Staying on top of current hiring trends is one of the best ways to craft a successful hiring strategy. This is particularly relevant at the moment, as the US and global economies are trending towards an uncertain future.

The hiring landscape is constantly changing. At the same time, a range of external factors are impacting the U.S. economy and businesses’ ability to recruit. As a result, there’s more pressure on employers and staffing agencies to be on top of their game when it comes to sourcing top talent.  

A huge part of this is understanding the key trends that are shaping the market; and adapting your hiring practices accordingly. In this article, we’ll take you through what some of these trends look like, offering clear insight on how to maximize them to achieve the best results. 

1. Change in Working Patterns 

Gone are the days of the traditional 9-5; especially right now when more people are working from home than ever before due to social distancing measures. At the same time, according to the American Staffing Association, 16 million temporary and contract employees are hired throughout the course of the year; so clearly, temporary workers make up a big part of the U.S. workforce. 

There are a number of reasons why temporary staffing is getting more popular. For the most part, people want more flexibility and working part-time or on a contractual basis gives them the freedom to balance their personal and professional lives effectively. 

Alongside this, according to a study from TrueBlue and Emsi, the main reason why people take on gig work is to earn extra income; followed by a desire to get their foot in the door with a company. 

Additionally, findings from Staffing Industry Analysts show that an estimated 53 million people took on gig work in the U.S. in 2018, with 34% of all U.S. workers performing gig/contingent work last year. 

Clearly, the gig economy represents a shift in employment around the world. Professionals are opting to work on a contractual basis out of necessity and choice. Particularly as there’s little job security in the current economy. 

But what does it mean for your hiring efforts? Well, if you’re finding it difficult to hire full-time employees, it may be worth looking for gig workers instead. It all depends on what your company’s needs are. 

2. Data-Driven Recruitment 

Another trend that hiring professionals need to keep on top of is data-driven recruitment. With more pressure to hire the right people, both cost and time-effectively, many organizations have turned to data to help them make smarter hiring decisions; and avoid unconscious bias. 

It’s particularly useful if you’re working towards key metrics. For example, you may want to measure your hiring velocity to see how efficient your hiring process is; alternatively, you might look at your hiring budget to ensure that you’re not overspending on your hiring campaigns. 

Whichever metric you track, you’ll need to start gathering and analyzing data in order to do it effectively. Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) make this easy to do, but there are other tools you can use such as Google Analytics. 

The type of data you might capture includes: how long it takes for people to complete your application forms, how many clicks on your job adverts convert to applications, how long it takes for your offers to be expected, how much ROI you’re getting on your recruitment tools and so on. 

Once you’ve gathered this data, you can then use it to make informed decisions. For example, if it’s taking too long for people to complete applications (or they’re abandoning them altogether), perhaps you need to cut the form down or re-consider the questions you’re asking. 

Ultimately, you’ll want to use data to make informed decisions, save time and money, and of course, to make sure you’re making quality hires. 

3. Candidate Experience 

Candidates have held the power in the U.S. job market for some time now, and considering the most recent economic data on the labor market, the candidate experience remains more important than ever.  

After all, people are more likely to accept your offers if they have a positive route to hire; and reputation matters in the current market. For that reason, this is a key hiring trend you need to be on top of. 

This is especially true as there are more avenues for candidates to air their views online than ever before. Whether it’s social media, or employee review sites; people aren’t afraid to share any negative experiences with other prospective candidates, potentially putting them off applying to your jobs, attending interviews, or accepting your job offers. 

So, what makes a positive candidate experience? Well, it all starts with your job advert. You need to write this with the candidate in mind; what do they want to know? What would make them want to apply? Use engaging language and break the copy up with bullet points so it’s easy to read. If your advert is poorly-written or doesn’t make sense, you’ll fall at the first hurdle. 

You then need to think about the application process and next steps. If they have to jump through a number of hoops just to show their interest in the role, they’ll probably abandon it altogether. Similarly, if there’s far too many rounds of interviews, they may lose interest and go with another employer who’s willing to offer them the job quicker. 

Ultimately, communication is key. See it as a relationship-building exercise. In order to get candidates interested in the role and brand, you need to put the work in. Acknowledge applications, keep them up to date throughout the hiring process and don’t wait too long to offer the job. This will speed up your hiring process and improve their experience; it’s a win-win. 

4. Machine Learning & Automation 

We couldn’t talk about hiring trends without mentioning machine learning and automaton. Both have picked up across many industries in recent years, helping to take over some of the more menial tasks and improving the overall user experience. 

In the staffing industry, machine learning may not be something you implement yourself. Indeed, it’s something that industry suppliers are investing in to improve results for users. At Resume-Library, we’ve used machine learning to improve the relevancy of job matches for candidates, ultimately driving more applications to our clients’ vacancies. 

To do this, we manually rated the relevancy of hundreds of thousands of job postings against specific search terms, before feeding this information into a “machine.” The machine is then able to apply this logic to all jobs on our site, ensuring candidates are presented with the most relevant results. 

Another popular way that companies use machine learning and automation in their hiring practices is through resume screening. There are lots of areas of the hiring process that take up time and effort; with screening being one of them. ATS’s like SmartRecruiters are great for this and can help you to make effective, data-driven hiring decisions. 

There are plenty of other areas that can be automated or that can benefit from machine learning. For example, assessment tools can help you understand how well someone will fit in your company and team, and whether they have the ability to do the job. 

Alongside this, there are tools that can help with candidate engagement efforts. Chatbots, for example, are useful for answering any questions applicants might have and/or keeping them up to date on the progress of their application. Interview scheduling tools can help too and save a lot of back and forth between employers and candidates. 

It’s worth considering what areas of your process need streamlining and how you can do this; it might require you to invest in some new technologies. 

Stay on Top of These Trends 

Unfortunately, there are a range of external factors impacting companies’ ability to hire right now. But that’s why it’s more important than ever to stay on top of the latest trends and ensure your hiring process is fit for purpose. 

Take this time to look at its efficiency; are there areas that are slowing it down? Are you spending too much, or too little money? What do candidate say about your brand online and how can you improve this? These are all questions you should be asking yourself. 

Alongside this, it’s worth speaking to your suppliers to see whether they’re staying on top of these trends and how they can help you meet your goals. At Resume-Library, we work in partnership with SmartRecruiters to enable its users to post jobs onto our site directly from their platform; and we’re launching a Resume Search integration very soon.  

Both help to streamline the process and make it a lot smoother for candidates and hiring professionals. 

With all the small steps it takes to make a hire, it can be hard to pinpoint where the process is dragging, we did some digging and this is what we found!

Last year the average time-to-hire was 23.8 days, up from 13 days in 2010 according to Glassdoor findings. This lag time is a problem because it costs your company revenue, and makes for a bad candidate experience. Though a variety of factors play a role in the time-to-hire metric, including low unemployment and a lack of skilled workers, or just workers in general, there are steps your organization can take in order to reduce that time and stop costing themselves precious resources, not to mention their reputation.

Costs of protracted time-to-hire:

• Loss of revenue: Every day a job goes unfilled you lose the revenue that an employee would have generated.
• Internal Resentment: Burning out current employees who have to cover the work of the open position.
• Bad Candidate Experience: Candidates feel nervous, frustrated, or in the dark.

• Opportunity Loss: Candidates may take your slowness as a sign of poor company communication, and take another offer.

To identify an action plan for more efficient recruiting we went to the numbers! Hiring is a multi-step process, involving many departments, so we looked at 30,000 hires to isolate each step and locate the problem area. Here’s what we found: There are four basic steps in the talent acquisition flow – view application, review candidates, interview, and offer. And it’s these two final steps that are causing TA teams to stall out.

So who did we survey?

We looked at 30,000 hires from SmartRecruiters last year from small, large or enterprise companies in Financial Services, Education Management, Health Care, Retail, and Information/Technology Services. In the interest of delivering the most relevant information, we omitted the extreme outlier cases. You may notice that our average time to hire is 4.8 days shorter than the average gleaned from Glassdoor, this is most likely because all our data comes from organizations using an applicant tracking system (ATS), whereas the above survey includes teams working without this technology

Let’s go to the numbers:

Average: 19 days

• 1 day to see an application
• 3 days in review
• 9 days to  interview
• 6 days to make an offer

Fastest 25 percent: 5 days

• Less than 1 day to see an application
• Less than 1 day in review
• 3 days to interview
• 1 (next) day to make an offer

Slowest 10 percent: 85 days

• 11 days to see an application
• 18 days in review
• 30 days to interview
• 26 days to make an offer

Interviews are the slowest step no matter what type of company. Quicker alternatives to multiple in-person interviews could be phone screenings, video interviewing, and/or online assessments! A quick win for hiring managers using Smartrecruiters was making use of the mobile app, which cut the hiring process by an average of two days when compared to those using their desktop computer exclusively!

Surprising takeaways and expert commentary:

Lengthy hiring processes could be hurting more than helping when it comes to tech talent! As expected high-volume low-skill hiring, like retail, is done much faster than information/technology services, however, that time could be hurting you more than you think. Engagement expert from WilsonHCG, Paul Dodd says.

“In regards to tech, there are a ton of aptitudes, skills, and knowledge that needs to be verified, and depending on the latest & greatest profile, with things like java stack or hadoop, your talent pool is small. Any, one professional would possibly have two or three offers so if you aren’t fast enough, the opportunity cost for not having them on your team could be significant.”

Internal and referral candidates take longer to hire. Internal candidates spent an average of 14 days in the interview stage and referrals 17, while the offer stage took 8 days for internal candidates and 4 days (which is actually below average) for referrals.  Perhaps the familiar nature of these candidates make the time factor seem less urgent, but “This is a huge miss,” warns Katherine Moening, marketing manager for Click Boarding.

“Current employees can make, or break, your hiring game. Provide them with the same level of care and attention as new hires during the hiring and onboarding process – and they’ll become champions for your business and your brand. Treat them as less urgent, and they’ll go find someone that’ll treat them better.”

It takes more time to reject a qualified candidate, who was interviewed, than to make the hire by a factor of over 3 days. When you have your pick of qualified candidates it can be hard to tell one they didn’t make the cut, but remember timely communication is key to keeping rejected candidates in your candidate relationship management system (CRM) talent pool for the next position that opens up!

Learn more about this survey by reading our in-depth unpacking in “Terminal Velocity: Where Most Hiring Time is Spent, Stalled and Saved“.

How one Wall Street bigshot found himself in prison, and the company he launched after his release connects the formerly incarcerated with second-chance jobs.

Approximately one in three American adults have criminal records – that’s 70 million people, and nearly 75 percent of them are still unemployed a year after their release. With few prospects to cover basic expenses, many ex-offenders return to illicit activities. Unable to make ends meet, an overwhelming majority (89 percent) are unemployed at the time of their re-arrest. The stigmas surrounding people with conviction histories systematically exclude them from countless job opportunities, and the current state of affairs shows little sign of improvement.

Back in the late 90s, entrepreneur Richard Bronson found himself in a prison cell, wondering how he would turn his life around. A few years following his release, Bronson became the founder and CEO of 70 Million Jobs, the first national employment platform for people with criminal records.

Seeking to provide second chances for the one in three Americans with conviction histories, Bronson sees his company as providing “double bottom line returns”, doing massive social good as well as building big, profitable businesses.

To understand more about how 70 Million Jobs came to be, we talk to Bronson about his transition from prison cell to the C-suite. This is his story.

Twenty-two months into my sentence the anxiety kicked in. I was sitting on my cot in a federal prison with eight weeks left on my two-year sentence for securities fraud, and my impending freedom made me feel only one thing: dread.

I began working on Wall Street in the early 1990s, and after working at several of the largest investment banks, I made a career pivot into a small brokerage firm on Long Island, Stratton Oakmont. You may know this company better as the infamous Wolf of Wall Street firm. I did so well there I quickly became partner.

My ambitions were greater than Stratton Oakmont, and after a year I left to found my own financial services firm. Our success was swift; in 18 months, I had 500 employees, and was generating $100 million in annual revenue. I was getting very rich very fast.

As portrayed in Wolf of Wall Street, our success came from conducting business the wrong way—the illegal way. I knew my behavior was wrong, but I told myself “everyone’s doing it.” I wish I could say it was a mistake or they got the wrong guy, but none of that was true. I was guilty of securities fraud. So, despite having paid everyone back, I was still—rightfully—punished with a prison sentence.

I came out of prison destitute and nearly homeless—thank God for a sister and her couch. I wanted to put the past behind me and live an honest, productive life. However, accomplishing this proved more daunting than I ever expected. Old friends deserted me and new acquaintances feared I was “radioactive”. Once they learned about my incarceration, many kept me at arm’s length. Over the next several years I went from one bad situation to another. I thought I fully learned the lesson of humility, having scrubbed toilets for hundreds of inmates, but class had just begun.

I eventually ended up working at Defy Ventures, a prominent non-profit in the reentry space. I loved the opportunity to help my brothers and sisters as they struggled with their transition to freedom. It was deeply rewarding work—very good for my karma—but over time I became convinced that reentry was ready for disruption, specifically with a for-profit approach.

So I launched 70 Million Jobs, not knowing if large, national employers would be willing to pay to access our large community of job seekers. We got our answer almost immediately: while we don’t sell them all, the vast majority have been highly interested in our work, while many have discovered that hiring folks with records is not only a great way to fill jobs but also a powerful step in asserting their leadership as fair-chance employers.

The real heroes are our job seekers. Studies show that many of them become an employer’s best hire. For the simple fact that they have few alternatives, they know they have to perform well to retain their job. And they know that their employer took a chance in hiring them. So, unlike many in our workforce, they typically reward their employer with greater retention. Great performance and retention is a home run for any HR professional.

They know the ins and outs of recruiting great candidates, but does your organization know the best processes for hiring a full-time talent acquisition professional?

Business growth starts and ends with hiring the right people, and as your organization continues to add employees, issues around people management, workflow processes, and legal regulations become more complex. A solid HR foundation is critical to business success, and the bricklayers of people operations are Human Resources professionals. You know this, and so do the candidates applying to your organization’s nascent, or nonexistent, TA team.

Hiring for these roles is difficult for startups that are busy focusing on developing product and honing business objectives, but beware waiting too long. According to renowned Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen, “The number of companies in the Valley that put HR off to the side and decided it wasn’t important and are now dealing with some level of catastrophe—either a public catastrophe or one that’s in the making … and it’s totally unnecessary. If they had taken HR seriously at an earlier point, they probably would have been able to fight a lot of their issues.”

Establishing an effective HR department is critical to growing your business, building company culture, and managing employees. Here’s how to hire a top-quality HR professional at the right time for your company, from crafting a solid job description to what to ask during an interview.

At What Stage Does Your Business Need a Full-Time HR Hire?

The short answer is: the earlier the better. From a legal perspective, organizations with 50 or more employee begin encountering state and federal regulations like the Family and Medical Leave Act. Hiring a HR professional is an absolute must after crossing this threshold.

For smaller startups, tight finances may be the biggest hurdle when launching a Human Resources department, but the greatest success happens when HR is considered early in the process, even before the recognized need for an HR function. For startups with limited financial resources, hiring a full-time HR professional may not be an option, which is why outsourcing the job to a consultant can be a cost-saving alternative. Seasoned advisors bring value and impact to organizations by leveraging strategic TA to drive business growth at any company size.

“It’s about asking what would you like to achieve from the business side—what are the business objectives,” said Anna Brandt, HR Advisor at Backbase and N26. “Then, it’s about asking how do we make sure that the recruitment plan or TA strategy will support the delivery of those objectives?”

Business objectives should also be a consideration when developing a profile for what kind of HR professional your organization needs. For example, if data privacy and compliance are important to your industry, then it’s crucial your HR hire is knowledgeable and experienced in the legal regulations affecting your organization.

Likewise, fast-moving startups will need someone who can multi-task, has high-energy, and is able to switch gears quickly. The ideal candidate for an e-commerce corporation might look very different, so aligning your organization’s HR goals with the ideal candidate profile can help refine the search when it’s time to hire.

Job Descriptions for HR Managers and Recruiters

As with any job posting, you will want to outline the core functions of the role. Key responsibilities for an HR professional may include:

• Organizing departmental planning, including hiring and termination policies
• Overseeing employment and compliance with federal and state regulations
• Implementing performance management and improvement systems
• Managing employee salary, bonus incentives, and other compensation programs
• Managing employee safety, welfare, wellness, and health
• Organizing employee training programs
• Managing employee relations, including fielding complaints, concerns, and feedback
• Offering employee services and counseling

Depending on the size of your organization, it may be important to emphasize how the role could evolve over time as the HR department expands, bringing changes to the role and its responsibilities. But, be careful to avoid clichés like “ad hoc responsibilities”, which can deter great candidates.

Tech Proficiency Matters

Technological innovation like artificial intelligence is advancing exponentially, and the HR industry invests billions of dollars in new tools for recruitment, performance management, engagement, training, inclusion, and analytics. “Recruiting has really been transformed these past years,” said Hessam Lavi, Director of Product at SmartRecruiters. “We’ve seen a shift from HR and recruiting coming from an admin function, or merely a cost center, to much more of a strategic function.”

Today’s HR professionals need a strong understanding of modern HR technology, like automated sourcing tools, talent acquisition suites, and candidate relationship management integrations. That’s why strong HR candidates know how to implement technology to reduce the amount of time spent on administrative tasks, improve data quality, and free up more time for value-added tasks. This requires an understanding of the HR tech tools available in the market and an ability to pitch business leaders and stakeholders on investments that will yield a high potential return.

Interview Questions for HR Professionals

HR managers and recruiters are expected to be on the front lines of hiring new talent for your organization, which means you need to understand their ability to assess and interview potential candidates. Sample questions for HR professionals may include:

• How will you drive results in your role?
• How do you conduct job terminations?
• What kinds of interview questions do you typically ask?
• Describe a difficult encounter with an employer/manager/colleague and how you handled it.
• Describe a time when you didn’t follow policy or had to deviate from policy.
• How would you deal with an unethical situation? Any examples?
• What kinds of trends do you think will shape the future of HR departments in the coming years?

As with any strong candidate, responses should drive positive conversations, demonstrate thorough research of the company, and reinforce the importance of HR’s role in the company’s overall business growth strategy.

The End Goal

At the end of the day, hiring a HR professional will allow your company to develop better employees and hit your company growth goals. According to Marjorie Adams, President and CEO of Fourlane, “An internal HR person will improve internal processes and development, including tracking vacation time, improving performance review process, helping employees set goals and managing benefits. After all, a business owner doesn’t have the time or talent to take these tasks on, let alone do a good job administering them.”

MoBerries created a networking platform that offers equal opportunities for candidates of all backgrounds, and here’s why they believe efforts of inclusion are the responsibility of all HR professionals.

Harvard University psychologist Mahzarin Banaji suggests that “we behave in ways that are not known to our own conscious awareness, that we are being driven to act in certain ways not because we are explicitly prejudiced, but because we may carry in our heads the thumbprint of the culture.”

One of the driving principles at MoBerries is to proactively tackle bias, particularly implicit bias, in HR. A recent study by the Ascend Foundation found that “white men and white women in five major Silicon Valley firms were 154 percent more likely to become executives than their Asian counterparts.” Racial bias is just one example of the type of prejudice that negatively impacts all levels of the hiring hierarchy, from internships to C-level management. As such, it’s imperative to business success that companies and employees work against bias in the workplace, especially when it comes to hiring practices.

At MoBerries, our team shares the vision of creating an accessible job market for everyone. Launching MoBerries in new markets like Southeast Asia was a crucial first step in making this dream a reality, but our inspiration for creating a level playing field is rooted in our personal experience seeing disadvantaged people work hard to prove themselves and fight for equal access to opportunities.

Learning from Experiences

Victoria’s Secret model-turned-programmer Lyndsey Scott recently made headlines when she spoke out against internet critics who belittled her accomplishments as a computer programmer. In addition to her role as Lead iOS software engineer at RallyBound, Lyndsey is also a highly active contributor on the computer programming website Stack Overflow, and previously held the top spot for most iOS question answered on the platform.

“The whole reason I started answering questions on Stack Overflow and writing tutorials in the first place was because I was struggling to have companies take me seriously,” said Lyndsey.

Lyndsey’s bout with internet haters reveals that even the most talented professionals face biases if they are in the minority. What’s more, research consistently reports that “a team with diverse backgrounds has diverse ideas and approaches to problem-solving.” Hiring diverse candidates sounds like a no-brainer for companies, right? Yet, the struggle for women, people of color, and other minorities in STEM jobs shows no signs of slowing.

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Winning the war for talent is not solely about attracting the best candidates on paper, but learning how to capitalize on people’s strengths, and good managers understand that talented individuals can take non-traditional paths—like Lyndsey Scott—on their career journeys.

Though we worked together for only a short time, Nasir Zubairi was an important mentor for both me and my partner, Lucio. After observing our existing business strategies, Nasir refined our sales pitches and follow-ups to be more impactful and engaging. He also proactively changed our hiring strategies for sales positions, allowing us to build a team of complementary personalities for our different team functions that affect how we run our business to this day.

It is our job as HR professionals to create opportunities of inclusion that facilitate business success and have positive impact on people’s lives. MoBerries salutes companies like 70 Million Jobs, which offers opportunities to individuals with conviction histories. The company claims that its candidates boast higher-than-average employee retention rates and provides tax incentives for employers.

Another company inspiring social change is MoBerries partner CodeDoor, a network that transforms underdog candidates into sought-after professionals by offering high-level coding courses to underrepresented groups in the tech industry.   

We must endorse and support creative solutions from companies like CodeDoor and 70 Million Jobs to win the war for talent. With countless groups being excluded from jobs in tech due to implicit biases and outdated recruitment practices, these groups need a new status quo.

For many underserved groups, limited work options can lead to increased criminal activity and poverty. The top reasons that many teens join gangs include:

• Lack of jobs
• Poverty compounded by social isolation
• Early academic failure and lack of school attachment

Creating a more inclusive job market is one of the easiest ways to address these problems and provide minorities opportunities for future success. At MoBerries, we look for people who want to work, develop, and improve by asking questions like: Do people show up? Do they accomplish their assigned tasks? Do they work well with others?

Are Non-Biased Robots the Solution?

Of the myriad articles and tips on how to minimize or avoid biases in HR, most repeat the same types of advice; namely, accept the fact that you might have a cognitive bias and fight it. As Banaji suggests, humans struggle to turn a blind eye towards race, gender, or physical appearance, but if we want to create truly inclusive workplaces we need to look for new solutions. Here is where AI holds promise for the future.

A common criticism of AI in the hiring process is the likelihood that it reproduces human biases by detecting patterns of underrepresentation and copying them, keeping underserved groups in the minority. The MoBerries platform is unique in that it can evaluate bias trends on a macro (company) and micro (candidate) level. MoBerries leverages AI sourcing to connect active job seekers and employers, judging candidate suitability by multiple criteria—not only a resume or CV. MoBerries also evaluates the candidate’s fit according to the job description and role responsibilities, as well as the employer’s interactions and feedback with the candidate. These data are then benchmarked against other employers in the network to determine their validity.

The team at MoBerries is committed to our promise to help you break into and thrive in the job market regardless of your race, gender, age, or economic background. We are proud to do our part alongside other companies, thought-leaders, and executives who pledge to change the way we interact with—and hire—all types of talent.

Perception is reality. It is our responsibility to shape it.

Losing candidates at the offer stage can destroy a recruiter’s confidence. Here’s how to make an offer even the most demanding job seeker can’t turn down.

After vetting and interviewing down to a final selection, a recruiter’s efforts culminate with a final step, one that can make or break the hiring process: the offer. This moment marks the beginning of a professional working relationship with a new employee, so it’s important the experience is smooth and painless. Communication is key to orchestrating a successful offer, which is why we’ve broken down every stage of the process so recruiters know exactly how to professionally extend a job offer, negotiate terms, and close the deal.

The Setup

As recruiters and candidates work towards a final offer, it’s important that everyone’s expectations are aligned as early as possible. Any mistakes made during the hiring process need to be addressed at this point. Before moving forward, recruiters should have a solid grasp of the following information:

• The company’s preferred start date and salary range for the position (including bonuses, benefits, and company perks)
• The candidate’s requested compensation, desired start date, and most recent compensation (including bonuses, commissions, and benefits)
• Background and reference checks from the candidate’s previous managers.
• The candidate’s motivation for wanting the position

While financial compensation is the top concern for candidates, many of today’s job seekers place a high value on company culture and work-life balance, making them important considerations when entering salary negotiations. Knowing what truly matters to the candidate is essential information that can help close the deal.

Prime Your Serious Candidates

Recruiters should discuss a possible job offer with serious candidates during a late-stage interview or a post-interview phone call. This gives recruiters another opportunity to discuss the candidates’ expectations and ensure they align with the company’s position. Emphasizing that the conversation is not an offer, and that other candidates may still be considered, recruiters can assess the candidate’s salary expectations, targeted start date, and benefits package. Does the candidate agree with these terms? This is another opportunity to uncover obstacles that could slow the offer process, such as counter offers from current employers.

Professionally Communicate & Deliver the Offer

Normally, a recruiter verbally communicates the offer before sending an official letter. In addition to the phone or in-person confirmation, an email announcing the offer along with an attached formal letter is common practice. For even faster offers, many modern ATS platforms automate approvals for candidates and hiring teams, preventing unnecessary delays in the sign-off process. When sending this email, the body copy should briefly reinforce the company’s culture, values, and the opportunity being offered—save the professional language and fine print for the job offer letter. There, be sure to include the following:

• Congratulations to the candidate
• New job title & short job description
• An agreed-upon start date
• Work hours
• Probation period
• Base salary, bonuses, or commissions
• Any legal requirements (employment visa, non-disclosure agreements, etc.)
• Health benefits
• Time off entitlements
• Other benefits
• Deadline for candidate response

Timing and momentum are crucial, and maintaining a fast-paced hiring plan ensures candidates aren’t being lost in the tangles of lengthy processes. In today’s job market, top-quality candidates juggle multiple offers at once, and will not wait for companies that procrastinate. With tech-forward features in modern ATS’s like real-time offers and one-click offer acceptances, hiring teams have no excuse for not closing candidates quickly and effectively. Remember: your top choice candidate is likely a top choice at another company as well. Almost half of employers in a recent recruiter sentiment study said their offer rejection rates range from one to 10 percent. Top reasons candidates turned down offers included: accepting another job, insufficient compensation and lengthy hiring practices.

Recruiters can pitch their company and appeal to the candidate’s motivation by describing the candidate’s immediate and meaningful impact on the team, highlighting future career opportunities, and mentioning the company’s strengths (growth potential, desirable culture, financial security, etc). Recruiters should aim to connect the candidate’s previous experience and skills to the new position, and demonstrate how this will positively impact their career growth.

Negotiating Salary

Inevitably, recruiters will need to negotiate financial compensation in order to maintain a candidate’s interest. Some factors to take into consideration include:

• The candidate’s quality, cultural fit, and value to the company
• The industry standard rate for the position
• Cost of living adjustments based on the city
• The possibility of a counter-offer from a current employer

Rather than approach the salary negotiation as a way to secure the best candidate for the lowest price, recruiters should package the job as an opportunity for long-term career growth.

Reiterate and Close

The more preparation a recruiter can do before extending the official offer, the more likely a candidate will be receptive and agreeable to the terms. Recruiters who bond with candidates by aligning the candidate’s skills, experiences, and motivations with those of the company prepare them for a rewarding career path. The more these expectations are communicated before and during the offer stage, the more likely the employee will put forth their best work for the company. By streamlining the job offer process with a technology-forward approach, recruiters get top candidates to “Yes” quicker.

Advancements in HR Tech have streamlined the hiring process online, but one French company decided to use SmartRecruiters to do things a bit differently. So what did they do, and what do they mean when they say “job dating”?

After investigating several ATS options available on the market, then thoroughly examining three providers, we at the Lesaffre group, a company founded in the 19th century and headquartered in Lille, chose to partner with SmartRecruiters. As a global player in yeasts and fermentation, we employ 10,000 people in nearly 80 subsidiaries based in 50 countries. Our first objective was to implement a solution to deliver excellent user experience to both candidates and recruiters across our home market, and after only two months of signing the agreement in November, 2017, the system was already being used by 18 members of our HR team in France.

The collaboration between our HR team and SmartRecruiters, from design to implementation, was outstanding. We worked closely to ensure the software’s configuration adapted to our needs, and we were very satisfied with the level of support and responsiveness we received.

Things went so smoothly, in fact, we felt confident we could come up with a novel approach to our next round of hiring, and have some fun in the process.

We got together for a brainstorm, and eventually decided to organize a recruitment event, but something a little different, one we categorized as “job-dating”. We thought it would be cool to bring together candidates, managers, and HR in once physical place, and use different digital communication tools simultaneously to accelerate the recruitment process. This would also give people the opportunity to discuss career opportunities with Lesaffre, at Lessafre.

We promoted the event through different channels like press, radio, and social networks, advising candidates to register their participation on a special website created for the event, and link their résumés to a relevant job offer using SmartRecruiters. Eventually, we invited more than 100 candidates to our facility.

On 28 March, 2018, candidates were welcomed at our Baking Center, in Lille, by members of our HR team, and in case anyone had any difficulty signing up to the platform, we were able to guide them to the candidate path via SmartRecruiters’ mobile app, and their résumés became instantly accessible to the recruitment team.

Meanwhile, our managers who’d already downloaded the SR mobile app, began “hiring” on their mobile phones, and after a 15-minute briefing for each candidate, those selected were interviewed both by a manager and a member of the recruitment team. All feedback, assessments, and comments, were captured in the SR app using cell-phones or tablets. It was a lot like what used to be called speed-dating, but far more technologically advanced, and matchmaking became recruiting.

The number of candidates we were able to welcome and assess at the event was the first sign of success, but what was even more important is how this approach enabled us to work efficiently with candidates, hiring managers and recruitment team. Having captured all inputs and comments into the same platform, Smartrecruiters ensured continuity after our experimental job-dating event, and alignment on the next steps of the recruitment process was the easiest part.

Recruitment has transformed rapidly, but some insights remain timeless. We mined the slush pile at the quote farm, unearthing some untarnished gems from which the most cynical can’t help but draw wisdom.

The hiring process is a different beast whether you’re a recruiter, a hiring manager, or a candidate. While the ultimate goal is to match the right candidate to the right job, sometimes the procedural challenges offer the most valuable insights for the future. TA professionals lean on past leadership to improve recruitment today. That’s why we’ve gathered quotes from accomplished entrepreneurs and business leaders that will challenge your perceptions of recruiting, and give you that much-needed kick in the ass.

On Candidate Experience

“Understand your candidates and why they’re making job changes. People leave people, not companies, Make sure you’re giving them something they’re excited to come to.” — Robin Mee, President and Founder of Mee Derby

If we truly believe that people are the core of HR, then creating the best possible candidate experience should be a no-brainer. In an era where company reviews on sites like Glassdoor are widely accessible to prospective applicants, organizations cannot afford to ignore the importance of a positive first impression. Today’s companies are increasingly aware of how candidates view them, not just as potential employers, but on their social initiatives, and even how they write open job descriptions.

On Employer Branding

“Engagement has to be human, because people trust people more than brands. Our employees are the ones who personify Shell.” — Ana Alonso, Global Marketing Head at Shell

A company’s reputation as an employer is hugely important to candidates. Today’s job seekers have greater access to company information than ever before, with 75 percent considering an employer’s brand before even applying for a job. Company fit and culture are moving into the top considerations for candidates who value connections with people more than with a brand. Employers wanting to attract the right candidates should focus on building an internal culture that supports these relationships.

On Hiring the Right Person (or People)

“When you’re in a startup, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is ten percent of the company. So why wouldn’t you take as much time as necessary to find all the A players? If three were not so great, why would you want a company where 30 percent of your people are not so great? A small company depends on great people much more than a big company does.” — Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple

“If we weren’t still hiring great people and pushing ahead at full speed, it would be easy to fall behind and become some mediocre company.” — Bill Gates, Co-Founder of Microsoft

Steve Jobs may be right about one thing. True, individuals have more impact at startups, but that doesn’t mean they are less influential at larger companies. While we would be hard-pressed to argue with the man who built a successful multinational tech firm, Microsoft’s equally savvy tech mogul makes a strong counterpoint – that maintaining great hires is crucial to an organization’s growth. The takeaway: hiring top-quality talent starts in a company’s infancy, and if done correctly, will carry things into maturity.

On Training

“The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay.” — Henry Ford, Founder of Ford Motor Company

Onboarding rarely goes beyond the typical welcome packets, employee handbooks, and payroll forms for many recent hires. And while no organization wants to suffer the financial cost of losing a freshly trained worker, this quote from Henry Ford argues that companies who don’t invest in employee training risk greater loss. The future workforce will need a balance of technological, social and emotional, and higher cognitive skills, and many of these will require occasional honing. To that end, it behooves companies to initiate skill workshops, training seminars, and other exercises to maintain a high level of employee performance.

On Team Building

“The best teamwork comes from men [and women] who are working independently toward one goal in unison.” — James Cash Penney, Founder of JC Penney

The founder of JC Penney opened his first store in 1902, and over the course of his life grew it into a $12B organization with 850 stores across the US. Feats like this are only possible with a united team working towards a common goal, where every person understands how his or her role is instrumental in achieving success. Expectations on an individual level demonstrate to employees how every team function aligns with the greater company mission. This not only establishes a value-add for all tasks, but instills a sense of purpose among the entire team.

On Management

“Many think of management as cutting deals and laying people off and hiring people and buying and selling companies. That’s not management, that’s deal making. Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practiced that way, it’s a magnificent profession” – Clayton M. Christensen, HBS Professor & Disruptive Innovation Expert

It can be difficult to know exactly what happens behind the closed doors of corner offices as recruiters fight in the trenches for the next great hire, but as this quote from Clayton Christensen suggests, the function of management is to provide support and mentorship to employees. Great managers identify potential, maintain a pulse on company health, and empower employees to reach their goals. Companies can only grow as fast as the people who run them, from managers to executives.

In their shiny new e-commerce avatar, can battered AA rebrand, be forgiven by justice-minded Millennials, and embraced by woke Gen Zers?

For Sam, Tuesdays meant one thing –  the conference call. For one hour each week, every American Apparel store manager, visual merchandiser, and back-stock director the world over dialed into stream-of-consciousness rants from then-CEO Dov Charney, each employee praying they weren’t the unlucky soul singled out for reprimand.

During his three years working at AA stores in Seattle, Sam, a sales associate turned visual merchandiser, became accustomed to what he describes as the company head’s “Trump-esque” tirades. Some store manager in Ann Arbor would be called out for slow sales, or a back-stock director in Tel Aviv would be given a raise for suggesting a new sock color. It was that arbitrary and unpredictable. Sam didn’t love the work, but he wanted to be part of such a cool brand.

Back then, there was a certain prestige in being connected with the hyper-sexual, made-in-America label. The clothes were cool and ethically made, the aesthetic was very “in”, and anyone who worked there was “in” by extension. But, while AA had all the right optics, the reality of working there was not in line with its image.

Looking back, Sam says his hours were routinely taken away as punishment for “infractions”, and understaffing put unnecessary pressure on store managers who were “mainly a bunch of 19 and 20-year-old kids trying to figure it out on the fly.”

AA filed for Chapter 11 in November, 2016, with $234.9 million in debts, a steep descent from its peak profitability of $634 million in 2013. Bad news for hipsters now required to seek a new neon bodysuit supplier, but comeuppance for employees who came to see the oversexualized, super skinny, white AF label as all that’s wrong with the fashion world.

When Sam heard that his former employer was back, this time online-only, he couldn’t help shaking his head. “Honestly, I thought it was foolish. They just aren’t relevant anymore. There are other brands doing the same thing with less bad press.”

All the same, and for better or worse, AA is back. The new site, launched last August in the US and globally just this April, features a “back to basics” campaign, complete with iconic neon bodysuits, crop tops, hoodies, and all the rest. The difference between American Apparel then and American Apparel now seems to be, essentially, the absence of brick-and-mortar sales points, and a tacked-on mantra-du-jour of “diversity and inclusiveness”. The April press release stated new AA models would be “real people who represent a diversity of body types, ages and ethnicities.”

But can our memories really be that short? Could AA truly now be all #goodvibesonly, or are someone’s shiny disco pants on fire? The challenge in courting of Millennials and Gen Zers will be proving authenticity in a political climate that demands corporate integrity in exchange for brand loyalty.

Sarah Wilson, Head of People at SmartRecruiters, and former director of talent acquisition for Aritzia, has no illusions about what AA is up against in their search for redemption in this day and age. “It’s a really competitive industry to begin with, but rebranding now, on the heels of movements like #timesup and #metoo, will be an uphill battle, more so than it would have been five years ago, or will be five years from now.”

This challenge is even more pronounced for a brand whose ad campaigns cashed in on the sexy-skirting-pervy vibe, ever since its first store opened in LA in 2003. The AA aesthetic, often described as “porntastic” and previously lauded as edgy, crossed into creepy once its founder and CEO, Dov Charney, admitted to masturbating in front of a female reporter from Jane. This opened the doors for a slew of complaints from employees claiming sexual harassment, all of which ended in a $3M payout from the company, and $9.3M in legal fees.

AA’s current head of brand marketing, Sabina Weber, claimed in a recent interview with Fashionista that “the brand is still sexy, but it’s about a woman’s choice to be sexy; it’s in the gaze; it’s ‘If I wanna show my ass to the world, I’m gonna show my ass to the world’.”

The first picture is a swimsuit campaign from the brand’s latest iteration, while the “Spring Fever” addition is taken from the AA archives. The difference is negligible, even if, under the wing of their Canadian acquirer, Gildan Activewear, the company raised the minimum age of models to 21, and in their most recent casting call requested they be over 25.

It could be argued, however, that anyone over 25 remembers AA scandals like the “teens do it better” t-shirt – created in collaboration with Ey! Magateen, a magazine “celebrating the sexuality of young men”, which used models as young as 16. AA also owned the maxim “all press is good press” by notoriously having ads banned for sexualizing school-age girls.

Other efforts of the new dispensation include employing more female photographers, and sourcing brand ambassadors from social media – the people they refer to as “real models” – and staffing AA HQ with roughly 25 mostly young, mostly female employees. (In its heyday the label employed 10,000 people.)

So what more can AA do to let consumers and candidates know it’s taking this second chance seriously? For Joel Cheesman, employer branding expert and founder of Ratedly – an employer reputation management platform – it’s simple: “People are willing to forgive when you admit wrongdoing and outline the ways change will occur.”

If you ever find yourself in AA’s situation, Cheesman suggests ridding yourself of anyone in a leadership position from the past, particularly the CEO, bring in people with a flawless background to lead the company, and spin how tomorrow is “a new day and a fresh start” to the media.

American Apparel may be off to a good start in re-establishing themselves as socially conscious, but even with the figurehead gone – and running a copycat company called LA Apparel – have the hiring practices he created really been eradicated, and if so, what else needs to change for AA to claim a true transformation?

As Dov Charney has said in the past, “I am in the DNA of the company,” and it’s true, but his imprint is pathological. The dysfunction is in the proverbial company fabric, and it’s going to be hard to get the Dov stank off these ethically made clothes.

To wit, the following email that internal AA investigators, keen on finding evidence to oust the troublesome CEO, found addressed to Charney from a female employee:

Add this to other accounts of Charney yelling racial slurs, sending pornographic emails to employees, then later, during the investigation, requesting workers to “delete any naughty emails”.

Meanwhile, AA stores had taken on a different type of toxicity, mostly in hiring and firing practices. “There were no standards of how employees should be treated, or how managers should act,” Sam recalls, “and this behavior went right up the chain to corporate.”

At 19, Sam was hired by a friend who managed a Seattle AA store. A few weeks later he was promoted to floor manager. “I don’t think anyone looked at my resume, I just showed up and was hired. I don’t think most people were actually qualified for the jobs they had.”

Six months in, Sam was upped to visual merchandiser. “To this day I don’t know if I did everything a visual merchandiser is supposed to do, ” he admits. “I placed orders, arranged the store and made sure I enforced the dress code,” which was to wear American Apparel, head to toe. “That meant if someone broke the dress code, the choice was to buy something on the spot or go home.

“We were required to keep the store open an hour past close if we were within $100 of our sales goal. Once I couldn’t stay late, and the next week I saw my hours were cut from 32 to 4. I followed up with my manager and then the district manager, but I was just put in a circle of them referring back to one another. No one would give me a straight answer.”

In 2010, Gawker published a series of anonymous AA employee recountings, which let readers into the catty chaos behind the Helvetica storefronts. For example:

And there were specific conditions on hiring black women:

“It’s an extremely fine line for apparel companies, between articulating brand image and discriminatory hiring practices,” says Smartrecruiters’ Sarah Wilson. “American Apparel isn’t alone in that. It’s a broad challenge in the fashion industry.”

The company will undoubtedly seek out new employees who know and love the brand’s aesthetic, but in the digital space, no one will have to physically embody it: consumer-facing retail positions are generally entry level, whereas UX designers and digital marketers have university degrees or equivalent experience, which both raise the age of entry, and shift focus from appearance to qualifications. “With an e-commerce candidate,” explains Wilson, “it will be less about what you wear to the interview, and more about how you describe the brand’s aesthetic.”

As opposed to the scalability of employee hotness, the label is making a great push to bring its socially conscious side to the forefront, even if it can no longer boast it’s all “Made In America”.  With the global relaunch, clothes will be made in both the US and “sweatshop-free” factories in the developing world. Consumers can choose the product source, with the American-made version costing between 17 and 26 percent more.

Without the founder’s nefarious ways to overshadow them, AA’s strides in labor standards could actually garner some good press – including new 24/7 medical clinics for workers in Central America. Charney may have even given American Apparel an unintended boost by taking his bad rep, along with much of the same branding, models, and even former AA employees to LA Apparel.

“I knew Dov,” reflects Sam. “ but I didn’t know about the sexual harassment until it came out in the press. I don’t know what happened, but I err on the side of believing the women, so I couldn’t work for him again.”

And what about American Apparel? What if they asked Sam to come back?

“Nope.”

Using tech creatively in recruiting is more than de rigueur, it’s the new standard. But for one German airline, there is still another horizon: right swiping.

It’s Friday. It’s almost quitting time. You don’t have plans. Your phone is in your hand, thumb twitching from an entire 30 seconds of non-use. If you’re one of the 10 million daily active users on Tinder, you may get to swiping on strangers’ faces, based on your synaptic speed of gauging beauty, brains, or compatibility of body parts. This evermore popular and socially acceptable behavior might land you a drink, a date, maybe more; but before today, you’d never think it could get you a job.

Not that kind of job. You perv. Starting this week, a German airline has taken a novel approach to recruitment by creating their very own Tinder profile, in hopes of landing candidates for various positions, both in and out of the cockpit.

Just as Facebook has always used your digital footprint to sell you targeted ads, Tinder has been dealing paid-for product profiles for a while now – you’re seeing the same products you shopped on Amazon yesterday because you registered with your Facebook account, remember? – but as for matching with a corporation and having them message you about job openings and link you to their careers page, that’s a new thing.

“Using a mobile online platform like Tinder to reach additional applicants is digital, modern, up-to-date and maybe a bit tongue in cheek – these attributes are in line with Eurowings,” said CEO Michael Knitter.

Oooh. Edgy.

A budget subsidiary of national carrier Lufthansa, Eurowings was likely considered lower-profile, thus lower risk than the German mothership to engage in this kind of experimental recruiting. Or maybe it has something to do with Eurowings being a domestic entity, in geography and society where “European” attitudes to sex make this kind of hybrid app experience more acceptable? Imagine if United or American Airlines got the way of your San Francisco booty call. That might be bad PR for airlines that can’t afford much more of it.

At this point, it’s all speculation (the initiative is only three days old). If it fails, Eurowings Tinder will just be another left swipe, considered for a moment and dismissed forever. But if it works, in the same way people who once wouldn’t confess to, but now flaunt, their dating-app notch tally, “Hey I got a job off Tinder” could be a new twist on an old taboo. Maybe in a year it’ll be a point of pride. Because like going on an actual date after a Tinder match, you still have to get through the interview, at which, unlike a date, there won’t likely be any booze to help you.