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.

A well-crafted job description helps job seekers see themselves in the role, determine if they have the right skills to perform, and indicates what skills they might develop on the job. By taking time to craft skills-based job descriptions, you widen talent pools, attract more diverse candidates, and increase hiring velocity. It’s one of the first steps on your hiring for skills journey.

Follow these guidelines and view the example to get started.

Re-examine each part of your existing job descriptions 

As you evaluate job descriptions through the lens of skills, keep these questions in mind:

• What skills does the job require, which do they need to have on day one, and which skills can they acquire over time?
• Are there components that imply a bias towards a pedigree or specific educational/work experiences that aren’t necessary to excel at the job? 
• Do the requirements align with the job’s required competencies? 

Components of the Job Description

Job Description

• Outline how specific skills will be used in the role and communicate its business impact. Include a breakdown of daily and weekly job duties and describe the types of projects the role covers. Candidates empowered with this information can assess whether their skill set matches the competencies required.
• Frame the role in positive, general terms that don’t imply biases toward specific age ranges or educational backgrounds. 
• Indicate the benefits an employee will receive from working in the role. This might include the opportunity to build new skills or contribute to a compelling company mission.

Company Description

• In addition to a description of what your company does, articulate your company’s approach to career development and list behavioral values that guide how work gets done.

Required Qualifications 

• Include the skills a candidate will need to show up and be successful on day one. This includes not only technical skills but also behavioral skills such as communication, persuasion, adaptability, etc.
• Be specific about competencies/skills required that are not educational-degree or experience level specific. This reduces the chance of applicants having to guess if they’re a good fit before they begin the application and interview process. 
• Is a certification or form of education (e.g., college major) necessary for this role? Unless the position requires specific science/math knowledge only transferable via a particular degree, don’t limit your job opportunities to specific majors.
• List other ways the candidate could have acquired the skills and knowledge you need without having a degree or certification. This avoids closing the talent pool to only members of specific economic/academic backgrounds and ensures compliance in some countries.
• If the role requires knowledge of certain software or tools, list them one by one.

Preferred Qualifications

• Include the skills that would be nice to have, such as additional education, areas of expertise, or leadership skills. This section allows you to attract your ideal candidate while not limiting your reach by making the job description so specific that it turns away candidates who meet the required qualifications.

Additional Information

Include the compliance statements standard in your region. These may include:

• Equal Employment Opportunity Statement
• Fair Chance Ordinance (FCO)
• Candidate Data Privacy Notice 

Example Job Description

The following job description may or may not be similar to how your organization currently writes job descriptions. The purpose of this example is to demonstrate how you can weave skills into the qualifications section of the job description without having to make a separate list of skills. By tying each job duty to the skills required to carry it out, you give candidates the opportunity to self-assess their current skillset and imagine themselves in the role. 

Skills-based hiring does not stop at the job description. Writing the job description in this way becomes a baseline for how you evaluate the candidate. For each skill in your list, consider how you will evaluate it. For example, to evaluate program design skills, you could ask a behavioral question such as, “Tell me about a program you designed and implemented.” 

A well-designed hiring process with multiple interviewers will have predetermined skill-based questions for each interviewer. This way, questions don’t get repeated and you can put together a picture of the whole candidate as a team.

Position Title: Customer Service Manager

Skills-based verbiage in bold

Job Description

The Customer Service Manager is responsible for ensuring the satisfaction of our customers. This position will report to our Managing Director, and keep them up to date on activities within the Customer Service department. In this job, you will supervise the daily operations of the customer service representatives, create a reliable customer loyalty program, and manage the relationships with customers, including handling customer queries and complaints. You will get the opportunity to build relationships with our valued customers, make an impact on our contract renewal rate, and foster team spirit among a group of dedicated employees.

Indicates the benefits an employee will receive from working in the role.

Company Description

The Fuller Organization is a company rooted in cleaning values. The organization founded in 1875 helps customers achieve high levels of cleanliness at a reasonable cost.  We pride ourselves on our customer relationships and strong customer loyalty. Working with the Fuller team is exciting, fast-paced, and will reward you with the knowledge that your work contributes to peace of mind and environments that meet high standards of hygiene.  At Fuller, we value the growth and development of every team member.  Our core value “Thrive together” means that we learn from each other and grow from it. We believe at Fuller you will not only find a great place to work, but also a great place to grow, learn new skills, and develop your career. 

Articulates the company’s approach to career development and lists behavioral values that guide how work gets done.

Qualifications

• To manage a time of five customer service representatives, you’ll need skills in leadership and strong coaching skills.
• A new customer loyalty program is a key initiative for our business. You’ll rely on project management and program design skills to design and implement this core program.
• Ability to collaborate cross-functionally is essential to this role as you will be communicating with stakeholders across the marketing and services teams to execute the customer loyalty program and communicate results to business teams on an ongoing basis. Your skills in survey development and analysis with help you contribute to our team’s continuous improvement.
• Your skills in customer interaction, problem-solving, negotiation, and communication will help us deliver unparalleled service that keeps our customers coming back.
• You are a fast learner with new systems and have demonstrable skills with word processing software, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Includes the skills a candidate will need to show up and be successful on day one.

Lists required tools/software

Avoids listing educational requirements or years of required experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Two or more years of experience managing teams in a customer service environment.
• Experience in the service industry

Includes nice-to-haves

Additional Information

This is a full-time, salaried role that covers a Monday-Friday day shift. We offer health, vision, dental, life, and disability insurance, 401(k) matching, an employee assistance program, parental leave, and paid time off.

The Company provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type, without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

Includes useful details about the job, benefits information, and compliance statements

Learn how to hire for skills

To learn how to build skills-based hiring into every aspect of your TA process, download our ebook, A Practical Guide on Hiring for Skills

Whether you’re going through budget cuts or scaling up, you’re probably being asked to do more with less. To make money, your company needs people, and your ATS is essential to getting the right people in the right roles faster. 

The right applicant tracking system properly configured, can save money by increasing recruiter productivity, employee retention, compliance, and speed to hire. Let’s look at all the ways an enterprise-grade ATS can save your company money while making better hires.

1. Automate interview scheduling. Interview scheduling can take up a vast amount of time for recruiters and recruiting coordinators. With SmartRecruiters’ automated scheduling system, food delivery and grocery store business Wolt kept the same number of recruiting coordinators while scaling from 1000 to 6000 employees in just three years.
2. Automate candidate screening. Text messaging chatbots allow you to reach more candidates, screen them all quickly, and schedule interviews without even making a phone call. It can even be done on outdated phones: Anglo American, a mining company, processed 12,500 applications in less than an hour with a text messaging system built for non-internet-enabled phones.
3. Streamline hiring processes. Scorecard hiring brings transparency to the hiring process, allowing teams to make better hiring decisions with a consistent evaluation strategy that covers desired skills, behaviors, and competencies. Increasing retention by using a system that helps you make better hires saves your company money with reduced recruiting costs later on.
4. Improve reporting relevancy: How efficient are your processes? Where are you losing candidates? With role-level drillable dashboards and export to BI tools, you can pinpoint exactly where your hiring process is breaking down and take steps to mitigate roadblocks. Wolt kept its leaders up-to-date by integrating TA analytics into its business intelligence tool. Did we mention that smart volume hiring helped Wolt get acquired by DoorDash?
5. Streamline offers: Your ATS should allow you to make same-day offers that can be signed digitally. With easily configurable offer letters in SmartRecruiters, you won’t lose candidates before they get another offer — and you won’t waste resources looking for another person to fill the vacancy left by the one who got away.
6. Automate consent and candidate data retention. Non-compliance can be costly, so you must ensure that candidates consent to each type of interaction. Additionally, your system should be configured to automatically handle candidate data retention as required by law in your local jurisdiction to minimize the risk of non-compliance.
7. Empower internal mobility and referrals. An ATS with an internal jobs portal that simplifies employee job search and referrals improves your employee experience, increases retention, and boosts morale with referral bonuses. After just three months with SmartRecruiters Employee Portal, telecommunications company CityFibre filled 40% of its positions with referrals and internal hires. 
8. Advertise in the right places.  The old adage about advertising, “I know that half of my money is wasted, but I don’t know which half” is rendered obsolete with the automated ad spend adjustments in a modern ATS. With SmartJobs, you can manage all your job board contracts all in one view and optimize spending in real-time.  
9. Amplify your employer brand. Employer branding and a careers page may require some upfront investment, but this is the place where spending a little can save you a lot. Candidates can self-select and get inspired by your mission and growth opportunities. For Aspen Skiing Company, better job visibility on a central careers site resulted in a 24% reduction in recruitment marketing spend.
10. Streamline your recruiting tech stack. Fees add up and people waste time chasing reports from system to system. By bringing a CRM, recruiting, onboarding, internal mobility, and referrals all under one roof, you get analytics in one place and reduce the IT burden.
11. Integrate with time and money-saving tools. Perhaps your ATS can’t do everything, but it can make it easier for you by integrating with tools that bring you time and money savings. Background checks, reference checking, and AI-powered sourcing are just a few of the solutions in your recruiting tech stack that promote efficiency and time savings when integrated into your ATS.

As we’ve shown, an applicant tracking system impacts the amount of time recruiters, hiring managers, recruiting coordinators, legal, and IT staff spend on getting the right people in the door – and that time is money.

For a deep dive into how money in multiple ways across your talent acquisition function, download our Guide to Evaluating the Business Value of a Talent Acquisition Platform.

In addition to more details the 11 items listed here, you’ll get information on 5 business value drivers for talent acquisition and 2 checklists to help your organization prioritize its TA platform search. Get in touch with us today and see how we can help save your company time and money by creating a more efficient talent acquisition process. 

Table of Contents

• The Three Metrics of Hiring Success
• Candidate Pipeline
• Hiring Plan Dashboard
• Report Builder
• Quarterly & Yearly Hiring Metrics
• Conclusion

One of the coolest parts about being a recruiter at SmartRecruiters is that not only am I personally pretty much on brand, all the time – I am, after all, a ‘smart recruiter,’ but more importantly, recruiting here is so much more than a cost center.

It’s at the core of everything we do as a business. We believe that Hiring Success and business success are inexorably intertwined. But at a company like SmartRecruiters, connecting people with jobs at scale is more than just our business model. It’s our bottom line.

Our mantra here at SmartRecruiters is “you are who you hire.” It’s probably a bit of a cliche to say that a company is only as good as the people working there, but all I know is, for recruiters, the ability to attract and develop the best talent possible makes our jobs a whole lot easier. 

At SmartRecruiters, I’ve been lucky enough to partner with our amazing Hiring Success team as we build our brand – and bandwidth – all over the world. That means scaling up our internal Hiring Success teams so that our people can scale at the same rate as our platform, and that we have the right talent in the right roles at the right time, all the time. At no time is that easy, but thanks to Hiring Success, we’ve proven the age old adage that recruiting is not, in fact, rocket science. 

Hiring Success, however, takes a much different approach than traditional recruiting, and I’d likely be doing my team and I a great disservice if I defaulted to using the “expected” metrics for the sake of expediency. Because while I’ve been recruiting my whole career, at SmartRecruiters, versus my previous roles, how we hire – and how we think about hiring – is fundamentally different. 

Let me give you an example. 

In traditional recruiting, there’s often an overemphasis on more traditional metrics – things like time to fill, cost per hire, and, of course, the ever elusive quality of hire (how can a subjective and abstract construct be benchmarked?). 

None of these measurements actually tell you anything about whether or not the hiring process was as efficient and effective as possible; simply, they tell us how much we’ve spent to find talent and how long it took us to do so. 

At SmartRecruiters we have embraced a completely different set of analytics that takes a much more holistic and integrated look at the recruitment process and optimizing TA outcomes. 

Internally, our use of the Hiring Success metrics have allowed us to move from order takers to strategic business partners – a shift that’s pervasive among the employers who have adopted the Hiring Success methodology in their talent organizations. 

The Three Metrics of Hiring Success

That’s not to say that my days are spent in meetings or business updates. Like most recruiters, my calendar is usually packed with candidate interviews. I talk to as many candidates as possible so that I can find the talent my hiring managers need to fill their roles.

As my stakeholders, my primary focus when dealing with hiring managers is building relationships and adding business value – so, I’ll admit, it’s not often that metrics are the very first item on my agenda during every meeting. 

But no matter how good a partnership a hiring manager and I might have, no matter how many jobs I fill, I know that if the recruitment analytics don’t provide empirical evidence of Hiring Success, then I know I haven’t done my job as a recruiter – and likely, let down the hiring managers who rely on me to help them transform human capital into a competitive advantage.

Candidate Pipeline

When I want to identify bottlenecks anywhere in my hiring process, or if I want to streamline and simplify those processes for greater efficiency and efficacy, the Candidate Pipeline dashboard is my go-to resource. This is one of my standby visuals that’s available within SmartRecruiters’ Source to Hire analytics. 

That dashboard effectively represents a central destination for tracking candidate progress across requisitions within a defined period of time, and also allows me to provide my Hiring Managers with the information and insights they’re looking for from a true talent advisor during the hiring process.

So, what exactly do I personally use the Candidate Pipeline dashboard for? Here are a couple of use cases that come to mind:

• I can understand the average time the recruiting process takes, from “hi to hire”, for both individual jobs and across teams and regions. Once I know how long the process takes (at each step and overall),  I’ll have an idea of where our team can optimize the process.
• I can track my progress over time by viewing Candidate Pipeline data during different time periods. This can help you see how you’re improving over a specific period of time, or help you redirect your efforts. 
• As a talent team leader, I can instantly identify which jobs require the most resources or support, and which team members might need some help to make Hiring Success happen; this information is accessible in one dashboard that makes recruitment analytics easy.

Hiring Plan Dashboard

Recruiting is a marathon, not a sprint – it can at times be an intense and competitive race to the finish line for TA, candidates and hiring managers alike. 

It’s easy to get lost in your daily grind, but sometimes it’s important to take a step back and take a look at how far you’ve come in that race, how far you have to go, and what it’s going to take to actually cross the finish line.

That’s where the Hiring Plan Dashboard comes in. It’s a great way to track hiring progress at a high level, and immediately know the status of all my positions over a select period of time – I  often default to quarterly views within the Hiring Plan Dashboard, since, well, that’s how we currently plan our growth headcount.

I can also drill down to see weekly progress, quarterly, or annual reports,  making it an ideal way to see which hiring managers or business partners might need more support (or where I might need to intervene in terms of hiring strategy or resource allocation).

Pro tip: look for the Hiring Plan Dashboard in SmartRecruiters within the Source-To-Hire analytics section. Don’t forget-  you can also share access to your Analytics with other hiring stakeholders, like fellow recruiters, HR Business Partners or hiring managers, providing self-service functionality for real time reporting and requisition management.

Some of the ways I leverage the Hiring Plan Dashboard throughout the entire recruitment process include: 

• Tracking our hiring plan progress against goals through benchmark data, meaningful metrics and actionable analytics that show me how I’m performing in real time, all the time
• Identifying which requisitions, regions or departments could use a helping hand
• Utilizing historical hiring data to inform future hiring plans and forecast how well those plans are likely to inform based on the jobs I’ve already filled
• Understanding exactly how open positions or jobs are distributed across the organization, and ensuring the correct alignment of recruiting resources required to produce optimal Hiring Success outcomes

Report Builder

If you’re in recruiting, chances are the questions you get from hiring managers and talent acquisition stakeholders sound like variations on the same recurring themes. These should sound pretty familiar.

“Where exactly do our candidates come from?”

“How long does the application process take for <whatever position I’m currently hiring for> and how long will it take to actually fill that role?”

“Where are we losing applicants? Why are candidates dropping out of the process? What can we do to fix it?”

You get the point. These sound like the answers should be fairly simple and straightforward, but obviously, generating empirical evidence and actual analytics around these complex and complicated questions is anything but. That’s where Report Builder comes in.

Almost everyone on our Hiring Success teams gets a high volume of questions from Hiring Managers, and that’s to be expected. Our team relies on Report Builder to filter down this data into digestible dashboards, so that we can access the analytics required to answer these questions with as much detail as possible. 

Using Report Builder, I can not only get custom reports based on required ranges like job field, applicant source or date – and these reports are easy to export directly into the data visualization tool we use to make this foundational talent data easier to interpret, analyze and present to relevant recruiting stakeholders or hiring managers as needed.

Quarterly & Yearly Hiring Metrics

I often wonder how I performed over the last quarter, how my individual recruiter productivity and hiring outcomes varied year over year, or how my Hiring Success outcomes stacked up against the other recruiters on our Hiring Success team.

I also pride myself on hitting my hiring plans, but you know what they say about the best laid plans (assuming, of course, they exist in the first place, which isn’t always a given in TA today). 

By regularly accessing our Hiring Success analytics, when there’s some sort of variance between hiring plan and recruiting outcomes, I’m able to meaningfully measure what issues are temporary/ one-offs specific to small groups, and what issues need more strategic solutions. 

For example, if we planned to hire 100 people, but only filled 85 jobs, that isn’t always a bad thing – sometimes, they’re actually proof that those hiring plans are working when it comes to short term hiring, and are also driving longer term Hiring Success results.

Whenever a year or quarter comes to an end, I turn to the Hiring Success Analytics dashboard to see how my team is doing collectively when it comes to our Hiring Success Analytics. 

Obviously, everything we do in terms of both operation and strategy is dedicated to driving continuous Hiring Success throughout the entire hiring lifecycle, but for periodic reporting, I’ve discovered that hiring velocity, in particular, can be the most accurate indicator of how well we’re doing at delivering real recruiting results and real business value. 

It’s a metric that’s easy to overlook, but one that I’d encourage every SmartRecruiters user to pay closer attention to.  Ultimately, how efficiently we can attract, select and onboard the talent our business needs to succeed at scale is really the most important Hiring Success outcome out there. 

The only way our business can survive – and thrive – is if our hiring velocity can keep up with our business growth. When it comes to supporting a high growth business like ours on a global scale, there’s no way to understate just how much velocity counts. Bottom line: if you aren’t getting the right people into critical roles when you need them, it can have huge ramifications across your company.

There are a ton of different ways to leverage the Hiring Success dashboard within SmartRecruiters, but a few of the ones I think me and my team generally utilize the most include:

• Tracking changes in our talent acquisition team and recruiting related outcomes over time, and performing any related associated variance analysis that might be required
• Conducting monthly, quarterly or annual reviews with both my direct supervisor and our company leadership team, and showing how I’m performing against my own goals
• Tracking our Net Hiring Score to ensure that we’re constantly improving both the hiring manager and new hire experience throughout your process.

Conclusion

If you’re in recruiting (particularly at a high growth company), you know that having the data and insights associated with Hiring Success makes it easier to be a true business partner and talent advisor to hiring managers and leadership alike. When you come to the table with meaningful data that describes your team’s successes and hiring results, instead of leaning on anecdotal evidence and obligatory metrics, then you become more than a recruiter.

Metrics and data help make Hiring Success a reality, and achieving Hiring Success is much more critical to your business than just getting “butts in seats.” The analytics resources  in SmartRecruiters provide a powerful tool for tracking our hiring progress, while also allowing us to optimize our entire recruitment process. 

Aside from driving business outcomes, It’s also nice to be able to access your own numbers. That way I can demonstrate that not only am I doing my job and hitting my goals, but I also have the data to prove it available at my fingertips. That peace of mind lets me focus on what really matters: connecting the right people to the right jobs at scale, on time and under budget. 

Of course, this is the literal definition of Hiring Success. If you’re not familiar with the Hiring Success framework, its foundational pillars and how to use the methodology as a competitive advantage in today’s increasingly complex and cutthroat talent market, we’ve got you covered.

Click here to check out The Definitive Guide to Hiring Success. It’s got all the information recruiters need to get started on what’s been the most important journey of my career: moving from being just another recruiter in a cost center to becoming a trusted talent advisor who’s directly responsible for supporting our business – and our bottom line. Which is about all that a recruiter can hope for, really. The road to Hiring Success starts here. Download The Guide Today.

Are you interested in hosting your own virtual career fair, but need a little more info first? You’re not alone, and we got you covered.

Table of Contents

• What does a virtual career look like?
• What are the benefits of a virtual career fair?
• What are the disadvantages of a virtual career fair?
• How do I plan a virtual career fair?
• What is the best recruiting technology to set up a successful virtual career fair?

Virtual career fairs are new twists on a recruiting staple. Once upon a time, recruiters from like-industries or with similar candidate needs would gather in a hall, set up booths, and meet potential applicants. It was a way for recruiters to contact high volumes of talent that were actively seeking employment. 

Today, the busy schedules of candidates as well as pandemic safety guidelines have encouraged recruiters to find creative alternatives for large, in-person gatherings. Enter the virtual career fair. Virtual career fairs take the expo hall online, yielding the same high volume recruiter-candidate interaction without breaking social distance codes. But it’s not all about health regulations, it’s about looking to the future.

This method of recruiting was a long time coming. Back in 2017 a Gallup poll already reported that almost half of employed Americans had worked remotely for some amount of time and 2018 US Census data showed 5.2% of employed Americans working entirely from home. Researchers from Harvard Business School have even found in initial studies that working from home or remotely can increase productivity. So if organizations can benefit from remote work, then why can’t recruiting? 

Indeed, recruiting stands to gain a great deal from harnessing the power of virtual events, but some are reluctant to take the leap without more concrete information. We understand, so we put together the top five need to know questions to get you started on your path to virtual recruiting. 

1. What does a virtual career fair look like?

A virtual career fair is an online information session that you can host a single organization or with partners. Candidates will join a large video conference call and the host will present a video or slides about the company and available positions. Allow time at the end for a Q&A session and be sure to send follow up communications to the attendees. 

2. What are the benefits of a virtual career fair?

Hosting an online event can save you time and money. You can cross off ‘venue,’ ‘booth,’ and ‘printed materials’ from your budget–while erasing all transportation time for you and your team. Think of the stress you will save as well, with no last minute changes or cancelations brought on by health concerns: An online event can take place as long as the wifi is on.

In addition, if you are serious about scaling your hiring then you need to be able to think bigger than your city or region, there’s a whole world of talent out there to recruit. The fact is, virtual events have the ability to reach a greater talent pool than those that are in-person. 

Virtual career fairs have advantages for candidates as well. Potential applicants may find it easier to attend a virtual event, as they won’t have to worry about transportation, travel time, child care etc. Life is hectic for all of us and even interested talent may find it hard to attend an in person event–especially if they are already employed. 

Beyond the practicality of virtual career fairs, these events are powerful drivers of employer brand. Top tier candidates will appreciate the flexibility and creativity of companies who harness their tech to save them time and keep them safe.

3. What are the disadvantages of a virtual career fair?

It’s easy for a virtual event to slip people’s minds. Candidates may not feel as committed to an online RSVP as to an in-person one. So be sure to send out reminders and calendar invites to facilitate attendance. It doesn’t hurt to point out in the invite that there will be a live element to the event so would be attendees feel motivated to show up.

At a traditional career fair, you will get time to interact with candidates one on one or in small groups. These small interactions–a handshake, a face to face conversation–can make a big difference. It’s harder to make personal connections in an online forum. This is where your planning and comfort with your tools will show. Let candidates know at the beginning of the session how and when they can ask questions and consider doing breakout sessions for a more intimate feel. Make sure to follow up with attendees with next steps, a simple email does the trick.

4. How do I plan a virtual career fair?

A virtual career fair can be planned from your desk without much fuss, but you’ll need to be organized and strategic. 

• Before: Choose your conferencing platform, create a landing page with your event info, promote on social channels and via email, send out invites, and prepare your presentation.
• Day-of: Send out reminders, test your camera/microphone, and get ready to meet some awesome talent. During your presentation keep an eye on the chat for questions.
• After: Congratulate your team, thank any helpers (even those who shared your event on their social channels), send follow-up emails to candidates with next-steps, and track your metrics like invite to attendee ratio to create an even more successful event next time!

5. What is the best recruiting technology to set up a successful virtual career fair?

The tech element is generally the most intimidating aspect of planning a virtual career fair, but most of the tech you need you probably already use. Keep it simple and focus on the main three:

• Recruiting Chatbot: Utilize a chatbot with advanced, conversational AI, like SmartPal, to recruit at scale and at an efficient pace that will improve your hiring velocity.
• Recruitment CRM: Use this for sending out invites, reminders, and follow ups. Consider creating a landing page with the event info and field for candidates to sign up for an invite.
• Video tool: Whether Zoom or Google hangouts select a video tool and test it out beforehand–even if it’s just a test run at your next team  meeting.
• Social Media: Leverage your social channels to put out the word about your virtual career fair and link them to your landing page. If you have a large facebook audience then consider making an event page.

When narrowing down a pool of top job candidates, communication, engagement, and documentation are essential. Instrumental in that process is the combination of conversational recruiting and knowledge management

Both recruiters and job-seekers alike will tell you: the recruiting process can be full of pain points that can derail a relationship before it even really begins. Too often, these problems boil down to miscommunication—which can cause myriad other problems, such as gaps in knowledge, redundant processes, and mismatched targeting.

The key to ensuring clear communication takes place?

Conversational recruiting—backed by a solid approach to knowledge management.

What is Conversational Recruiting?

Conversational recruiting is the process of conversing with potential job candidates in an effort to attract and engage them—and begin qualifying them for the position in question.

(Those familiar with the concept of conversational marketing can see parallels between how both approaches can generate leads and engage with their intended targets.)

In contrast to the traditional approach to recruiting, conversational recruiting involves minimal “formal” engagements, such as form-filling and other more mechanical processes. 

Instead, conversational recruiting focuses on communicating with candidates in a more authentic, personable manner. This, in turn, allows recruiters to develop stronger relationships with high-quality candidates well before the “official” interviewing process begins.

“Chatbots are a great tool to improve the candidate experience and recruiter efficiency. That being said, they are still only a small piece of the overall talent screening process. When a chatbot is combined with the right screening and matching technology, we not only see improvements in efficiency but in accuracy and fairness as well.”  – Somen Mondal, CEO of Ideal

Research shows that feeling understood is a powerful driver of social behavior. An important aspect of being able to understand another is picking up on the nuances in conversations, such as a shift in tone or direction.” 

One of the main reasons conversational recruiting has become a growing trend is because technology has enabled recruiters to absolutely thrive in this area. 

By today’s standards, recruiters can communicate with potential candidates in a variety of ways, such as:

• On-site and social media chat.
• Social media content, posts, and comments.
• Email, text message and push notifications.
• Audio and video chat.

In addition to enabling true one-to-one conversations to occur between recruiters and candidates, technology also allows recruiters to create simulated engagements with potential hires. For example, on-site or social media chatbots can help you collect preliminary information on a potential candidate from your very first engagement:

Or, you might set up templated emails to be sent out to candidates that take a specific action (such as submitting their contact information via your chatbot). Here, you could engage in a more personalized conversation with the individual candidate, allowing their replies to become more open-ended in nature.

Regardless of where or how a given conversation takes place, the goal of conversational recruiting is for each engagement to keep the relationship growing and moving toward an interview. 

Again, technology comes into play here, as it allows recruiters to:

• Engage with recruits on the platforms they’re most likely to use throughout their job search.
• Pick up conversations right where they left off, regardless of the channel.
• Deliver the right information to the right recruits, and begin preparing them for the interview process.

Now, technology can enable all of this to happen; but it can’t make it so.

In order to take advantage of the technology involved in conversational recruiting, you need to have a solid knowledge management system in place. In the next section, we’ll explain just why that is.

How Does Knowledge Management Fit Into Conversational Recruiting?

Knowledge management refers to the organization-wide process of collecting, organizing, interpreting, communicating, and using information.

A few examples:

• An outgoing employee creates a file documenting their tasks and duties for their replacement to refer to as needed.
• Managerial staff develop policies and procedures for their teams to follow, and use various tools to deliver these documents to their employees.
• Information regarding engagements with prospective employees, customers, and other entities is documented, stored, and communicated to stakeholders as necessary.

From a bird’s-eye view, it’s pretty easy to see how knowledge management relates to conversational recruiting: Without this flow of information occurring throughout an organization, engagements with potential candidates can go absolutely nowhere.

More than just enabling these conversations to take place, proper knowledge management allows these conversations to thrive. As we said earlier, a pleasant and productive lead-up to onboarding a new hire will ultimately lead to more productivity across the board.

That said, let’s take a closer look at how effective knowledge management can improve your conversational recruiting efforts.

Knowledge Management Centralizes and Prepares Data for Delivery

Most instances of conversational recruiting happen in or near real-time.

When engaging with an on-site chatbot, for example, recruits will typically expect an immediate response to any question they may have. For this to happen, the “recruiter”—in this case, a digital tool—must have immediate access to the information being requested. It’s essential, then, that your organization’s collective knowledge be stored in a centralized repository solution such as a knowledge base or wiki. 

In addition to creating the structures for such communication to occur, knowledge management also ensures that the right information exists in the first place. With regard to conversational recruiting, this means:

• Knowing what documentation to create for recruiters to pull from.
• Organizing documents and files to allow for easy recall and communication of the right information.
• Continuously maintaining and updating data to ensure accuracy at all times.

SmartRecruiters’ applicant tracking system, for example, allows recruiters to document engagements and other touch points as they begin to bring new hires onboard.

Without solid knowledge management, it’s nearly impossible to provide your candidates with the information they need when considering working with your company. 

But, with proper knowledge management processes in place, you’ll always be able to deliver the exact information your top recruits are looking for. In turn, they’ll be even more likely to remain engaged with your organization.

Knowledge Management Ensures Proper Data Collection

As much as conversational recruiting is about delivering info to your recruits, it’s also about collecting info from them, as well.

As your team or tools engage with a recruit, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to learn more about them. For example, over the course of multiple interactions, your recruit might end up discussing their:

• Skills, qualifications, and certifications.
• Professional and personal goals and preferences.
• Individual circumstances that may impact their performance.

With proper knowledge management processes in place, all incoming candidate data can be funneled directly into the same centralized location. This ensures that you’ll never miss out on a vital piece of data that might prove valuable when attracting a given recruit. 

Knowledge management also aims to ensure that outdated candidate information is continually replaced with current data as it comes in. That way, your team and tools will always be able to pick up with candidates right where they left off.

Looking at the whole of an organization’s initiatives, knowledge management involves collecting and internalizing performance data, as well. This can help you optimize your approach to conversational recruiting moving forward—and enable you to better attract and engage the right candidates for your company.

Knowledge Management Helps Identify Best-Fit Candidates and Optimal Engagement Strategies

Speaking of engaging with best-fit candidates…

As we said, you have a variety of options at your disposal in terms of conversational recruiting. Each option, of course, includes its own set of options and variables. And, of course, not every candidate responds the same way to each of these options.

Knowledge management, then, is necessary for identifying:

• The best-fit candidate(s) for a given position.
• The optimal way to reach out to these individuals.
• How to proceed with a given candidate in order to help the relationship grow.

By assessing all relevant information known about the candidate, the position, and anything else of note, your recruiting team can develop a clear-cut strategy for bringing your next new hire onboard.

A recent case study by chatbot development company ubisend displays exactly how a chatbot helped a business qualify candidates and save precious time. 

The business, a large construction company, struggled with applicants making their way too far down the process before realizing they lacked important qualifications. With over 350 positions open at any given point, the time wasted was significant.

To combat this, the business implemented a recruitment chatbot. The recruitment chatbot would be the first line of contact between applicants and the business. Its sole purpose would be to gather the necessary information from applicants to vet their qualifications. With this information, the chatbot would be able to:

1. Act as a gatekeeper to applicants who do not fit the requirements.
2. Prioritize candidates that do fit the requirements.
3. Save everyone (including candidates) time.

The recruitment chatbot approach resulted in a 73% reduction in unqualified job applications across the business.

Conclusion

The takeaway from this post is twofold:

• Conversational recruiting is an incredibly effective way to engage with and qualify job candidates during the leadup to the more formal interview stage of the process.
• The effectiveness of your conversational recruiting efforts depends on your knowledge management capabilities.

While knowledge management can be implemented in all areas of your business, our focus today is on using knowledge management to create a streamlined experience for your potential recruits—as well as your recruitment team. 

Interested in adopting conversational recruiting into your talent acquisition strategy? There’s no better place to begin than pairing SmartRecruiters’ ATS with an Intelligent Chatbot.

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Traditional recruitment is in crisis, with many turning to talent acquisition instead. But if talent acquisition is to be more than another corporate buzzword, it’s essential to properly understand the difference between recruitment and talent acquisition.

We’re all familiar with the approach to recruitment in which candidates are sourced, scrutinized, and then passed off to hiring managers. The role of the recruiter usually stops there, and fails to take into consideration what comes next. To a large extent, this explains why the old models of recruitment now offer diminishing returns.

Over two-thirds of HR leaders say that employee onboarding is underutilized in their companies, which can seriously undermine staff retention. Poor management makes employees more likely to quit, and employees who feel under-appreciated are twice as likely to look for employment elsewhere. 

These lapses in workplace judgement, could very well be to blame for phenomena like workplace ghosting, where employees simply fail to turn up at all. Such developments point to a breakdown in the way that employer-employee relations begin, develop, and are handled over time.

What’s the solution? Talk of a new concept called talent acquisition has started to echo through corporate boardrooms worldwide. 

But what exactly is talent acquisition and how is it different from recruitment?

To understand this, we should first refresh our knowledge on what traditional recruitment involves. 

What Is Recruitment?

Recruitment is the process of searching for, evaluating and hiring experienced and qualified people to fill an existing vacancy at a company or organization. It usually follows a specific, pre-defined recruitment process that is highly standardized and typically implemented in periods of expansion or due to staff turnover.

Lots of factors influence the specific rhythms and cycles of recruitment in various workplaces. Staff turnover figures from 2017 show that the events and publishing sector had the highest rates of turnover, while general management and admin had the lowest.

Recruitment is an absolute fundamental of running any business, but it is essentially a short-term process that seeks to fill a company’s immediate needs. So how is talent acquisition different?

What Is Talent Acquisition?

Talent acquisition is similar to recruitment in the sense that it shares the same aim of finding the best people to work for your company. But whereas recruitment tends to be a very standardized, reactive process, talent acquisition is all about the long game of your company. It involves a more flexible and dynamic approach from your recruitment team and a broad understanding of the long-term strategic aims of your business.

What Is the Difference Between the Two?

Recruitment is an action… a tactical process to solve an immediate problem. Talent acquisition is a strategy, an ongoing process of making your company the most attractive place for quality talent, while ensuring you make use of the many avenues through which new talent can be sourced. 

Here are some key ways talent acquisition seeks to expand your recruitment horizons…

Networking: You have to be connected in your industry; attend relevant industry events and networking sessions, build diverse social networks online.

Referrals: Nearly half of businesses report that the most quality hires come from referrals from existing employees, so make sure you have an attractive employee referral program in place.

Career sites and job boards: An oldie, but a goodie. They’re still important to use so take the time to research the best jobs boards for your sector. 

Social media: Ignoring social media and its recruitment potential will lead to your peril.  LinkedIn is still the biggest online recruiting tool after your company website. Sites like Twitter and Facebook are also important. 

Brand marketing. Talent acquisition means you need to make your company the most attractive place for talent to work. Enhancing your brand imaging can help your company secure its reputation as the hot place for talent to be. 

Is Talent Acquisition More Important Than Recruitment?

There are cases where  a traditional recruitment strategy may work for you ,but data has shown that a majority of recruiters struggle to get the best people to fill their vacancies. In the UK, 90% of employers are struggling to fill roles.

Talent acquisition goes far beyond the mere tactical approach of recruitment. Similar to the process of learning how to be a good manager, learning how to implement a talent acquisition strategy is about coming to understand the true value of your employees. 

When you hire, you’re investing in people, but all too often it can be seen as just another costly expense. This can encourage employers to cut corners and see recruitment as a mechanical process that never changes.

Talent acquisition is about being aware of current staffing trends, the state of the workforce, and using that insight to attract vital talent.

For example, research has shown that over half of Americans are quitting their current jobs right now. A talent acquisition strategy would prevent this by anticipating and identifying the reasons employees might be tempted to leave your company, and addressing those issues so that the recruitment team isn’t hiring due to a lack of awareness in foresight in your organization.

Furthermore, most business owners don’t know why their employees leave. The majority of them think that it’s all about money, but it’s not. In fact, only 12% of employees leave because of the money. 

One problem is that employers don’t conduct exit interviews to find out the real reasons why people quit. An effective talent acquisition strategy—one that views the candidate/employee experience holistically—would do so, and pose the following questions in an exit interview.  

• How could we have made your time with our company better?
• What measures can we put into place to keep current and future employees happy?

Your relationship to candidates and potential employees doesn’t end once they sign their contract. As with every relationship, its success is predicated upon empathy, understanding, and an ability to learn from one’s mistakes.

Employers who implement a talent acquisition strategy realize that recruitment is not just about scrutinizing candidates to see if they’re right for your company, it’s also about convincing potential talent that you are the right company to meet their career expectations.

Video interviewing has revolutionized traditional recruitment processes, helping hiring managers better understand job applicants all over the world, while saving time and money.

Once upon a time recruiters relied on one-dimensional, text-based resumes and CVs to start refining their candidate pool. As technology has evolved, so too have hiring processes, helping recruiters make more genuine connections with job applicants and more informed decisions—even at a distance.

Before Skype came along in 2003, few people were comfortable using video teleconferencing. I remember the first time I tried communicating with my parents this way; my mother needlessly shouted so I could hear. “It has to go all the way to the moon and back,” she’d explain while I rolled my eyes. A lot has changed since then, including the sophistication of video communication software (and, thankfully, the volume of my mother’s voice during video calls).

Nowadays, even those with limited tech skills can easily navigate a video call. That’s just one of the many reasons why video interviewing is becoming an increasingly popular tool for recruiters and hiring managers around the globe.

From Words to Phone to Video: The Evolution of the Interview

Video interviewing helps recruiters understand much more about an applicant’s fit for a job than a resume/CV or even a telephone interview. Why? Because video interviews allow candidates to showcase their personality and skill sets in ways other methods simply cannot. Video interviews also allow recruiters to detect hesitancy or pain points when applicants answer questions, and help assess an individual’s overall confidence and excitement for the position.

For example, when I send my parents snail mail or emails, I sometimes worry the message might be misconstrued. Chatting with them on the phone allows us to hear tone and inflection in our voices, lessening the chances of misunderstanding. Still, nothing compares to when we can see each other through a video call. It’s the next best thing to being together in person—and the same is true with job interviews.

The Many Benefits of Video Interviewing

Some of the benefits of implementing video interviewing as part of your recruitment process include the ability to:

• Better qualify job applicants, especially for “soft skills” (read facial expressions, tone of voice, etc.)
• Connect with qualified candidates all over the world (perfect for hiring remote workers)
• Save as much as 67% in travel costs
• Reduce hiring velocity by up to 80%
• Improve and personalize the candidate experience
• Establish your brand as a progressive company that keeps pace with the latest hiring best practices

Pre-recorded Versus Live Video Interviewing

While Skype, Zoom and FaceTime are all great tools to stay connected with friends and family, recruiters need a more sophisticated, multi-dimensional video conferencing software to do their jobs well. There are a variety of professional video interviewing platform on the market, but make sure to invest in one that offers both pre-recorded and live video interviewing options.

What’s the difference? Pre-recorded video interviews are a huge timesaver, especially in the early screening stages. Recruiters do not need to be present; candidates are sent standardized questions, they record their answers via webcam, and then recruiters can review these at their convenience. Pre-recorded interviews are especially useful when evaluating candidates in different time zones as the recruiter, or when hiring teams are dispersed.

Live video interviews mimic tools like Skype in that they’re real-time video calls for those who are not physically in the same space. However, professional video interviewing software provides recruiters with many features like basic, free software, including automation, customization and evaluation. The right video interviewing platform allows everyone involved in hiring decisions to evaluate candidates fairly, minimizing hiring bias and expensive legal consequences of unfair recruitment processes.

Red Flags in Video Interviews

Video interviewing is extremely effective in pre-qualifying job applicants, giving recruiters a more complete picture of candidates in a fraction of the time. Watch for these red flags:

• Candidate appears very nervous or defensive when asked certain questions
• Candidate is not dressed professionally. People should dress for the job they want in a video interview, just as they would in an in-person interview.
• Candidate lacks eye contact, does not smile or uses closed body language. None of these things exactly scream confidence or approachability.
• Background is cluttered. A pile of clothes on the floor or a messy desk may be a sign that the applicant is unorganized.

Video interviewing is helping recruiters find better candidates faster and with more ease, all the while minimizing costs. They’re making the lives of both recruiters and job applicants more pleasant and effective by modernizing and simplifying the hiring process for all. There’s no question video interviewing is the future of recruiting.

This is the second installment of Common Perceptions in Talent Acquisition That Must Change. Part I addresses the false notion that Talent Acquisition (TA) is an unnecessary source of overhead costs for businesses. The following is another commonly held, but inaccurate belief in the industry.

Hiring (Well) Means “Letting Go”

Relinquishing control and trusting that those around you will do the right thing is not always easy. There are tons of HR executives and TA professionals out there who think that the only people who can execute a TA strategy are recruiters and recruitment leaders.  As business needs are constantly changing and evolving, the concept of forecasting accurate hiring numbers (forget layering in the complexity of attrition) is as nebulous as the flying purple squirrel candidates.

Targets, priorities, and profiles change, and both inbound and outbound sourcing methods take time and energy – which leads to inevitable resource constraints. While it would be nice to say that all of this can be solved with a good CRM strategy, the reality is: there will always be certain roles that we are filling ‘”just in time.”

This means that a completely centralized recruiting function needs to be built for worst case scenario hiring numbers – they need to be prepared for the inevitable “urgent hiring push” that in some businesses is cyclical and in others seems to be completely random. The most amazing thing that TA leaders need to realize is that they have an entire workforce of recruiters – inside their own companies. 

As an industry, we’ve spent too much time making the recruiting process complex and bringing all control and ownership into the department, that we are missing out on using our best asset to our advantage: our people. TA leaders who decentralize their hiring processes (i.e., give both power AND responsibility back to the hiring team – managers, brand ambassadors, executives, department coordinators) have access to a huge pool of resources who are both experienced in interviewing and invested in making a great hire.

Giving access to these resources does come at a price: your ability to control every tiny part of the hiring process. If you want these people to be REALLY invested in hiring, they need to have some semblance of control.  This may mean letting them post their own jobs (gasp!) moving their candidates through the recruitment process, or even making a hiring decision without input from a recruiter.

There are of course certain parts of the process that need controls (you still need a sound approval chain for postings and for offers) and most hiring managers will still want the opinion of someone from your TA team before going to offer on a candidate.

BUT, instead of them having to have your approval or wait for your team to push a button, you become an advisor that they look to for advice, assistance, and support (or sometimes a differing opinion). Ultimately, the hire is theirs to onboard and manage, so why not let them feel that the hiring process is theirs to own too?

Next week we will dive into the last topic of our three part series, which is how delivering true digital transformation within TA is not a lipstick on a pig exercise.