this guide will be one resource to help you get to where you want to go.

So you’re the head of your organization’s talent acquisition team and your CEO just implemented a hiring freeze. What’s next?

First, don’t panic. While companies typically implement a hiring freeze in response to a downturn, this doesn’t mean that a freeze doesn’t present opportunities to improve.

They enable the best organizations to streamline their corporate infrastructure by consolidating current employees and restructuring departments as needed. A hiring freeze also allows firms to reassess which parts of their business are most essential. 

Following the tips we’ve outlined below to keep productivity and team morale high, and to be as prepared as possible for the moment when hiring resumes.

1) Don’t Lose Touch with Your Pipeline

In an economic downturn, safeguarding existing assets is a top priority. For talent acquisition teams, the candidate pipeline is one such asset. What can be done to protect it then? First, don’t “ghost” the people in your (temporarily) closed recruiting pipeline.

By keeping lines of communication open, you’ll optimize your ability to ramp up hiring once the freeze is lifted. Competitors in better economic situations may try to poach your top talent, so you need to activate and implement your talent retention strategy.

Pool Talent and Source Proactively: Reach out to your talent pool and remind/inform them who you are as a company. What opportunities can they expect to have once the freeze has ended? What does your corporate culture look like? What are your company values?

Map Talent Internally and Externally: Talent mapping helps organizations optimize their talent. It involves identifying your future talent needs, assessing whether you can meet or develop those needs internally or if you’ll have to recruit externally, and developing a strategy to move your company from where you are to where you expect to grow. 

Talent redeployment is another crucial area you can invest in during a hiring freeze to mitigate layoffs, which presents its own sets of hard and soft costs. You can learn more about our Talent Redeployment Platform here. What does the term mean?

It refers to ways in which businesses identify opportunities to move talent from one role to another. Companies are increasingly turning to this brand of internal mobility and talent nurturing as they seek ways to retain productive employees, mitigate turnover, and preserve organizational knowledge and morale.

2) Review Job Descriptions and Role Attractiveness 

Examining existing job descriptions goes hand-in-hand with talent mapping. During a freeze, refresh your existing job roles and descriptions so that they more accurately reflect your organization’s needs and better speak to the interests of internal and external talent. 

3) Realign Stakeholders 

Successful companies ensure their organization is on the same page from top to bottom–stakeholders to employees. A hiring freeze presents an opportunity to discuss expectations with your stakeholders, review how well your firm is meeting those expectations, and adjust as needed.

4) Upgrade Your ATS to Enhance Productivity 

When was the last time you thoroughly assessed the effectiveness of your applicant tracking system (ATS)? Are you confident it is as effective as it could be? Maximizing the performance of your ATS is vital during a freeze. If you’re using a legacy system that may have been innovative five or ten years ago but is now outdated, this is even more important. Here are a handful of points to consider before making your next purchase: 

• Your ATS should empower you to “do more with less” through capabilities such as candidate relationship management (CRM), interview self-scheduling, employee referrals, resume parsing, and programmatic job advertising.
• Hiring is a team sport and your ATS should reflect that. Is it well-suited to collaboration with other stakeholders in your organization?
• Focus on ROI first and features second. To be a strategic business partner, TA must demonstrate that it can deliver outcomes while maintaining cost efficiency. Will an upgrade in your TA tech stack help you to do so? 

5) Innovate Your Hiring Process 

The three principles of Hiring Success are as follows:

1. Compelling Candidate Experience
2. Engaged Hiring Managers
3. Productive Recruiters

The first of these principles is especially relevant during a freeze. Providing your candidate with a high quality interview experience can separate your company from the others competing for top talent. A bad candidate experience costs you talent, credibility and revenue. Our cornerstones of a candidate-centric hiring strategy are:

1. An authentic voice and brand
2. Ease to express interest/connect
3. Speed and ownership of responses
4. Structured process and discussions

6) Model Strong Leadership

Once you’ve optimized your TA team, here are some final suggestions for navigating your hiring freeze.

Be Transparent: The unknown is often the most stressful aspect during this period. By prioritizing transparency, you help calm anxiety, boost morale, and make your employees feel valued and included during the downturn period. Transparency also helps empower your workers and provides an opportunity for you to recognize their contributions to the team while also challenging them to maximize their efforts during the freeze.

Model A Strong Work Ethic: If your team sees you respond to the freeze period with a positive attitude and a sharpened focus on your work, they’re likely to follow your example. Modeling the work ethic you want to see in your team helps optimize performance and maintain morale. 

Encourage collaboration: A hiring freeze may include cuts to your team’s budget, head count and resources. In order to minimize the pain associated with those potential cuts, think of ways to leverage the brainpower of your workers to conceptualize ways to identify and eliminate inefficiencies, streamline tasks and eliminate barriers to further success.  

Recognize your staff: While a hiring freeze may not be the time for elaborate celebrations or awards, this does not mean that you shouldn’t use the hardship stretch to remind your staff how much you value their hard work. Small gestures, individual meetings, cards or emails, or informal group activities can have a noticeable impact on morale and performance during a freeze period.  

Conclusion

Ultimately, it’s essential that managers try to identify as many opportunities as possible in a hiring freeze. That begins by protecting your recruiting pipeline and top talent in house.

By taking this a step further, and using the time to improve transparency, optimize your team’s operations and ensuring your team members feel valued, you can come out of a hiring freeze ready to resume hiring with improved morale and increased efficiency.

P.S. there’s no better time than the present to reassess your ATS. For a limited time, SmartRecruiters is offering eligible companies a below-market-rate offer for a complete and flexible talent acquisition platform. Designed to drive technological change, this stimulus package will help businesses that want to take advantage of the hiring slowdown to upgrade their ATS and reduce costs. Benefits include:

• Contract buyouts and zero transition costs
• Significant savings on technology, people, and sourcing costs
• An accelerated path to Hiring Success

Last May, SmartRecruiters organized an event to help San Francisco’s tech sector make progressive strides towards offering fair, second chances to individuals with criminal histories.

We often hear of companies expressing their interest in the benefits of open dialogue between corporations and potential employees who served time. Some of those companies are taking steps towards actively hiring them. As unemployment rates continue to hover at or below historically low percentages, it appears that some companies are finally taking action by providing more equal opportunities to help these individuals return to the workforce.

According to a survey conducted by recruitment and staffing services firm Adecco USA, 49 percent of organizations are “loosening” requirements because they are unable to find enough qualified candidates. While this trend signals a positive change in perception, a growing number of organizations are taking a more proactive approach by elevating this historically underserved minority through professional training.

Last spring, SmartRecruiters hosted the “Bridging Worlds: From Prison to Position” event, inviting formerly incarcerated individuals—also known as “returning citizens”—along with talent acquisition professionals to the company’s downtown San Francisco office. The group shared actionable insights and engaged in discussions on changing attitudes towards hiring second-chance candidates.

Throughout the evening, SmartRecruiters and its partners provided interview coaching, workshopped resumes, offered mentorship advice, and led in-depth conversations on background checks. Over 50 recruiters, human resources professionals, and representatives from local nonprofits interacted with the group of formerly incarcerated individuals, some of whom served upwards of 35-year sentences.

“It’s work like this that keeps me motivated,” said Roy Baladi, Head of Marketplace for SmartRecruiters. Alongside colleagues and SmartRecruiters’ Founder & CEO Jerome Ternynck, Baladi spearheaded discussions, fielded questions, and introduced the participating organizations at the Bridging Worlds event at SmartRecruiters’ headquarters.

The nonprofit organizations in attendance earned notoriety throughout the Bay Area and beyond for their activism in helping returning citizens find gainful employment. The Anti-Recidivism Coalition and the Center for Employment Opportunities assist formerly incarcerated individuals obtain jobs; Code Tenderloin removes barriers to securing long-term employment by providing education, opportunity, and support to participants, including those with criminal records; Defy of Northern California uses an entrepreneurship model to create career opportunities for people with criminal histories; the Southern California firm 70 Million Jobs connects candidates with criminal records to companies that offer second-chance jobs.

“Each (returning citizen) spoke with a certain softness and grace I’d never likened to someone who had spent the better part of their life confined to a jail cell,” wrote Abigail H. Scott, who works as a Customer Success Specialist at Glassdoor. She continued, “There is a strength within them that I had not been in the presence of before.”

The Bridging Worlds event, described as “an inspiring pact between recruiters and formerly incarcerated individuals,” was galvanized by Baladi & Ternynck’s experience visiting a prison in 2018. During their stay, they forged strong bonds with the inmates. “I learned how to get back in touch with my own humanity,” said Baladi. 

This experience soon incited an idea: bridge the gap between intent and action by providing real second chances for returning citizens. At its core, the Bridging Worlds event encouraged more open dialogue between people who served time and companies, especially at the executive level. 

In certain US cities, moving the needle towards greater equality for formerly incarcerated individuals requires legal reinforcement. Known as The Fair Chance Ordinance (FCO), this law grants individuals with criminal histories equal opportunity for employment and imposes certain restrictions on employer inquiries into candidates’ criminal records.

Currently, more than 150 cities and counties and 35 states have adopted some form of fair chance legislation. The success of Fair Chance Ordinances in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York stems from FCO requirements on employers to complete a detailed analysis of why, if a candidate is rejected due to criminal history, their dismissal relates to their specific convictions. For example, a candidate with a DUI on their record wouldn’t necessarily be disqualified from working in a call center, but might be rejected for a position as a truck driver.

Before the FCO was enacted in San Francisco in 2014, “a company wasn’t required to explain its rationale for rejecting someone with a criminal record,” said Ian Harriman, Sales Manager at Checkr, a San Francisco firm that aggressively hires candidates with criminal histories. Now, if a company is suspected of discrimination due to a candidate’s criminal history, the FCO provides legal recourse—for candidates and businesses. 

“A candidate can ask to see documentation of the decision,” said Harriman, “to get a sense if the company was acting in bad faith.” If so, watchdog groups like the Human Rights Commission or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission can intervene.

Harriman suspects companies might be wary of hiring persons with criminal histories for fear of negligent hiring lawsuits. Previously, businesses were liable for any damages caused by the actions of an employee where it could be proven a hiring manager knew they were a “risk”. However, companies operating in cities with fair chance or “ban the box” laws can now defend themselves against such allegations by citing legal precedence. In this way, the FCO was designed not only to assist candidates with criminal histories find jobs, but to protect—and encourage—employers to hire them without fear of negligence suits.

However, legislation cannot be the only motivator for companies. Harriman urges employees to engage with their human resources teams to discuss policies and attitudes around hiring returning citizens. “The most impact comes when people get hired,” and continue to seek out this underserved minority.

In short: The more success stories we hear about individuals with criminal histories securing jobs and finding success in their positions, the easier it will be for others to follow.

To conclude SmartRecruiters’ Bridging Worlds event, all returning citizens in attendance were invited to apply for three job openings—Customer Support Representative, Influencer Marketing Manager, and Product Operations Specialist. With the promise of interview opportunities to come, this was a welcome step towards building a bridge that connects individuals with criminal histories to forward-thinking organizations.

“The more people understand the humanity of others,” said Harriman, “the more likely they are to hire them.”

The glass-ceiling-shattering law will forcibly move the needle towards greater gender parity by 2021, but what’s stopping the change from happening at companies today?

Thanks to new legislation signed into effect on Sunday by Governor Jerry Brown, California is now the first state in the country to mandate women on company boards. The law, known as SB 826, will require all publicly-held companies in California to have a minimum of one female director by 2019.

By 2021, the minimum number will increase to two or three female directors depending on the size of the board.

This pioneering decision emerges during a charged political climate in the US, particularly on the heels of of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s sexual assault allegations and the rapid momentum of the #MeToo movement across the country. Brown acknowledged this current state of affairs in a memo accompanying the new law, saying, “Recent events in Washington, DC—and beyond—make it crystal clear that many are not getting the message” about equal treatment of women.

Many in-state organizations are likely taking stock of their gender parity initiatives in the wake of this new legislation, which carries fines between $100,000 and $300,000 per violation. California-based companies have until December 2019 to comply, but equality activists are scratching their heads as to why—in the midst of the social justice movements sweeping the US—companies are just now reacting to the lack of female leadership at major corporations.

Of the 445 publicly-held companies headquartered in California listed on the Russell 3000 Index, more than one quarter (26.1 percent) had zero female board members in 2017. California, on average, has 1.65 female members per corporate board whereas the US as a whole averages 1.75 female members.

These discrepancies have raised concerns in recent years over the lack of female representation in sectors like the tech industry, with a major hub located in California’s Silicon Valley. According to the most recent diversity reports from SV’s biggest tech firms, women account for 24.5 percent of technical employees at Google, 23 percent at Apple, and 22 percent at Facebook.

These numbers are growing slowly, but not nearly fast enough for change advocates like California Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson, who authored SB 826, arguing that “gender diversity on corporate boards is associated with increased profitability, performance, governance, innovation, and opportunity.”

A number of European countries have already acknowledged the benefits of more female leadership roles. Norway lead the charge in 2008 by requiring companies to have at least 40 percent female directors or face possible dissolution. In the years that followed, France, Italy, Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands were among the dozens of countries that enforced similar quotas ranging between 30 and 40 percent female representation at the corporate level.

With the fifth largest economy in the world, and home to 53 companies on the Fortune 500 list, the Golden State is in a chief position to spearhead efforts of corporate board diversity in the US.

But why is the threat of financial penalties the strongest motivator for generating this change when the merits of female workers are well known? Not only are women often more qualified for leadership roles than their male counterparts, they often outperform their male colleagues over time because they continue to learn and develop their skills.

What’s more, a study from MIT found that evenly-split, gender-mixed teams brought “a greater spread of experience, which could add to the collective knowledge of a group of office workers and make the unit perform more effectively,” affecting everything from office morale to the company’s bottom line.

While the passing of SB 826 may present challenges for organizations that currently lack diverse hiring policies, here are some actionable tips that all HR and TA professionals should consider as more companies reevaluate their diversity and inclusion efforts.

• Get comfortable discussing difficult topics. Conversations around D&I are rife with uncomfortable truths, but the first step to implementing real change is approaching these conversations in an open and honest way.
• Identify what doesn’t work. Bärí Williams, legal counsel for companies like Marqeta, StubHub, and Facebook, argues that companies looking to improve their company diversity and inclusion should begin by asking the simple question: “How can we do better?”
• Examine your employer branding. Think about how your company’s employer branding also encompasses your impact on customers, employees, and society at large. It’s equally important to consider your organization’s candidate-facing image, from the company website to the tone of its messaging, the types of photos used on social media channels, and the language used in job descriptions.
• Reach out to underserved or underrepresented minorities. Proactively seeking out these talent pools gives companies a measurable advantage over others that exclude them. According to Greenhouse Senior Recruiter Ariana Moon, “We saw a huge impact on our pipeline once we began listing jobs on diversity recruiting sites such as NAACP and Ebony.” She continues, “When thinking about partnerships, align with different organizations that are key to building pools of diverse talent.”
• Reduce bias in the hiring process. One of the biggest D&I issues tackled by AI is recruiter bias. AI solutions like SmartRecruiters’ SmartAssistant automate the candidate screening process, evaluating applicants based on skills, allowing you to make better and faster hires backed by measurable data.
• Create a truly inclusive company culture. None of the efforts outlined above will work unless your company embraces and celebrates different cultures and values. Making employees feel valued and giving them a sense of belonging allows them to thrive at your organization, and directly affects your employer branding.

Although California’s recent legislation represents a major step towards greater gender diversity in the boardroom, whether or not this new law will be challenged in court remains to be seen. In the meantime, however, it appears promising for women everywhere, offering them an opportunity to step into more executive roles and the chance to undo the male definition of leadership that has dominated the corporate world for generations.

Jenny Jung coaches leaders on how to be better at their jobs through peer-based mentor groups—topped with a healthy dollop of self-awareness.

The tech industry has an intimate relationship with failure. With figures estimating that 70 percent of all startups collapse, and the phrase “fail fast” now an established mantra, executives must have the skills to negotiate such choppy waters, motivate their crews, and “work under constant pressure to ship”.

As it happens, failure is where Jenny Jung’s job begins. “Many leaders find it very hard to identify a safe space inside their organization where they can offload or speak about challenges that they’re facing at work with people who truly understand ,” says Jung. Having worked with fast-growing businesses for the past decade, most recently as EyeEm’s VP of People & Operations, Portfolio Manager at Lakestar, and COO of Factory, Jung recognized a lack of peer support at the executive level. “I realized that, by nature, some leadership and executive roles are highly isolated,” she says. “Many don’t have any true peers.”

Inspired by her experience with US-based coaching firm Reboot, Jung teamed up with her colleagues Anna Löw and Jenny Buch in Spring 2018 to launch MindTheLeader, a consultancy focused on leadership development through peer coaching programs and one-on-one sessions, whether for founders, HR leaders, or new/first-time managers.

We caught up with Jenny ahead of her session at Hiring Success Berlin to find out more about why MindTheLeader focuses on startup leadership, and the one thing executives can do to be better at their jobs today.

What are you most looking forward to at Hiring Success?

Fresh faces and new people are always inspiring. Even if you spend two days at an event talking with strangers about things you’re passionate about, you always learn something or make some progress. I’m also very much looking forward to meeting people I should have been catching up with for months.

Why is leadership at the startup level so crucial for business success?

It’s a dramatically underserved area, and having been on the operational side many times, I’ve seen companies fail because they wouldn’t invest in—or wouldn’t pay attention to— aligning around basic leadership principles and forming managerial skills without mixing the two up.

Both through our group sessions and in my individual consulting work, I stumbled upon the same questions, many of which are basic managerial questions, like how do I navigate this tricky conversation? How do I give this feedback in a way that is impactful without being offensive or demotivating? How do I help somebody on my team to grow into a new position? Why is it OK if the earliest employees leave after two years?

These are cyclical problems in startup growth, and they’re very basic human issues that can be very easily addressed if you just take the time and pay attention.

What sort of training do you offer at MindTheLeader?

It depends on the program. In our upcoming New Manager program we train basic management skills; in the HR program, the participants decide which topics they want to focus on (i.e. remote work, psychological safety for employees, dealing with co-founder conflicts).

What all programs have in common is that we teach basic peer-coaching skills rooted in a systemic-constructivist perspective to our participants, and then over time we, as facilitators, become supervisors as they coach each other. The methodology has a relatively low barrier of entry.

How is the leadership coaching at MindTheLeader unique?

Our secret sauce is the mix between the introspective work provoking self-awareness, the hands-on tools we train, and the safe space we offer to help leaders cope with—and grow from—their challenges.

I think we bring our own experiences working in tech that go beyond programs that simply offer training. We also don’t pressure anyone to speak in our group sessions. If you don’t want to talk you don’t have to—you can just do that work for yourself.

Above all, we do the hands-on work on organizational development, and we’re well-equipped to do so. We have enough credibility in the market to say hey, “we know our shit.”

What is one thing leaders can do today to make them better at their jobs?

I think self-awareness and the openness to information coming from sources that are dramatically different from your own perspective are the key skills that it takes to be a good leader. By awareness, I mean taking time to self-reflect, uncover behavioral and thought patterns, allow yourself to also be outside of the leadership role, and, most importantly, you’re still a human being. Stop every once in a while and just ask yourself how you are.

Invention and innovation are at the heart of our economy and our democratic society. They’re one of the drivers of the American Dream (flagging as it might be), catapulting lives, changing businesses and shaping our national image. America was founded on a certain brazenness and ingenuity. So we should be good at this, right? Innovation gets a lot of lip service, but success remains stubbornly out of reach for many among even our best and brightest companies.

In my work studying how consumer research can improve enterprises’ innovation processes and improve their chances of success, I’ve come across innovation management research that focuses on how companies can succeed by making their businesses innovation ready.

In 2007 Uri Neren, Innovators International, was commissioned by The Mayo Clinic to research the best practices of companies that most often succeed at innovation. His challenge was to build a curriculum for improving Mayo’s own innovation process. Along the way, it became much more than that.

After working with Mayo, Neren continued his research, working with consultants, CTOs, R&D folks, social scientists, innovation experts and economists to refine his findings and arrive at 27 commonalities among organizations that get great results. In this article, I’ll focus on the top five that serve as a guide to Neren’s broader findings.

As companies around the world already know, innovation is an elusive goal. Nuren believes that’s because most organizations are programmed to standardize their practices. They value predictability and control, letting those benefits elbow out innovation. So how do successful companies avoid the predictability trap? According to Neren, you’ve got to “structure your organization to allow innovation to flow through it.”

During my interview with Neren, he described the five business practices that help make innovation repeatable and reliable:

Belief Systems

Getting everyone on the same page is a day-one activity. And for business, defining innovation is the place to start. We all think of innovation in a slightly different way. Through his research, Neren established a two-part benchmark definition:

• Innovation is “focused on breakthrough, transformative, far end of the spectrum innovation as opposed to the incremental” types of change
• Innovation is engaged in the “bigger picture, issues outside your walls, creating human behavior change.”

From here, each company needs to define innovation to fit their own mission and goals. The definition must be understood by the entire organization. That was the case at Medtronic, where even a maintenance worker purportedly answered the question “What do you do?” with the simple response, “I save lives.” Companies where the mission was bigger than profit inspired passion for and deep knowledge about the company culture throughout the employee ranks, and allowed those organizations to grow without needing top management in on every decision.

In addition to agreeing on how to define innovation and on what it means to your company’s mission, you need to change your team’s perspective, shifting from thinking about innovation as a “risky endeavor” to it being an exercise in risk management. In short: Innovation is something to be managed, not something to simply throw money at.

Structure Equals Commitment

Four findings stand out for how to structure a repeatable, reliable innovation process.

• Commit to the percentage of growth that the business expects from innovation and stick to it. Structure this commitment to be the catalyst for growing your top line.
• “Obsolete yourself.” Reward engineers and R&D for building, designing, or concepting the next innovation that will act to “obsolete” one of your products or processes before the competition does it for you.
• Create a set of “agreed to metrics, and a decision process by which products or services will be funded or killed.”
• Incorporate CEO ownership. Innovation teams should report to the CEO or COO and not just for the short term.

Johnson Controls made the boldest structural move Neren has seen by a public company. “They publicly announced that they would grow by 50% in one year, and they did it.  They knew that organic growth would take care of a portion of this, that expansion in Asia another percentage, and they left the remainder to a new innovation team that looked not only for new technologies but for new business models that would make their old models obsolete – before the competition could do it to them.“

Process that Leans on Research

Most innovation processes start with discovery, move to invention, followed by improvement, socialization within the company, and then go to market. Teams tend to spend most of their time in the invention stage, developing great solutions. No wonder; it’s a fun and exciting area. Instead, substantial time must be spent in the discovery phase, at the front end, understanding the behavior and drivers of your intended audience and the problem you are trying to solve. Unless you design a really solid consumer research phase as a foundation, you won’t really understand the question. This also helps to keep the project more “objective and follows Einstein’s philosophy and Kettering’s quote ‘A problem well-stated is a problem half solved’.”

Who’s done it right? Wine and spirits maker Pernod Ricard has an especially robust Market Opportunity discovery process and structure in their Breakthrough Innovation Group led by Alain Dufosse.

Talent Encouraged and Rewarded

“89% of CEOs say that talent acquisition and management will determine the innovation outcome.” But Neren’s research doesn’t show that to be true. It’s more important to put the right people with the right skills in the right spots with the right team. Then get out of the way. “All people will generate new and successful ideas given the chance.” Much has been written about the prescribed mental free time that some companies give their employees. And it’s true, according to Neren’s work: Simply assigning innovation to employee scorecards, then rewarding and recognizing them is the opportunity and motivation employees are naturally geared for. Daniel Pink says that “the secret to high performance isn’t rewards and punishment but that unseen intrinsic drive, the drive to do things for their own sake, the drive to do things because they matter.”

Connected Culture

Neren admits that this last section — culture — is a hard one to study. But the one thing that keeps showing up is that innovation success is not dependent on whether the company culture is open to new ideas or requires strict work and substantiation for potential innovations. What matters most is that the culture is connected, so that people have access to one another and their ideas, and that all the contributing parties are recognized and rewarded. 3M had a rule that only one scientist’s name could be listed on a patent. As a result, the scientists were less likely to share information and work as a team to develop ideas and solutions. So 3M changed the rules to allow all the contributors’ names on the patent and scientists started sharing and generating ideas. It’s essential that individuals and teams have access to what and whom they need.

Each one of these sections, Neren says, is like the tip of an iceberg. There’s a wealth of information, insights and diversity that ladder up to these 5 practices.

At the end of our conversation I asked Neren what critics ask most often. He said that many say “innovation is harder than this.” And he agrees. It takes true dedication and the right leadership. Others say that you can’t structure innovation because the structure will kill it. But after years of study, he disagrees with that. Over hundreds of interviews and studies these are the practice areas that have proven to be the foundation for successful innovation. They are, of course, adapted and executed in many different ways to be consistent with company goals.

Lastly, I asked about the point at which innovation most often fails. His answer? Execution. Products or ideas often aren’t executed well because the originators of the idea were not as involved along the process as they should be. The inventors should be involved all the way to the “to market phase”, not simply running a process but representing the soul of the product.

And that speaks to my — and every — entrepreneurial heart.

This article was written by Mary Meehan from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, your workspace to find and hire great people.

Nancy Altobello is a big fan of millennials.

Altobello, Vice Chair of Talent at EY, shared her thoughts on the changing global professional landscape and how companies can attract and nourish top talent–particularly among recent college graduates–at Universum’s Employer Branding Conference this morning in New York.

Talent, and recruiting it, aren’t just on the minds of campus reps and college seniors, says Altobello, noting that in a world where everything is increasingly more complex, talented, skilled labor is more important than ever before–and there’s less of it.

“Talent is now being viewed as an important resources by executives and by boards,” Altobello told Forbes. ”The dichotomy of talent being more important and less available has invented an executive issue.”

Below are Altobello’s observations about how to recruit and hang onto top-notch millennial employees.

1. They’re not all running for the door–if you can keep them interested. 

Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says that millennials only tend to stay in each job an average of 18 months. Altobello says this doesn’t have to be the case.

“We’re starting to hear from a lot of people who’ve had two jobs in three years and want to stay somewhere,” she says. “But the work has to be interesting, they don’t want to keep doing the same thing.”

2. When it comes to compensation, cash is still king.

In this way millennials are just like professionals at every other stage of their careers; the best way to attract and keep the best and brightest is to pay them well.

 3. To younger professionals, flexibility is almost as important as salary.

Altobello says in this context flexibility means millennials want choices about how to deliver a job well done. With the understanding that deadlines and client needs must always be met, they want options about where and when they work–and they want their managers clearly on board.

“People are looking for approval around flexibility.”

 4. Millennials want to be regularly evaluated and advance quickly–but they’ll do the work to get there.

It’s a regular drumbeat about millennials: They want to be constantly told how they’re doing and see the payoff.

Altobello says managers need to understand that this is a population accustomed to “quick knowledge”–they grew up contacting their parents over cell phones with a single question, or consulting Google–and to view this as an opportunity. A yearly performance review is simply not the right approach.

“They want the trophies,” says Altobello, “but they’re very willing to earn them.”

5. On-the-job training is essential. 

According to an annual survey by Accenture of soon-to-graduate college seniors and graduates of the classes of 2012 and 2013, 80% of 2014 graduates expect to be formally trained by their first employer, but 52% of professionals who graduated from college within the past two years say they received no training in their first job.

Altobello says the best way to meet your company’s demand for skilled labor is to invest in developing current employees.

“So many skills are teachable and coachable. Most important is on-the-job training. Move them fast through a lot of experiences.”

Follow me on Twitter @KathrynDill. This article was written by Kathryn Dill from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, your workspace to find and hire great people.

The typical job ad is a horrifying anti-marketing message to the talent community. When you read a job ad, you should immediately get a sense for why a smart person would want the job. The job ad should focus less on what the Selected Candidate Must Possess, and more on answering the question “What’s so great about our company, and about this job?”

We market to customers. It’s time for us to apply a marketing mindset to the recruiting side of our business, too. If we don’t, we’re encouraging the sparkiest and most-valuable people who read our job ad to skip it and go on with their lives. What talented person with normal self-esteem wants to read 1000 words of corporate drivel that drone on and on about what the perfect candidate requires? That’s putting the marketing cart ahead of the horse. If we remember that the best job candidates — the kind we’re marketing to, if we care about talent in our organizations — won’t keep reading a job ad that turns them off in its first few lines.

If the whole focus of the ad is on the job requirements, you’re artificially depressing the caliber of the candidates who’ll respond to it.

It’s easy these days for a job-seeker to read a typical job ad and have the reaction “The people who wrote this job ad are high on their own exhaust fumes. Why would I want to grovel to convince them I have something valuable to offer?”

The more talent-repelling your job ad is, the lower the quality of candidate you can expect to respond to it. When I say ‘lower the quality,’ I’m talking about marketability. The more in-demand a job-seeker’s skills and experience are, the less he or she needs to spend hours filling out tedious forms in a corporate or institutional Black Hole (also known as an Applicant Tracking System). Here are ten easy tweaks that will dramatically increase the quality of responses your job ads get. Why  not try a few of them with your very next job opening?

Tell Us Who You Are

We need to know where the organization came from — is it a new spinoff of a larger company we know, or is it a joint venture between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and NASCAR, or what? Give us the backstory. “Massive Boring Industries is a leader in plastic extrusion” might be great branding for potential investors, who are going to do lots of their own digging if they’re smart before they put a dime into anything.

For job-seekers, you have to bring your branding to ground level and tell us what the company does and why anyone would care. If you yourself don’t know why you do what you do apart from the fact that you’re already doing it, that’s a vision-and-strategy problem that needs to be solved before you hire anyone new.

Lose the Zombie Voice

We don’t have to talk down to our job applicants in zombie-language job ads that read like government manuals: “You will performs tasks and duties in accordance with the Central Task and Duty Allocation Procedure outlined in blah blah blah.” There’s no reason for that kind of language ever to appear in a job ad. Its only effect will be drive anyone with a pulse away from your job ads and your organization.

Speak To Us Directly

We don’t speak to our customers in the third person, a la “The Appropriate Customer at 7-11 is a person with the following qualities.” We don’t specify what our customers must have. If they have a need for the stuff we sell and they have money, they’re perfect customers for us. Get any third-person language out of your job ads, too. The most common one is “The Selected Candidate will possess….” That’s insulting. It’s like you’re saying to the reader of your job ad, “This stuff we’re talking about is the stuff the Selected Candidate will have  — not YOUR sorry ass.”

Nuke The Bullets and Tell a Story

Bullet points are the opposite of conversation. They don’t tell a story. Use your job-ad real estate to tell us what the job is about, instead. Tell us the story of the job, like this:

Acme Explosives has just received clearance to ship our modular dynamite sticks through UPS and the Postal Service, and our e-commerce business is exploding! We need an E-Commerce Operations Manager to run interference between Marketing (who manages our website) and Production (who make the stick dynamite) to keep our online business running smoothly, and growing. If you love the back end of an ecommerce site and working with Marketing to merchandise and promote our online offerings to customers around the world, this could be a great spot for you and the next place to grow your career. 

How Do I Fit In?

Use a sentence in your job to explain how the open position fits into the overall organization. Here’s an example featuring the E-Commerce Operations Manager at Acme Explosives:

In this role you’ll report to the VP of Operations, Don Drysdale, who reports to our CEO Chuck Jones. You’ll work closely with our Marketing, Production and Inventory teams. 

A sharp job-seeker is going to read those two sentences and jump on LinkedIn to see who Don and Chuck are and where they’ve been. The more we can tell job-seekers about who they’d be working with in the job, the more appealing your ad (and your opportunity) will be to the people who can help you most.

What’s Fun About The Role?

You’ve got to tell the job-seeking community (made up of every working person, let’s be honest) why this job would be fun and enriching for them. If you can’t explain why a person would grow his or her flame in the job, then you’re saying “Come for the money,” except the money is never enough. If you’ve got anybody on your payroll who is doing it for the money, you’re shooting too low in the talent-acquisition process. Here are two sentences that give a prospective Acme Explosives E-Commerce Operations Manager a reason to apply:

One of your first priorities will be to look at our site’s usability to make whatever changes will make the buying experience more pleasant. You’ll come to our CustomerSlam 2014 global conference in San Francisco and meet our biggest customers. You’ll be the principal voice for e-commerce inside our company, and right in the middle of our strategic planning conversation.

Direct Us To A Person

If you’re going to take the approach I’m talking about here and that we teach, called Recruiting With a Human Voice, you’ve got to give job-seekers an alternative to the soul-crushing Black Hole recruiting portal. To put a toe in the water, take one job ad and try this new approach for that opening. Use a human voice in the ad, and take the other suggestions we’ve listed here. In that job ad, use a human being’s name and email address rather than a sterile website address.

Whomever has the least risk aversion on your HR team is the perfect person for the assignment! Let job-seekers write to your designated Talent Liaison rather than pitching resumes into the void. Watch the level of engagement and quality of response zoom up!

Give Us An Assignment

If you’re worried about your Talent Liaison getting crushed with resumes, don’t panic. Give the talent community an assignment to fulfill, right in the job ad. Ask them to send you a Human-Voiced Resume and a 300-word essay on a topic you choose. Choose a topic that will allow the best candidates to show you in a few sentences why they should be high on your interview list. Sad to say, most job-seekers will respond to your ad without completing the assignment. That’s an automatic “no thanks,” so your Talent Liaison is unlikely to work any harder using this process than he or she did before.

Since you need candidates eventually to get into the Black Hole database if you’re going to interview them, you can ask only the folks you interview to fill out those forms, once they have a reason to expend the energy.

Here’s the assignment that appeared in the Acme Explosives E-Commerce Operations Manager job ad:

If this sounds like a good fit for you, send us a 300-word reply that explains why this job and your background are a great match. Tell us how you’d approach the role and how Acme could support you best in building an e-commerce operation to support our global customer base. Send your reply plus your Human-Voiced Resume to Declan McManus at declanm@acmeexplosivesizdabomb.com.

Tell Us Why You Need Us

Lastly, save a line in your job ad to tell the brilliant, creative, funny, energized and passionate people who are evaluating you as an employer what their presence would do for you. Most job ads have a voice embedded in them that makes a job-seeker feel like the company thinks it’d be doing him a favor by interviewing him. Why would we ever do that? We need our employees. They make our engine go. They delight our customers and our shareholders and frustrate our competitors. Your employees are your company.

There is no shareholder value, no new product pipeline, no accounts receivable, nothing of any value without them, just a pile of PCs and boring beige cubicle walls.

Tell us in the job ad why you need us, like this:

“We’re excited about our e-commerce opportunity and excited to meet the person who will take us a big step up in our operation. If that’s you, we can’t wait to meet you!”

Like Liz Ryan’s worldview? Follow her on Twitter (@humanworkplace)! Send Liz a LinkedIn invitation at liz@humanworkplace.com. 

This article was written by Liz Ryan from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Learn more about SmartRecruiters, the only platform managers and candidates love.