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

Internal mobility is an integral component of a comprehensive talent acquisition strategy. Not only does tapping into this resource promote greater engagement in the workplace, it can also make your organization more resilient during downturns.

What Is Internal Mobility and Why Does It Matter?

Internal mobility refers to the movement of employees across different roles within an organization. Publications throughout the industry, including Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and SHRM agree that internal mobility is the most efficient path towards organizational success.

While recruiting outside talent is an essential part of improving your business, many companies overlook the most promising talent within their company. At best, this leaves talent untapped. At worst, a failure to optimize the potential of your employees could discourage them from remaining in your firm and inadvertently push them to seek employment elsewhere. 

Add to this the fact that millennial workers change companies at a significantly higher rate than do older generations. Moreover, the recent COVID 19 pandemic has created a host of unforeseen obstacles for external recruiting, further compounding the need to optimize your internal mobility strategy. 

Bottom line: Internal mobility is an essential part of an organization’s sustained success and future growth, and that is perhaps never more the case than right now.

So how do you create a highly effective internal mobility strategy? Here are the most important elements:

Effective Management

Good management is a foundation of a strong approach to internal mobility. When it comes to internal mobility, great managers do the following:

1. Identify top talent and potential
2. Build trust with their team members
3. Consistently discuss team members’ career goals and conceptualize ways to meet those goals within the organization.
4. Mentor employees to reach their goals, even if that requires leaving the company. 

Make internal mobility a foundational component of your culture

The last point in the previous section may seem counter-intuitive. Why, in other words, would management want to potentially help employees, especially the most talented ones, leave their organization? The answer lies in building a corporate culture that employees don’t want to leave.

Effective management helps build a work environment that signals to employees and external candidates that your company is invested in their personal growth and success.

In other words, demonstrating to your workers that you care about their career goals is one of the most impactful ways to show your employees that remaining with your firm might actually be the best place to pursue their goals. It also distinguishes your company from your competitors, which will prove a highly effective recruiting strategy. 

A healthy culture of internal mobility, in other words, helps align your firm’s goals with those of your employees. It also helps boost morale and enhances engagement throughout your organization, and helps your workers feel like they are an essential part of the company, rather than a cog in its machine.

Hold Yourself Accountable

Internal mobility should not be viewed as an occasional strategy. Establishing a formal strategy to develop it into a standard practice is essential. When implementing your strategy, it’s imperative you thoroughly assess your success and improve as needed. Your assessment of your talent mobility efforts should answer the following questions affirmatively:

1. Is your internal mobility strategy vertically integrated throughout the entire organization?
2. Do you have quantifiable goals for internal mobility?
3. Do your employees have easy access to opportunities for internal movement?
4. Do you have training and mentoring programs that encourage leaders within your firm to help other team members broaden their skills and experiences to acquire the training and skills needed to move upward in your organization?
5. Do your managers have a clear understanding of the skills required for internal mobility? Can they communicate them effectively to their team?
6. Does your company, managers in particular, communicate regularly with employees about their career goals?

Don’t forget about lateral transitions 

While “climbing the corporate ladder” was once considered the only method of career advancement, flatter organizations can benefit from programs that allow employees to move to different teams. Lateral movement enhances collaboration overall and eases disruption when new roles are filled by those who already know your company and culture.

You’re Ready to Get Moving!

Set your internal mobility in motion! By implementing some or all of these strategies, we believe you’ll see tangible improvement in your recruiting performance. You’ll hopefully find your organization filling roles faster and more efficiently.

What’s more, your approach will align with those of top-ranked firms that possess some of the most mature talent acquisition procedures. Better yet, you’ll send a clear and reliable message to your employees that they can mobilize their careers and achieve their long-term goals within your company. 

So don’t just look outside, look inside. And encourage employees to do the same. Doing so will help you win the battle for top talent!

Internal Recruiting in the Time of COVID-19

The COVID 19 pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges and concerns to every aspect of life, including business operations. So how does our current health crisis impact recruiting? 

Externally, most companies have implemented hiring freezes. Yet, this does not mean you should neglect previous candidates and applicants. Instead, use this crisis as an opportunity to migrate previous applicants into your talent pool.

Connect with those candidates and nurture your relationship with them. This will give you an edge with members of your talent pool and help prepare candidates and your organization to hit the ground running once we have an economic upswing.  

Internally, there are also important recruitment opportunities. Don’t forget about your own employees. Internal mobility is critical during this pandemic. It helps ensure retention by reinforcing your commitment to your workers which is essential to keeping your top talent. It will help avoid having them poached by organizations with more active recruiting strategies during this period. 

So remember: internal recruiting never stops—ever.

To learn more about what you can do to develop a workplace culture that supports internal mobility, sign up for a demo of our internal mobility software, SmartMobility!

This is the third and final installment of Common Perceptions in Talent Acquisition That Must Change. In case you’re just tuning in, Part I dispels the myth that talent acquisition (TA) is a cost center for businesses. Part II touches on the importance of sharing decision-making power with multiple stakeholders in the hiring process. Below is the third and final misperception in need correction:

Digital Transformation Is a Lipstick on a Pig Exercise

Okay, that might be the most bizarre sentence I have ever written. If the first thing that came to your mind was, “Where the heck is this guy going?” or “This dude is weird.” Then that’s fine by me as long as I have your attention.

To get us started on this topic, I should clarify a bit. Putting lipstick on a pig, with concern to digital transformation in HR and TA, means that you are avoiding the core technology or process issue and trying to fix it with a point solution. Here are a few examples that I love:

• Using chatbots for your careers page, but still requiring a login and password for your applications.
• Having amazing website architecture, beautiful content, and deep videos on your careers page, but applications that do not render on mobile devices or aren’t responsive enough to allow someone to apply while on an airplane. (Yes, this one drives candidates crazy, and ultimately drives most to abandon the process. Imagine if you were shopping on Amazon and then when you went to check out, they asked you to get out our checkbook and mail in your payment.)
• Selecting any modern solution that doesn’t have a mobile app. I know this may sound ridiculous in 2019, but you would be surprised at how many HR tech vendors exist without any sort of mobile application. If we can do banking on our phones (which is clearly sensitive data), should we not be able to do HR/TA related tasks, too?

There are several reasons that companies make decisions like this:

Budget

Point solutions are typically less expensive than platforms, or other frontend or backend systems that support multiple integrations. So, if you have limited funds available to support a project, then it feels good to tackle something in order to drive some level of progress.

Be careful about how often you take this approach, as it’s common for companies to amass a good number of disparate systems over time. Most of which will not integrate well with one another, i.e., you could easily end up with a rat’s nest on your hands.

Time

Similar to budget, most point solutions, in theory, are faster to deploy than core technologies to your overall process. When a company has fully optimized their talent attraction and engagement workflows, and it has narrowed them down to one area of performance-related concern, then a quick fix point solution is perfect.

However, when a company has multiple known issues, it’s best to slow down and outline the desired process steps and outcomes as opposed to implementing something that you only think–or hope–will work. 

Procurement Process

This one is interesting. Many companies have simpler processes for procuring something that is considered tactical (cost, time to deploy, low IT requirements, etc.), so if a team is pressed for time, wants to avoid doing an RFP, or simply doesn’t want to deal with internal politics, then taking on something fast and easy feels like the right path. 

I struggle with this one as it can be very difficult for HR/TA leaders to get budgets approved. In fact, they rarely get what they are asking for.  Yet, they are no different than any other department in that they are under a tremendous amount of pressure to innovate.

Market Influence

Whether it’s because of peer pressure, or broader market influence, many people end up making a purchase simply because others are doing the same. That feeling of being left out or behind drives the majority of buying behaviors.

Now that we’ve discussed why some companies make decisions like this, what should companies do? While the following tips are not going to work for every scenario, they are the best pieces of advice I can give you based on my 20+ years of building businesses and working with organizations of all sizes.

1) Have a Plan

All companies need great execution to survive. In order to accomplish any goal in life, it’s best to lay out a framework and timeline for what you are after. Most people know what is broken and standing in their way, yet very few have a clear strategy on how they plan to fix it.

2) Be Prepared to Pitch and Defend Your Plan

Having a plan is a start, but in order to properly execute the plan, you will need alignment, funding and resources. A thoughtful business case that articulates challenges, solutions, and clear outcomes. Also: supporting data goes a long way with executive teams. Finally, don’t flinch when opposition arises. If you believe in your plan and have properly articulated its value, then your peers and executive audiences will respect you even more when you fight for your projects.

3) Solve for the 90%—Not the 10%

It’s impossible to make all departments and users happy, so focus on the greater good within projects versus worrying about a few detractors here and there.

4) Stop Thinking About Your Old Processes and Think About New Ones

While we do have a certain level of compliance driving our various hiring processes, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t constantly bethinking about new ways of doing things. 

Thank you for your time! Sarah and I look forward to your feedback and continuing the conversation! 

Good Hiring,
Bob

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.

I’ve been known to upset the apple cart in meetings from time to time. In fact, one prospective customer of mine recently asked the room “who brought this guy?”

The reason for that reaction is that a core component of my career in customer engagement has been playing the role of devil’s advocate. A challenger, if you will, an idea generator, listener, and collaborator. This mindset and approach commonly creates friction and, to be transparent, has not come without my share of mishaps over the past 20-plus years.

I believe that when something in business, or in life for that matter, does not align with your core values, is fundamentally wrong, or impacts people negatively, then why not challenge the status quo? I am pretty sure that we would all agree that most are comfortable doing this in their private lives with respect to their political views or sports for example, but what about the workplace? 

In my experience, many people in their professional lives will join conversations, listen, and even participate in some way, but not ask why when they hear something that sounds a bit off or maybe is against what they believe. Instinctively, my sense is that they don’t want to put themselves in an awkward position with their peers or leaders. They stay quiet. I speak up.

My recommendation is to always challenge, but be prepared to offer ideas and a solution to your position. Without a solution or recommendation, you truly are just disrupting the flow of a meeting, and that is not productive. When done properly, the worst case scenario is that people or the business go on doing things the way they have done it before. Best case – they move forward, try something new, and get out of their comfort zones. This may be as a result of your ideas, or maybe not, but as long as a positive outcome follows, it doesn’t matter.

So, now that you know a bit more about me and my communication style, here are a few positions on commonly held ideas in my industry that I believe must change, as well as some ideas on how to get there.

1)  Talent Acquisition (TA) Is a Cost Center

It wouldn’t be groundbreaking to argue against this; many thought leaders think this is a misconception. The problem is that not enough people in TA are actually doing something to counteract the perception that the HR/TA function is a cost center.

For example, if you and your company are still running the business through core metrics like Time to Fill and Cost per Hire, you are only perpetuating this problem. These are legacy data points that only speak to the length of time it takes to do your job as a recruiter and how much you’re costing the business to get a new butt in a seat. I hate that term by the way, but to companies running their operations in this manner, that’s the only way of looking at it.

Nothing about either of those outcomes speak to value or revenue. Why is it that we never talk about value or ROI per hire? People create and drive business, not products or services. Never forget that. 

As a sales leader, I know that the average ramp time for an enterprise level account executive in a SaaS sales environment is anywhere from nine to twelve months to achieve full productivity. A typical non ramping quota for someone in this role is 1.2M annually, so 100k per month of bookings capacity.

Here’s where things get interesting. In my experience amazingly talented sales reps ramp faster than those that do not (we can discuss why another day. ) So, if we can agree upon that, our equation suggests we are losing 100k a month of bookings capacity for every month in which a role goes unfilled.

Even if your average productivity rate for sales attainment is 65%, that means we are still missing out on $65k each and every month that role goes unfilled. Even worse, imagine if you fill the role with the wrong person. That hiring decision could set you back for at least a year, which drives further negative consequences for productivity, training costs, replacement time, hiring costs, etc.

Why do people care how much the cost per hire was for the role? Yes, I realize there are budgets and people are seeking efficiency, and I respect that at some level, but isn’t the point to drive revenue, release a new product, or maintain your high level of customer service outcomes?

Regardless of the role you are filling, we should be talking about business outcomes, not just the cost. At my company, we spent that last few years thinking about this issue. As a result, we came up with all sorts of ideas for measuring TA outcomes differently. The real challenge was how to come up with a concept so simple that businesses could embrace it readily at every level.

As with all good methodologies, they require a great name. Hiring Success, we believe, fits the bill as it is focused on outcomes that will propel businesses forward within critical areas most executives and TA leaders care about. Internally at SmartRecruiters, the methodology I am about to share is an integral part of our DNA and how we operate.

The Hiring Success Framework provides a framework for TA teams to deliver successful hires on time and on budget, to be the strategic function that every business needs and relies on. I could write a whole essay on that topic alone. If you want to dive in further, just click here for more reference material. But for today, I will focus on three metrics that we recommend using as part of this framework. Metrics that move the conversation away from cheaper and faster to BETTER.

CEOs and their executive teams inherently understand the importance of great hiring, but they struggle to quantify the specific financial return of incremental spend on recruiting. Fortunately, the metrics & math related to out-hiring the competition are simple to explain and understand. They lie along the familiar frame of cost (Hiring Budget), speed (Hiring Velocity) and quality (Net Hiring Score) to capture the impact of each on the hiring process.

Hiring Budget

An organization’s Hiring Budget includes all recruiting costs such as all Talent Acquisition (TA) employees, program spend, outside recruiters, travel costs of candidates and technology infrastructure, but does not include time spent by interviewers and the hiring team as they engage in the process.

While most organizations measure the cost of recruiting, forward-looking organizations consider their Hiring Budget an investment just like a marketing budget to attract and grow ideal candidates and express the budget relative to the salary of people hired. Therefore, the Hiring Budget is a percentage of the total salary of new employees or New Hire Payroll (NHP).

Hiring Velocity

Hiring Velocity measures one simple thing: the percentage of jobs filled on time. Why is this important? Well, it answers one simple question: Are we able to hire the people we need when we need them? It’s critical for CEOs and their executive teams to know that their decisions and plans can be implemented because they have a TA organization that can mobilize quickly and deliver results. If they can’t, taking too long to hire the right candidates hinders the organization’s ability to grow and meet goals. Hiring Velocity is highly correlated to Business Velocity. 

Net Hiring Score

How do you develop a reliable measure that accounts for the numerous elements that inform your hiring success? We envisioned something like the Net Promoter Score that evaluates consumer loyalty: simple, solid, and straightforward. We created the Net Hiring Score (NHS), which evaluates the quality of each hire based on the following:

• 90 days in, we ask hiring managers one question: On a scale of 1 to 10, is this person the right fit for the job?
• 90 days in, we ask new hires one question: On a scale of 1 to 10, is this job the right fit for you?
• We then average the scores across managers and new hires, subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of advocates.

A score of zero, for example, indicates a company is hiring as many bad organizational fits as good ones, resulting in a net neutral impact on the company. Above zero, a company is coming out in the black with more good hires than bad ones. Below zero, and the company is in the red with bad fits outweighing the good ones.

More food for thought on that here in this LinkedIn article.

For more information on Hiring Success and how to win in the Talent Economy, check out the following resource.

The CandEs Shop Talk Podcast welcomes Sarah Wilson, Head of People at SmartRecruiters, enterprise-grade recruiting software designed for the modern workforce — and a proud Candidate Experience Awards Sponsor. Listen in on how improving candidate experience impacts recruiting and the business bottom line.

After a decade in the industry, SmartRecruiters’ Head of People, Sarah Wilson, shares why she still never misses a conference.

Sometimes I walk away from an event and think, “That was pretty good, I am glad I went,” and sometimes I skip out of the room thinking, “Holy shit I love my industry!” Our Toronto Hiring Success breakfast definitely fell into the “holy shit” camp. It was an early morning, a time of day that pairs poorly with jet lag and Toronto humidity. The struggle was real getting out of bed. Though the hotel was moments away from the venue, by the time I reached the slightly muggy room, I was already thinking, “This is going to be a long one.”

“HR is the coolest job, you get to impact everyone in the company.” Sarah Wilson @SmartRecruiters #RecruitingAutomation pic.twitter.com/ObMc8rKgmu

— RAS (@RAS_SF) June 14, 2018

Moments later, a few of my favorite Torontonians walked in – equally blurry-eyed – and that amazing thing happened when you remember why you love something. HR has always been about the people for me. The people we serve, but also our peers, our exhausted fellow practitioners who can make an early morning conference session fly by with insight and enthusiasm, and I wanted to share some of the top takeaways that sent me back to San Francisco still skipping, even after 10 years of doing this whole HR thing – and in ascending order:

5. Think of marketing and recruiting like peanut butter and jelly.

We’ve been talking about Marketing and Recruiting intersecting for several years, but now it’s really happening. The consensus from the room was that marketing (for now anyway) belongs inside the Talent function (ask us again in a year or two and see whether we change our minds), but we have a lot to learn from our marketing counterparts. At the top of the list is how to be data driven when we think about reach, response, and investment. The key to having a business case for marketing spend is built upon solid data. If you aren’t sure how to do that, don’t be shy about asking your friends in marketing.

4. Just tell the truth.

Not every candidate is going to get hired. In reality, 99 percent of the candidates you meet may never work for your company.  What’s important to them is that you keep them in the loop. Let them know if you aren’t going to hire them – gently of course – because all they really want is the truth from you. One of our panelists talked about rejecting a candidate over the phone because there wasn’t an open opportunity, but offering to chat casually with a few colleagues so the candidate would be top-of-mind when a position comes up. Taking accountability:   Making the candidate feel special:

3. Help hiring managers more.

Listen to their needs, learn from them, and lend them your expertise so they can pick the best candidates.

2. Never feel alone!

Every story prompted a chorus of nods. When we opened to questions from the floor, there was continuity in the flow of ideas. My a-ha moment that morning wasn’t so much a tactic I could take away and implement tomorrow,  it was that I felt a sense of community. Which leads me to my final takeaway…

1. Get together more often.

Talent Acquisition is a team sport. It’s an industry that gets better by sharing. Yes, the war for talent is real, but that doesn’t mean we can’t work together to win it for the industry as a whole. Of course we are a competitive bunch, but we are also a group of “people people” who gather energy from everyone around us. The people I meet at conferences inspire me, and push me to be better – and I know I can do the same for them. Who’s with me?

Join SmartRecruiters for Hiring Success 18: European Edition, being hosted September 19-20th in Berlin!

The following article was originally published on the Human Capital Institute website and is authored by Head of People at SmartRecruiters Sarah Wilson. Join Sarah in the future of recruiting – a future which is actually happening right now! Robots, technology, and the land of tomorrow. How can we harness all the recent advancements in HR Tech to make everyone’s lives easier from candidates to hiring managers?

Anyone who visited Walt Disney World during the 1980s and 90s likely has a solid memory of the Tomorrowland attraction.

I remember getting onto the ride that took you through history – all the way back to the dinosaurs (the tar pit scene still haunts me) – and then into the future.  It was the near future.  The air smelled cleaner (and faintly of oranges) as if we’d solved ozone layer and global warming issues, people dressed in white, cars flew and there were robots EVERYWHERE. They looked like metal people with blank expressions and they were doing all kinds of tasks – they mowed the lawn, dusted the shelves and took out the trash.

Compare this vision to today. It seems completely in the future, completely out of reach. Cars are still on the ground. I don’t know where you live, but where I live, there is definitely still pollution, carbon fuel, and the air does not smell faintly of oranges.  The people around me are not dressed exclusively in white (aside from the Diner en Blanc annual event). Everything about the vision of Tomorrowland seems like a funny upside-down version of the future.

“Nonetheless, there ARE robots EVERYWHERE.  They may not look like a traditional robot stereotype, but they are present in so many parts of my daily routine.”

Nonetheless, there ARE robots EVERYWHERE.  They may not look like a traditional robot stereotype, but they are present in so many parts of my daily routine.  An app tells me the best way to drive into work, my watch tells me when to pause and take a moment to breathe, the fancy coffee maker at my office calculates the water temperature for a perfect cappuccino, and my phone covers everything else I could need in a regular day.

For as long as I have been in this industry, I have heard that recruiters are frustrated about the overwhelming effort needed to find the perfect candidate, that hiring managers are flaky or change their minds too often, and that candidates apply for roles that are not a bad fit.

“Recruiters often say they have too many tasks and not enough time, and that the business doesn’t understand what takes them so long.”

Recruiters often say they have too many tasks and not enough time, and that the business doesn’t understand what takes them so long. Recruiters say the senior leadership team thinks there are too many recruiters for how few people the company is hiring, and they need technology to make things more efficient and help get end results.

Recruiters say automation is the answer.

As Head of People at SmartRecruiters, I responded to recruiters’ need by creating the applicant tracking system – an automation tool that would reduce the likelihood of candidates receiving a personal response to their applications.

When this didn’t solve our time and resourcing issues, we layered in more technology: ‘knock out’ screening questions that stopped an application dead in its tracks; artificial intelligence (AI) that prioritized which candidate to call first, video interviewing that allowed quicker assessments and that saved the precious time the recruiter was spending on the phone with unqualified applicants.

“Here’s the thing about super smart computers: they aren’t always right.”

Here’s the thing about super smart computers: they aren’t always right. To be fair, I’m not always right, either. I’ve let my past decisions and their repercussions impact my future decisions. I’ve let my surroundings and mindset cloud my judgment. I’ve learned from my successes and my failures.

These tech-based systems weren’t infallible. That era of recruiting technology made the job search process impersonal, robotic, and lonely for candidates.  Sending out countless resumes in hopes that maybe a human will someday read it is daunting, frustrating and ultimately depressing. The void got wider. We’d arrived at the tar pit for candidates.

“The best recruiting solutions are Talent Acquisition Suites that encourage the actual hiring managers and executives to get involved directly with applicants.”

So where does this leave us? Emerging technology in the recruiting space seeks to connect candidates to jobs in the most efficient way possible. The best recruiting solutions are Talent Acquisition Suites that encourage the actual hiring managers and executives to get involved directly with applicants – sending messages, reviewing resumes, and providing real feedback (in real-time) about a candidate’s application status.  We are starting to see more and more recruiting teams acting like sales people, building communities of talent and nurturing them so they know exactly who they want to chase when an opening comes up within their companies.

Let’s fast forward to the Tomorrowland of recruiting. The applicant tracking system is replaced by a true talent acquisition suite of tools designed to be inclusive, personal and easy to use.  Candidates will see in real-time whether a recruiter has looked at their resumes, and they can directly interact with a prospective employer to learn more about what it’s really like to work there.

AI is used for candidate discovery and job matching to increase the likelihood that you apply for the right job on the first try. It is also used to rediscover a candidate who may have applied months (or years) ago to another job, but whose profile now perfectly fits with an open position.

Video Interviewing gives candidates a chance to tell companies why they should take a chance and give them a call, and allows them to provide what isn’t on their resumes.

“Realize that recruiting really is a team sport.”

Most importantly, we harness the collective power of our organizations and realize that recruiting really is a team sport.

Hiring managers can contact a candidate directly and they can even (gasp) deliver an offer to someone they want on their teams.

Recruiters can spend time getting to know a candidate on a deeper and more meaningful level because the tools and technology they use will help them with the technical assessments of skill and ability.

Maybe cars don’t yet fly – but we’ve cleared the air.

In a digital world where you can have any piece of information available to you at the swipe of your thumb; we need to focus on using technology to help us create more intimate relationships with our candidates – not divide us further.

Here’s the wildest thing about this idea – this future world is here.  These technologies exist and the companies who built them want to help you figure out the best thing for you and for your candidates. The key to remaining human is to use your intuition.  If you think like your applicants for a moment, you can find a way to balance efficiency and intimacy.