Earlier this year, 87% of respondents in a Leapgen survey said, “attracting, acquiring, and onboarding new talent for our workforce” was a high-priority concern. Only 2% said bringing on new talent was a low priority. The labor shortage is real: In the United States, there are 5 million more job openings than there are unemployed workers to fill them. Digital transformation of talent acquisition is needed to address this gap.

Talent is a direct line to profits: businesses cannot operate at full capacity if they aren’t staffed at full capacity. Companies are investing more in recruiting, but are they doing it in ways that actually attract the most skilled talent? Are they building a selection process that surfaces best-fit candidates? Are they building brand equity by providing a great experience for every candidate, not just the ones they hire?

Transforming the way your organization hires is both a human transformation and a digital transformation. The recent webinar, Going Digital in Talent Acquisition: A Reflection on 2022 Digital Experience Delivery, offers valuable guidance on what organizations can do to transform their TA function. Karin Philippczyk, Hiring Success Transformation Consultant at SmartRecruiters, and Jess Von Bank, Head of Brand Strategy and Vendor Solutions at Leapgen offered these tips and strategies.

1. Start with a vision of what you want to achieve, then get technology to help. Too often, companies look to technology to solve their problems without understanding how their processes need to change. Yes, technology can bring greater efficiency, but without understanding what problems it needs to solve, new systems won’t be adopted.
2. Solve for experiences. The candidate’s experience is directly related to the recruiter’s experience. When you give recruiters tools that are easy to use, they can spend more time making those one-to-one human connections that convince talented candidates to join your organization.
3. Automate repetitive data-based tasks. High-tech, high-touch means applying technology in places with bulk tasks that can be easily automated. Screening, scheduling, and chatbot communications are just a few of the areas where automation will free up recruiter time for more strategic tasks and building relationships with candidates.
4. Build transparency into the hiring process. Recruiting doesn’t need to be a black box. You can build recruiting workflows that manage candidate expectations in a transparent way. Over time, this builds trust – so even if a candidate isn’t selected the first time they apply, they’ll feel good about your organization by the time they get hired.
5. Lead by taking small steps. The SmartRecruiters company value, “CEO of your job,” offers a guidepost for beginning any process transformation. Karin Philippczyk said, “you’re always a mini-CEO of your application process. If you improve a couple of things and show people the results, they will feel more motivated to change and give you more than you ask for because you’re involving them.”

It’s true: a  full-scale talent acquisition transformation starts one step at a time. Once you have your vision in place, get in touch with us. We’d love to help you build better experiences, automate repetitive tasks, and provide greater transparency to candidates — and anything else on your list of ways to improve Hiring Success.

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. 

Table of Contents

• Seasonal Hiring Strategy
• Where To Advertise Your Job Openings
• How To Get Job Seekers To Apply
• What About After The Holidays
• That Is A Wrap

Retailers are facing an historic test this holiday season when it comes to staffing their stores. If your store managers, district managers, head of store operations and talent acquisition teams are not discussing strategies to overcome seasonal hiring challenges right now, you will have a seasonal hiring slump that will impact the overall revenue of your company.  

Furthermore, if you have to condense your hiring cycle and process without proper planning for seasonal hires, think of the potential impact to your employer brand due to hurried, less-than-optimal candidate experiences. A few years ago, Virgin Media estimated that a poor candidate experience had a $5 million adverse impact on its business – remember, your candidate is your potential customer. We all know a negative experience gets shared more often than a positive one.  

In this article, we will look at a number of simple and effective ways for your organization to get ahead of the seasonal recruiting curve, helping your company meet its holiday revenue goals and strengthen its employer brand and recruiting culture. 

Seasonal Hiring Strategy

When it comes to your target audience for seasonal hiring, aim for breadth and depth. Foremost, broaden your recruiting horizons to focus on pools of workers who might be on the employment sidelines during holiday seasons, such as students, freelancers, veterans, the semi-retired, and the recently unemployed. Secondly, deepen your talent pool by setting up a seasonal referral program for your internal employees. Such a program is in your company’s best interest because leveraging the talent networks of your internal employees can oftentimes be your best line of offense, as it is a cost effective maneuver due to a more streamlined hiring process.  

SmartRecruiters clients tap into their CRM platform to notify their employees of such seasonal hiring campaigns. For instance, through SmartCRM, you can send an email letting all of your employees that you are looking for seasonal referrals and offer tangible employee rewards through the referral process. Additionally, be creative – one of my clients offers $50 per referral hired and another $50 upon completion of their assignment. After, who would not want some additional cash on hand during the holiday season, right?  

To further build out your seasonal talent pool and hiring strategy, ask yourself, your team, and your store managers – where do you candidates typically come from? What do they have in common? Are they students? Do they live within a certain radius of your store location? What is their preferred method of communication? And what is their typical mode of transportation? From here, you can start to build your content and determine how you want to advertise and hire your candidates. 

If you know that most of your current hires live within ten miles of your store location and take public transportation, perhaps you might want to create a campaign around a free bus pass for seasonal hires. The cost of a seasonal benefit program like a bus pass is greatly outweighed by the revenue your team can generate during the holidays if your store is fully staffed. 

Another easy way to attract talent is through store events. Setting up an after hours “meet and greet” is cost effective and allows you to process a lot of candidates in a short period of time. If you have the ability to spruce it with some light hors d’oeuvres and music, it will feel like an event and not necessarily an interview. 

In short, the key to the seasonal recruiting success is having multiple avenues to attract talent. If you rely on one method to find candidates, your competition will definitely outpace your organization. 

In speaking with a former Dicks Sporting Goods store manager, she said, “If you’re not recruiting for seasonal hires all year long, you’re going to be behind the eight ball before you know it. And if you aren’t having your seasonal hiring strategy conversations in late August, the holidays will be extremely painful.”

Where To Advertise Your Job Openings

When it comes to seasonal job advertising, again, think of breadth, depth, and creativity. Where do you think your seasonal hires go on a daily basis (i.e. school), how are they getting there, where do they spend free time and what would attract them to apply to your opening. Right out of the gate, think of high traffic areas. Your first area of focus should be schools – and don’t miss any of them – high schools, trade schools, junior colleges, adult education programs, and four-year universities. Other locations to consider – VA Centers, Recreation Centers, Workforce Development Centers. And how about going a bit old school with advertising at bus stops, metro stations, and shopping malls – all of which are high traffic areas.

If you have a recruiting budget, even a small budget, think about doing more than just job postings. Job advertising on social media sites like LinkedIn and Instagram, as well as on traditional and non-traditional media can yield great results. Can you afford a short radio ad that plays during rush hour traffic? Perhaps you might want to think about posting on Craigslist or other free job boards. And don’t forget about your local Employment Development Departments.  

How To Get Job Seekers To Apply

Once you have determined where to advertise, a key component to your success is the application process and candidate experience. Again, we need to offer multiple different ways for a candidate to provide you with their information. Rule #1 – keep the process easy, simple, and make it mobile. Many retailers have QR codes in their store locations so the candidate can apply, in minutes, while in the store on their mobile device. If your retail application process takes more than 3 minutes, your candidates will go elsewhere. Do your candidates have the ability to text to apply? If not, they are going to the competition. Does your applicant tracking system offer the ability to take a photo of a resume and have it uploaded to the ATS? If not, your candidate experience could be costing your organization millions of dollars – remember the previously noted Virgin Media story. Does your company’s careers page have a chatbot to help your seasonal hire find the right job, answer questions, and allow them to easily apply? If not, well you know the story. 

A current SmartRecruiters customer used our applicant tracking platform for their seasonal hiring, and not only did they reduce the application time from 11 minutes down to 3 minutes but they also made 1,300 hires in three weeks. So again, the message here is to have a multi-channel method for your applicants to give you their information and make it mobile first.  

What About After The Holidays

If you’re not leveraging a CRM and ATS to source, engage, and hire your seasonal employees, guess what? You are going to experience the same hiring crunch next holiday season that you had last year, the year before that, and the year before that. 

My client, a global facilities management company, practices the following recruitment strategies to maintain a successful seasonal employment pool:

1. They send all of their seasonal employees a “thank you” letter the first week of January. 
2. Then, they put the “eligible” rehires into a talent community which has an automated drip campaign. 
3. The drip campaigns go out to the community on a monthly basis and the content can vary from a company success story to an employee testimonial to information on a new product that is being released. 
4. The kicker – every fourth month, the seasonal workers receive another “Thank You” email with a 10% discount coupon for merchandise at the company store.  

By keeping your seasonal hires warm throughout the year, recruiting for the holidays will become simpler. More importantly, if you follow this methodology, you will be able to lower your overall seasonal recruiting costs and quantify the impact of those hires as they relate to your store sales.  

The aforementioned process is straightforward and can be applied for all types of seasonal hires to match your industry segment’s yearly business peaks, whether your business is a tax filing company ramping up in the beginning of a calendar year or a traditional retailer preparing for the winter holidays.  

That Is A Wrap

In summation, seasonal hiring does not have to be a headache year after year. Nordstrom is looking to hire 26,000 regular and seasonal hires this holiday season. That is a lofty number, right? But they have done this before and they know that if they can staff their stores, the revenue streams will be stronger than ever. Having a stable strategy, knowing where to advertise, understanding the application process, and being able to quantify the impact of your seasonal hires will ultimately reveal itself in uncovered revenue for the organization once the next earnings report comes due.

“Give the candidates the information that they want, in the right format at the right time. Make them curious so they want to know more, so they always have a good feeling and know why you’re the right employer — or not.”

It’s as simple as that says Florian Schrodt, Employer Branding Leader, at Verkehrsbetriebe Zürich (VBZ). With over 1 million passengers a day, VBZ keeps the citizens of Zurich on the move with their tram and bus services.

However, the VBZ recruitment team found that bus and tram “pilots” as they call them, are difficult to recruit. With 1500 applications usually resulting in just 70 new hires. Not to forget that they also need to hire engineers and digital talent to keep the company evolving.

“We are not just a transportation company. We are engineers, architects, developers and so much more. So we try to show a multifaceted big picture of our world of work – in combination with our living world. The key is the context, why we are concentrating on giving information that is full of facts and emotions as well. Storytelling is the key. In our job postings, but also on our website in general, that is a storytelling hub and centerpiece of our activities.”

When Florian Schrodt was given the goal of improving hiring, he set his focus on applying a Contextual Candidates Experience to the VBZ candidate journey. He set out a plan and evaluated what needed to be done to generate better hiring results. Barriers in his way consisted of a strict application process, due to the cognitive and behavioural aspects of tram and bus pilot required for those positions. In addition to a strict time frame to attract and hire new recruits.  

“Our application process is still a bottleneck where we try to improve our conversion. Because of our complex job landscape we still have a lot of media breaks. “

Looking at the entire candidate journey Florian made a list of which candidate touchpoints needed optimization. Looking at the definition of a contextual candidate experience, he knew more transparency was required on the role expectations and an instant communication experience. VBZ’s careers website was completely redesigned and streamlined, his team began publishing videos that showed the day-to-day life of VBZ employees, they even held career fairs on the VBZ trams.

Now that candidates were getting a better understanding of what was expected from the job, they still couldn’t always get an instant answer. At this point Florian set out looking for communication solutions, the idea of using a chatbot came up. 

To be honest, I had not been a big chatbot fan before because I hadn’t seen one that worked before or I was satisfied with. When the idea of implementing a chatbot at VBZ kept coming up, that’s when I turned to jobpal, who I saw doing exciting things with Deutsche Telekom. 

Taking a critical look at how a chatbot fell into Florian’s contextual candidate experience philosophy, he began to see how the technology could work. Implementing a chatbot meant that candidates could get instant access to educational information whenever they wanted. 

A chatbot also provided an additional communication channel to engage with customers and tap into a new potential employee base. All while offloading the task of answering repetitive questions from candidates and giving more time back to recruiters. 

As conversational AI and machine learning is still a new technology, jobpal held a workshop with Florian, the recruitment and marketing teams at VBZ HQ. For two days, they looked at the entire candidate journey and put together a roadmap. The goal was to ensure the chatbot would not just improve the candidate experience, but also impact hiring results. Once the roadmap was laid out, jobpal started implementing the chatbot onto the VBZ careers website. 

Now that their candidate journey had undergone a massive transformation, what results were they seeing? Interestingly, the team saw fewer applications but more quality hires. This shows the importance of quality over quantity when it comes to recruiting for VBZ. By providing role transparency and an instant communication channel with a chatbot, candidates can decide whether or not an open position is for them within minutes instead of further along the pipeline. 

Additionally, Florian was able to tap into a whole new set of talent insights thanks to the chatbot on their careers website. Thanks to the FAQ automation feature, this is when the chatbot asks and answers questions from candidates, he could get an authentic insight into what candidates cared about, what their desires were and who they were.

It’s amazing how good you get to know the target groups because of their input and the possibilities to improve the answers in real-time. Especially through the Corona crisis it was a great plus. That’s contextual candidate experience at its best.

Overall, contextual candidate experience can have a huge impact on who you hire, how you hire and the quality of hires. Another point that Florian’s story validates is how a contextual candidate experience strategy that includes a chatbot can improve your talent communication strategy. 

Florian is continuing to bring new ideas into VBZ’s candidate journey, which includes expanding the responsibilities of the chatbot that will save even more time for the recruiters and implement new features that will help candidates apply faster.

When was the last time you put yourself in the shoes of a candidate looking for a job on your careers site? 

Losing sight of the candidate’s perspective can often be the case for recruitment teams who are understandably busy. But when you start to take a look at your candidate journey through the eyes of a job seeker, you’ll be amazed at the number of opportunities there are to improve your overall candidate experience. 

This is why it’s so important to get an external view on your candidate journey review. In the meantime, you can take a look at these 7 questions to challenge your candidate journey review. 

1. How easy is it for talent to discover open roles at your company

When candidates are searching for a job the experience on a careers website should feel personal, intuitive and easy. The more steps between the candidate entering your careers website and getting to the open role they want to apply for the less likely they are to fully commit to applying. 

The content of a job description can be a deal-breaker for a potential candidate so it’s important that the job title and the job description match, that the role information is transparent and the expectations are correct.

2. Where are you missing out on attracting talent?

List the different channels you use in your talent attraction strategy. You probably have a careers website and company profiles on popular job boards such as Indeed and LinkedIn. These are traditional channels, and there’s no doubt that they still generate applications. But what if you could increase your applications exponentially? 

Social messaging platforms offer a massive opportunity for recruiters to engage with talent. Facebook Messenger engages with 1.3 billion monthly users and WhatsApp has over 1 billion daily users. 

Sales and marketing lead generation have been utilising social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook for years. Which makes sense considering social media is where customers spend a lot of their free time, brands are understanding the importance of relating to their customers – so why not recruiters and candidates?

3. How does your company appear on online job sites?

According to Glassdoor’s 2020 Report, 51% of job seekers prefer finding job opportunities on online job sites. Whether it’s LinkedIn, Indeed, Xing or Glassdoor you work with; it’s important that your company’s reputation and tone of voice is consistent across all platforms. Why?

Changing jobs is a huge emotional decision for candidates. They are at a point where switching employers can mean a change in lifestyle, salary and career. Throughout their job search they need to get the impression they can trust a potential employer.

Employers can build trust by providing a consistent message across each platform, and working to improve their rating on employer review sites. After all, 84% of job seekers say a company’s reputation matters.

4. How are you engaging Passive vs. Active talent?

It’s important to know the different scenarios in which candidates find themselves on your careers website. Depending on which channel they arrived from can tell you what their intentions are or where they are in the recruitment funnel. 

A helpful way to analyse and aggregate behaviours is to categorise candidates into two groups, passive and active. Active candidates are those actively looking for a new role and passive candidates could land on your careers website by accident. Either way, both groups offer quality candidates. 

Take a look at your careers site traffic analytics and note which channels you’re getting traffic from. Active candidates are more likely to come from direct and organic channels, if they’re typing your company name and a careers related keyword into a search engine. 

They can also come from referral channels such as Glassdoor and LinkedIn if they’ve been looking at your job positions on those platforms, and now they want to get a better understanding of your company. 

Looking at your traffic analytics can give you a great insight into how you can grow the traffic channels that work best for your company. 

5. What tactics are you using to engage with passive talent?

Passive talent has many faces, it can be someone who’s accidentally ended up on your careers blog, or joined a webinar hosted by your company. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to attract and engage with passive talent which we can break down into two categories – paid and organic engagement. 

Paid engagement can include employer branding campaigns, paid job postings or promoted content targeted at your candidate personas. If you’re not getting the candidates you want walking through the door it’s worth trying out a few targeted campaigns on LinkedIn to engage with the candidates you want. 

Organic engagement is very valuable, it doesn’t involve budget but it can mean results take longer to see. That’s why it’s important to create some great content around the employees you already have. People’s stories offer candidates clarity and help build trust, this is great if passive talent doesn’t know your company brand. 

Another great way to engage with passive talent is to build a great community around your consumer brand. For example, if you are a sports company and have a growing social media fan base, you can create a community of brand fans and use this as an opportunity to let brand fans know you have positions open. 

6. How well are you communicating with your candidates?

Whether it’s a status update on their application or they have a question about the job position, candidates want instant communication and maybe more importantly they want transparency.

It’s time to see your careers site from your candidate’s point of view. Choose a scenario in which a candidate is coming to communicate with your brand and ask: 

• How are you delivering that talent communication experience?
• How many methods of communication are you offering? 
• Is the UX too confusing? 
• Where do emails to your careers email address go? How often are they answered? 
• How are you prioritising communication channels?

One of the most common challenges recruiters face is trying to reply to everyone. One of the ways recruiters are overcoming this challenge is using a chatbot to handle repetitive questions and provide instant responses to candidates. 

When Airbus implemented their recruitment chatbot, it was so successful that they removed their careers email address from the website just 5 weeks after going live with the chatbot. 

7. Where are the easy fixes you can apply to make your candidate experience better? 

The great news is that there are some easy fixes you can make to improve your candidate experience. Once you’ve walked through the steps of the different candidate journeys you should be able to identify these easy fixes.

We’ve also listed some commonly found easy fixes that you could do today include: 

1. Check your job descriptions, evaluate if they are clear and informative
2. Do an overview of the emails you’re sending candidates. Make sure they are consistent in tone and offer clarity to the candidate. 
3. Check if your careers site is mobile friendly

Time how long it takes for your careers site pages to load as slow loading times can lead candidates to bounce. You can use this tool from Google to measure how well your site loads.

Recruitment processes are not always as simple as we’d like them to be. External factors such as requirements by law for specific benchmarks to be met or an internal resistance to change can frustrate recruiters who value building a successful candidate experience. Thankfully, there are ways to work around this. Such is the case for Florian Schrodt, Employer Branding leader at Verkehrsbetriebe Zurich (VBZ).

When joining the VBZ team in 2018, Florian’s goal was to remove the corporate perspective from their candidate experience and make it 100% candidate-focused. In order to keep 1 million commuters a day moving across Zurich; there is a business need to hire bus and tram pilots. But this was no easy task.

“It’s a really nice job because you are driving along the wonderful city all day long. But it can be tough because of the shifts. Especially because we are looking for job changers. Also, people do not have a typical education as a tram pilot on the market.  So we have to educate the tram pilots ourselves. And the test is not easy, because it’s a cognitive test. So this means we need to have around 1500 applications in order to hire 70 tram pilots a year.”  

Florian Schrodt

The 5% conversion rate from applicant to hire aligns with the strict application process for the tram pilot position which involves four stages: 

1. Application
2. F.E.D test (cognitive test)
3. Recruitment interview
4. Medical and psychological assessment

However, as Florian could not change the recruitment process, he set his goal on increasing the volume of quality applicants. These are applicants that understand the expectations of the role before applying, and to deter any applicants who would likely drop out of the recruitment process. 

“We wanted the people a better picture of their opportunity within the jobs. We tried to improve the information on an emotional level and we tried to improve the touchpoints.”

The ideology of implementing a candidate contextual experience, meant that everything outside of the recruitment process had to benefit prospective candidates. One of the most notable steps in achieving this for Florian was redesigning the VBZ.jobs careers website. Which gained momentum through successful recruitment campaigns. 

However even though the volume of website visitors coming to the website was increasing, the level of engagement did not increase enough. This is when the idea of using a chatbot to engage and satisfy candidates with instant communication came to the forefront. 

“What we experienced at VBZ is that for job changers, like tram pilots, they have many questions, and many similar questions, asked again and again and again.” 

Responding to everyone’s questions, and doing a great job of it, contributes significantly to a great candidate experience. But it’s a huge task that occupies a large portion of the recruiters time. As a solution, implementing a chatbot with a FAQ Automation feature on the VBZ.jobs website gave Florian’s team 4 ways to improve their strict recruitment process.

1. VBZ speaks with talent 24/7

Before implementing a recruitment chatbot there were only two ways a candidate could ask a question to a recruiter; through email or phone. Both channels offered a low response rate or in some cases some candidates’ inquiries were not responded to, as this was time-consuming for the busy VBZ recruitment team.

Now a candidate coming to the careers website can engage with VBZ instantly through TramBot. Over 74% of all questions are answered by the chatbot, while the rest are passed on to the recruitment team. Candidates can also engage with the chatbot 24/7 and get instant responses which helps Florian achieve his candidate-centric mission. 

2. Recruiters could focus on building relationships with candidates further along the pipeline

As TramBot handles 74% of incoming questions, recruiters are able to utilise their time doing more valuable tasks. Instead of spending hours replying to repetitive questions, they can focus on building better relationships with candidates further along the pipeline. 

3. The recruitment team could gain insights into what candidates wanted to know and improve their overall communication strategy

“It’s amazing how good you get to know the target groups because of their input and the possibilities to improve the answers in real time. Especially through the Corona crisis it was a great plus.”

Young graduates who are in their early-twenties used to be the focus target group for recruiting, before TramBot. In the first few months of the chatbot going live the VBZ recruitment team saw that amongst the most popular questions coming from candidates (salary and shift questions), questions around age were reoccurring.

It became clear that potential candidates were actually job changers, people who were looking for an interim job whilst they study or retrain. As a result, Florian and his team adjusted their marketing campaigns to capture this new target group. Their recruitment marketing team created stories directly from their staff and also advertised the chatbot on their trams, so commuters could engage on the go. 

In the future Florian and his team are continuing to improve their candidate touchpoints, including the chatbot. 

“The bot is a single point of contact for ALL initial questions relating to the profession of trampilot. We have established a contextual information management team that answers questions that the bot cannot answer as quickly and individually as possible. In addition, we are strategically expanding the bot so that we can offer contextually appropriate entries into the bot throughout the entire process.”

Jerome Ternynck and Tracey Allison join Lorne Epstein on his eponymous podcast for a frank discussion on the challenges of today’s talent economy.

“The war for talent is over and the candidates have won,” says Jerome Ternynck, CEO and founder of SmartRecruiters, as he sits down with Tracey Allison, Director of Global Talent at Avery Dennison, on the latest episode of the Lorne Epstein “How To Capture Talent In Today’s Candidate-driven Market”, recorded at Unleash Amsterdam 2018. Far from taken aback, Lorne and Tracey laugh in agreement.

“[Recruitment] today is about how you attract talent to your organization,” says Tracey. “You are marketing candidates and bringing talent in, rather than, ‘I have a job – who wants to apply?”

During the next hour, the three experts discuss the needs of today’s talent practitioners from both a strategic and technological perspective, with stories of personal challenges they’ve faced in the field, from diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives to getting a seat at the table. Listen now for the full scoop and check out the top 5 takeaways below.

1. HR technology is a must.

“Why does everyone have great tech except recruiters?” Jerome asks.”Sales, Accounting, and Marketing software are all par for the course, yet people balk at allocating budget for Recruiting systems. Recruiting is a digital function now, and they need the right tools to be successful.”

2.Don’t force candidates to fit your mold.

“It’s about engaging the right way,” says Tracey. “We need to stop ticking boxes and go after talent. Right now, we should be driven more by the individual candidate and how they can be successful – which will really be your department’s ROI – versus just filling a job.”

3. Engage hiring managers, they are your friends.

“The relationship between recruiters and hiring managers is, in many ways, a broken one,” says Jerome. “It doesn’t get supported through technology, which should be the enabler. At the end of the day, hiring managers and recruiters both want to find great people. If you put them together in one place where they can actually work together then suddenly you don’t have the dynamic where hiring managers are the customers and recruiters are the service center. Instead, it’s a shoulder-to-shoulder partnership where recruiters feed the pipe and hiring managers close the deal.”

4. Sell a lifestyle.

“In a candidate-driven marketplace, getting the message of what life is actually like at a particular organization is extremely important,” says Tracey. “More and more, the lines between work and life are blurred, and it’s all about the experience.”

5. D&I every step of the way.

“First, you have to go the extra mile to source candidates from underrepresented groups,” says Jerome.  “And it’s not good enough to do a regular sourcing effort, and then say ‘oh well, only white guys applied, not our fault’. You have to actively go and source people that are underrepresented. Diversity is critical to business success in every organization. Second, you gotta make sure that once you have that diverse talent coming in, that they’re not being discriminated against. Which, in recruiting, means having some objective criteria to rate these candidates throughout the interview process.”

Learn more about creating an interview process that discourages bias in the full episode, alongside other awesome learnings including examples from Tracey on how TA can be a strategic partner for business success.

More than half of all candidates have major fears about the job hunt, learn the specific pain points and how recruiters can help.

In a recent study of 1,000 working professionals, CV library found that 55 percent are scared of key elements of the job hunt.

While seeking new employment may always entail some level of pressure and anxiety, hiring teams can boost the candidate experience and better evaluate applicants by identifying common pain points and doing their best to alleviate unnecessary tension.

To help you out, this article will reveal the five most stressful parts of the recruitment process, with simple tips for making candidates feel at ease to perform their best.

1) Being rejected…

For over half of those surveyed (55 percent), being rejected for a job they really wanted is what scares them the most. Of course, no one likes rejection, especially if they were excited about working for you. But, it’s sadly part of the hiring game.

As a recruitment professional, you should be well adept at letting people know whether they were successful or not with a professional rejection letter. If it’s the latter, make sure you always give constructive feedback, so your candidate can learn from the experience.

What’s more, doing so ensures that they’re left with a positive view of you and your company, helping to boost your employer brand at the same time.

2) Attending interviews…

Our research found that 42 percent of professionals fear attending interviews. Again, this is only natural. Yet, it’s still important to keep this fact in mind. After all, someone who appears extremely nervous at an interview may not be showing their full potential.

Help your candidates feel at ease by giving them as much information before the interview as possible. Make sure it’s clear where they need to go, who they’re meeting with, and what they need to wear and bring.

On the day of the interview, welcome them into your workplace and offer them a hot or cold drink. Anything you can do to make them feel comfortable will ensure that the interview is as productive as possible.

3) Completing an interview test or task…

In addition to the above, a further four in 10 (40 percent) worry about having to complete a test or task during an interview.

However, don’t let this put you off having this as a requirement. For some jobs, you need to understand your candidate’s skills through practical tests during the interview.

Just be sure to not make the task too esoteric. Ask yourself if it’s reasonable for a person to be able to perform this task before having worked at your company as you don’t want to put them off or make them question their abilities.

4) Speaking to recruiters on the phone…

Interestingly, we found that one-third (35 percent) of job hunters worry about having to speak to recruiters on the phone. So, be conscious of this when you’re calling candidates.

It might sound silly, especially as you call different people every day as part of your job, but some individuals find speaking to potential employers daunting.

Again, make them feel at ease by giving them a good overview of the role and don’t go in with any hard-hitting questions too early on.

If you get the sense that they’re nervous or don’t want to talk right now, suggest that you call back and conduct a phone interview at a time that’s more suitable for them.

5) Video interviews…

Finally, we found that a further 34 percent are scared of video interviews. But don’t let this put you off organizing them! There are many benefits of video interviews and they’re great for speeding up your recruitment process.

Instead, reassure candidates that this is a great opportunity for each party to find out more about one another, before coming in and meeting face to face.

Make sure they understand how to use the technology and remind them that the format will be just the same as a normal interview.

***

Overall, it’s clear that there’s a number of elements that could be holding candidates back during the recruitment process. As a hiring professional, it’s your job to make these individuals feel at ease, especially if you want to find the best talent for your roles.

Follow our advice above and take these insights on board, and you’ll stand a better chance of boosting your hiring efforts.

If you want to predict the end for your employees, look no further than the start. A bumpy on-ramp into your organization could very well be steering many of them to the nearest exit.

It should come as no surprise to HR managers, but the first 18 months of employment — when turnover can reach as high as 50 percent — are pivotal in the employee-employer relationship. But according to a Gallup study, a meager 12 percent of employees “strongly agree” that their organization provides a sufficient onboarding training process.

Far too many HR departments risk an abbreviated tenure with new hires by neglecting this early stage. Given the costs of losing a team member — at least six to nine months of his or her salary — preventing employee turnover should be a top priority for every company.

The Untapped Power of Onboarding Software

Thankfully, many HR departments have the necessary tools right at their fingertips. Many of these teams have already implemented a learning management system (LMS) for staff training, but they might not understand some of the ancillary LMS benefits. What was once a tool solely for internal use can now be leveraged long before an interview.

The advantages of a learning management system can begin as early as the recruitment phase. One HR executive recently told me about a successful hire funneled directly from the company’s online recruitment program, which vets candidates with mini certification courses and games designed to test skills. This talent acquisition software enabled the company to build a robust profile of candidate data before the interview process, which ensured it was choosing from the best of the best.

Finding and Onboarding Top Talent With LMS Software

Taking your onboarding program online can yield similar results for your firm. Here are five benefits of recruiting and onboarding new employees using your learning management system:

1)

You can track recruits on a centralized platform. Without a central database enabling a rapid review of an array of applicants, a recruiting manager might have little time to assess résumés or set up interviews. Using online training platform software to aggregate all the pertinent information about your recruits can save precious time.

Once you have the data readily available, you can use it to quickly identify which candidates should stay in the running. The software enables you to find individuals who have the right degree or key qualifications much faster than thumbing through an unyielding mountain of résumés.

2)

You can fill in gaps using detailed reports. Onboarding software brings a host of analytics to your recruitment process. With detailed reports, charts, and graphs of assessment data, you can collect critical information to find the right talent to fit your gaps.

Companies like Johnson & Johnson are adeptly using these features to match recruits with departments. By analyzing the traits of its top employees, the pharmaceutical giant identifies criteria for its assessments and is able to screen out applicants who might be unlikely to succeed. Likewise, you can develop your own criteria for what helps someone thrive in customer service or sales and then structure your employee onboarding software accordingly.

3)

You can uncover hidden talents. As many recruiters and hiring managers have learned, it’s not uncommon for candidates to discover that they’re better suited for a different position during the interview process. Why not let your employee onboarding software accelerate this realization? You can use the system to help prospective hires identify their core talents and then see open positions that match their expertise.

By moving this critical discovery phase forward, you can save your organization a good deal of time and money. Instead of going through the painful exercise of re-recruiting after shifting someone toward another department, you can funnel new hires into the right role from the start.

4)

You can get face time with candidates. Most employee onboarding software has built-in support for video conferencing. Companies such as Unilever have scrapped résumés altogether in favor of a mixture of game-based assessments and automated video interviews.

Once again, software can save you and your department the effort of going through an in-person interview only to discover that your promising candidate is a poor communicator or a bad fit for your organization. Get that important face-to-face contact before an official interview by using technology to connect.

5)

You can customize your onboarding by pinpointing areas of improvement. Because you’ve already established a profile for new hires in your onboarding system through the recruiting process, you can transition seamlessly into training. Given that nearly 90 percent of new hires say they don’t enter a new job with all the knowledge they need, they will require help to bridge the gaps in their skills.

Regardless of any shortcomings that might have come to light during interviews, induction training for new employees coupled with specific online courses can quickly bring them up to speed. You’re thus able to dive right into on-the-job training, which more than 75 percent of new employees have identified as the most important part of onboarding.

***

While the benefits of onboarding new employees are well-established, relatively few companies think to put their learning management systems to work during these early stages. With a flexible LMS that supports gamification, video conferencing, applicant tracking, and advanced reporting features, you can employ this software to smooth the on-ramp and pave the way to success for your new hires.

HR and recruiting are about to experience a perfect storm – in a good way – learn how the labor shortage, tech innovation, and big investment are about to disrupt everything!

A healthy environmental ecosystem is the product of careful balance. Often, these schemes seem immutable, but even the most ancient can be transformed by the simple tipping of the scales. The same can be said for the HR ecosystem. Mutually reinforced patterns of behavior scaled up over years can be totally disrupted in a new wave of economic pressures, and we are about to experience three: a labor shortage, new technology, and major investment.

In the same way that a foreign seed can wipe out a native plant species or a flood can give rise to a new population of moss, we will soon see how Recruiting will adapt to these changing environs. Not only that, but we will witness how the C-suite and leadership view of HR – as a function – changes.

To understand better the evolving industry we talk to Franz Gilbert, Vice President, Solution Provider Programs at Bersin, Deloitte Consulting LLP.  An industry analyst with over 20 years of experience, Franz has seen how the market reacts when the pendulum swings. Here’s what he has to say about how the dust will settle… and whether ‘balance’ can be restored.

Can you give us your “state of the union” for HR Technology?

There are amazing things going on in the industry. It’s a great time to be in HR and HR technology specifically, and there are three simultaneous drivers behind this:

• Employees recognized as critical…
• Tech is ready…
• Investment is there…

One, from a business standpoint, the role of the employee is finally being recognized as critical to operations. Investors are seeing that better HR organizations tend to do better business. So now the people with the capitol want to vet companies from an employee management perspective, and – with the help of sustainable guidelines like the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) – companies are now reporting on turnover, training hours per employee, retention, pay equity, and diversity.

The global labor scarcity has played into the elevation of the employee status. In the United States specifically, there are 7.1 million open jobs right now while only 5.9 million people remain unemployed. That’s a 20 percent gap from a demand perspective which makes retaining employees incredibly important.

Second, on the technology side, the advent of cloud computing, which has made HR tech easier to do. HR is basically a tremendous pile of data, and there’s now the possibility to process it for innovative solutions to hiring pain points like sourcing outside hires, surfacing internal talent, and campaigning to passive candidates.

Third, we’re now seeing real investment in HR Technology companies. There’s more private equity and venture capital money in the market than ever before. The normal runway used to be around $500k in a year, but in the last 90 days, we’ve seen $256 million put into rounds, according to the public data. So, in a three month period, we’re doing what companies historically did in a year and a half to two years.

This infusion of capital is attracting amazing talent to HR tech. We already had good talent, but now you’re seeing people come into the industry with backgrounds in artificial intelligence (AI) and psychology from institutions like MIT and Harvard. It’s a great time for the market, and we’re already starting to seeing an explosion of smart solutions.

With the proliferation of point solutions are all-in-one platforms history?

The pendulum is swinging back from point solutions, and I think employee experience is going to be the great unifier. The challenge for the next three years will be bringing together all these technologies into a navigable interface.  I predict a great deal of collaboration behind the scenes, in terms of APIs, will have to take place, and perhaps some user interfaces will come to the market that just provide a skin for other applications. Of course, there will be some straightforward consolidation and acquisitions as well.

What are your predictions for 2019 for the HR tech industry?

• AI

AI has been the buzzword for the last couple years, but just now it’s coming into play as part of the feature suite of HR. I’m excited to see what happens now that the shiny foil is off this tech and we’re really going to see it in action.

• Candidate and employee experience

Another great trend I’m seeing is a return to driving good HR that puts employee experience at the center. This focus on making work great for workers is going to force the next wave of innovation.

• Upskilling

Workforce planning and workforce analytics will also play a huge role in 2019. As the labor shortages continue to grow, companies are being forced to know their employees better – their skills, their competencies, their goals, etc. Taxonomies like titles and hierarchy will become less relevant. It will become a question of ‘what can you do?’.