Give your company the competitive recruiting-edge and help the world at the same time!

[For the latest in corporate social responsibility, see here for the Top 20 Corporate Social Responsibility Initiatives for 2018.]

As Jennifer Dickey pointed out, a study by NYU and Imperative found that “purpose-oriented employees” tend to remain with employers 20 percent longer than those at other companies and are about 47 percent more likely to be more engaged promoters of the companies they work for.

Corporate social responsibility is becoming increasingly important to today’s candidates. Companies that offer a workplace and corporate culture of caring about essential social issues can be successful at both business and giving back to the wider community.

With that in mind, what are some of the world’s leading socially responsible companies currently doing to make such an impact?

Here are twenty of the top organizations demonstrating a diverse range of social responsibility goals and initiatives:

20. General Electric

The GE Foundation contributed $88 million to community and educational programs in 2016. They also match contributions by employees and retirees through their GE Foundation Matching Gifts Program.

The foundation’s signature Developing Health programs focus on health-care access for communities around the world.

19. Deloitte

This professional consulting firm makes clear its “commitment to driving societal change and promoting environmental sustainability”. Working on innovative solutions along with government and non-profit organizations, Deloitte makes an effort to encourage its employees to donate time to pro bono work.

This pays off for the company as well. In fact, 83 percent of Deloitte employees say that pro bono work has made a positive impact on job satisfaction and 60 percent reported “significant gains in job-relevant skills”.

18. IBM

Citizen IBM embodies the company’s dedication to corporate citizenship. IBM supports a wide range of efforts for education, disaster relief, diversity, economic development, global health, and more. Their approach to corporate citizenship aligns with that of their business — “applied technology, continuous transformation, and sustainable change”.

In 2016, The World Community Grid combined the computing power of idle PCs and mobile devices across a worldwide network for an equivalent of 167,000 years of computing time to support projects such as cancer treatment research.

17. 3M

With 90,000 employees, 3M has adopted “science applied to life” as a trademark. It’s 3MGives program — with $67 million funded in 2016 — focuses on community and the environment, plus educational initiatives that help boost student interest in science and technology.

One program, the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge, asks students from grades 5 to 8 to find innovative solutions to everyday problems, with ten finalists offered the opportunity to work with a 3M scientist during a summer mentorship.

16. Zappos

Zappos’ core values include “Embrace and Drive Change” and “Be Humble”. Their charitable group, Zappos for Good, works with charitable organizations to donate goods such as shoes, books, and school supplies to those in need.

15. Cisco

Cisco’s CSR programs make use of the company’s technology and resources to aid underserved communities with education, healthcare, economic empowerment, and disaster relief.

They have set a goal to impact 1 billion people by 2025 positively.

14. TOMS

TOMS was founded on the concept of sustainable giving through a for-profit business model. “One for One” started with the promise of donating one pair of shoes for every pair purchased, but has since expanded to programs supporting a wide range of services for people in need.

They also invest in jobs, social entrepreneurship, and integration with other charitable organizations through their Giving Partners program.

13. Apple

As one of the world’s leading technology companies, Apple takes its global responsibility seriously. One aspect of its social initiatives is the environment, adopting a mission to “ask less of the planet”.

Greenpeace has named Apple the “greenest tech company in the world” for three consecutive years. Not only does the company encourage its IT partners to take full advantage of renewable energy, Apple packaging is now manufactured with 99 percent recycled paper products.

12. LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s non-profit initiative, LinkedIn for Good, works with various organizations to connect underserved communities to economic opportunity. They partner with youth training organizations, veterans career services, refugee resource networks, and more.

Being a social networking service, they also utilize their platform to provide LinkedIn members with channels to participate in mentorships, donate time, and find volunteering opportunities through their Volunteer Marketplace.

11. Walt Disney Company

Disney, the number one company in the entertainment industry, has been ranked one of the “World’s Most Admired Companies” by Fortune for two years in a row. The company’s social mission is to strengthen communities “by providing hope, happiness, and comfort to kids and families who need it most” and gave more than $400 million to nonprofit organizations in 2016.

The company’s “VoluntEARS” program encourages employees to donate time, which has totaled to 2.9 million hours of service since 2012 with a goal of reaching five million hours of employee community service by 2020.

10. Alphabet (Google)

Regularly ranked as one of the most valuable brands in the world, and well-known for treating its employees well, Google supports a wide range of initiatives based on innovative use of technology to achieve social goals.

One of its goals is “Data-driven, human-focused philanthropy—powered by Google”. This takes the form of programs such as using data to uncover racial injustice, translating books through an open-sourced platform to improve education, and — one close to our heart at SmartRecruiters — connecting people with jobs to enhance economic mobility worldwide.

9. BMW

Just finished celebrating its 100th year in business, The BMW Group has maintained its rank as one of the world’s most sustainable automotive company as rated in the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes.

This aspect of BMW’s operations is only one of the company’s social responsibility programs, which include education, wellness, and inter-cultural understanding as key tenets of a commitment to “social peace” and “stable economic development”.

8. Virgin Atlantic

Virgin Atlantic’s Change is in the Air sustainability initiative has three main pillars: environment, sustainable design and buying, and community investment.

Since 2007, they have reduced total aircraft carbon emissions by 22% and have partnered with LanzaTech to develop low carbon fuels for the future. Virgin Holidays donates £200,000 annually to the Brandon Center for Entrepreneurship Caribbean to support young entrepreneurs in Jamaica. In 2016, through onboard collection of spare foreign currency from customers, they raised over £500,000 for charity partner WE.

7. Levi Strauss & Co.

Like many companies on this list, Levi Strauss & Co. demonstrates social responsibility to a large extent through sustainability initiatives that are “sewn into the fabric” of the company.

One trademarked campaign, Water<Less, significantly reduces water use in manufacturing, by up to 96 percent for some styles. Since launching the process in 2011, the company has saved more than one billion liters of water. By 2020, the company expects to manufacture 80 percent of its products through this process, up from 25 percent today.

6. Dell

Dell has implemented the 2020 Legacy of Good Plan as their commitment to “drive human progress” through environmental sustainability, addressing community challenges, global supply chain responsibility, hiring diversity, and, ultimately, a dedication to putting more back than they take out.

The Net Positive Project goal is, by 2020, to contribute 10x the good that it takes to create and use their technology.

5. Salesforce

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce sums up corporate social responsibility quite clearly when he says “The business of business Is improving the state of the World.”

The company has adopted an integrated philanthropic approach called the 1-1-1 model. This means that one percent of the company’s equity is set aside for grants in communities where employees live and work, one percent of the company’s product is donated to non-profit organizations, and one percent of each employee’s time is donated to community initiatives. It’s a simple model that’s easily understood.

4. IKEA

The IKEA Foundation focuses on the Circle of Prosperity — funding home, health, education, and sustainable income for communities in need. As stated by the founder, their mission is to “create a better everyday life for as many people as possible around the world”.

In 2017, the foundation’s Brighter Lives for Refugees campaign funded a solar farm to bring renewable power to Jordan’s Azraq refugee camp. This is the world’s first solar plant built in a refugee setting and will save $1.5 million, as well as reduce CO₂ emissions by 2,370 tons annually.

3. Starbucks

As a company established in the 1970s, Starbucks has always operated with a sensitivity to social responsibility — committed to sustainability and strengthening communities.

For example, the company has committed to providing one million coffee trees to farmers as a partner in Conservation International’s “Sustainable Coffee Challenge.” In addition, the company plans to hire 10,000 refugees across 75 countries in the next five years, plus, hire 25,000 veterans by 2025.

2. Bosch

The company continues to operate by the values of founder Robert Bosch, who said “I have always acted according to the principle that it is better to lose money than trust.” The credo that “responsibility creates trust” carries through in the company’s efforts around ecological and social improvement.

Bosch invests 50% of its R&D budget in technologies supporting conservation and environmental protection. The Bosch eXchange program remanufactures used car components, generating 23,000 metric tons less CO₂ annually compared to new production.

1. Ben & Jerry’s

This company has a reputation for social responsibility that goes back to its original IPO in 1985. That’s when the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation was created with an initial gift of 50,000 shares and a decision of the company’s Board that 7.5 percent of the company’s pretax profits be allocated to philanthropy.

The foundation now awards more than $1.8 million per year to fund community action, social change, sustainability, and other initiatives in the company’s home state of Vermont and throughout the country.

“Walk the walk”

Senior executives of these companies know that social responsibility requires not just words on paper, but taking action. Their goals may differ and their activities may change over time, but these initiatives demonstrate the commitment each organization has to its local and global community — and that the organization “walks the walk,” not just “talks the talk”.

In this recent Forbes article, Lian Shao, a lecturer at the University of Washington says that companies that don’t focus on improving their candidate experience can “end up harming their employer brand.”

Harm their employer brand? No question about it.

But the damage can be far more catastrophic. A poor candidate experience hurts an organization’s entire brand. After all, candidates are customers too. They won’t be shy about telling their friends and family about how they’re treated, maybe even spreading the word across social media.

What’s the potential damage? What are candidates saying today? Where can you pinpoint spots for measurable improvement? Join us July 20 for our webinar, “Candidate Experience: What the Evidence is Telling Us”

Don’t miss this exceptional SmartRecruiters webinar where we’ll be joined by Gerry Crispin, an expert on the topic from the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals, CareerXroads, and TalentBoard.

Turn anxiety into opportunity

Sometimes it seems as if recruiters have lost touch with how uncertainty in making career decisions leaves us all vulnerable to stress and anxiety.

This is a reminder that the candidate experience isn’t about you. It’s about the candidate. If I’m the candidate, it’s all about me.

Still, too many candidates report poor experiences, causing them to speak negatively about you. That hurts your chances of making excellent hires especially in a climate where the unemployment rate hovers near 16-year lows. During our webinar, we’ll show you just how damaging this can be.

The good news is that so many candidate experience issues are easily solved, so you can reduce all that anxiety and gain an advantage over your competition in hiring top talent — an enormous untapped opportunity at many companies.

See the data for yourself

I won’t reveal everything we’ll be discussing, but consider a few facts from recent studies:

• Roughly 4 out of 10 job seekers who give their candidate experience a one-star rating will definitely take their alliances, product purchases, and relationships elsewhere. It’s impossible to know how much that loss of goodwill represents in lost opportunities
• About 60 percent of candidate finalists report never being invited to provide feedback about their experience. Just listening can be so useful. Think about it. Would a company never consider asking customers for feedback? It’s just as important to ask candidates.
• Approximately 57 percent of candidates who were informed that they were no longer being considered received that news in an email from a “do not reply” address. Whatever happened to common courtesy? That’s just plain common sense.

We’ll be presenting plenty of additional data and insights on where you can make improvements.

Benchmark your performance

During the webinar, you’ll learn about the TalentBoard’s latest benchmark study, which clearly shows how delivering an excellent candidate experience brings significant benefits.

You end up hiring only a tiny fraction of applicants. So give the vast majority of candidates who won’t be working for you (at least not immediately) a positive experience. Believe me, they’ll tell others about it, which really pays off over the long term.

There are certainly high costs associated with making poor hires — lost time, additional recruiting costs, and loss of goodwill. But the lost opportunities of not being able to attract top talent can be even more costly – yet so preventable.

Don’t miss this webinar July 20. We look forward to helping you see where to find significant opportunities to improve your candidate experience.

Sure, you might have an employee referral program. But is it something you make a recruiting priority? Or has it been sitting on a shelf, getting kind of dull because you haven’t dusted it off for months or maybe even years?

It’s well accepted that employees can be your best source to add to your talent pipeline. After all, employees know what your mission and values are, so are in a great position to refer others who share those values. One Ohio State University study shows candidates hired through referrals have a 25 percent higher retention rate than employees hired through other sources.

That’s exceptionally valuable for hard-to-fill roles. So dust off that referral program and make it shine.

One reason many employee referral programs don’t reach their full potential is that they seem more like a “policy” than a program your team can get excited about. You can’t bore people into taking action, so words alone that merely describe incentives and rewards won’t be very compelling.

Make employee referrals part of your culture

The most effective programs are those that are not merely administered by talent acquisition and HR teams, but span across all areas of the organization and are backed by top managers. Company leaders need to commit to promoting these programs as a key attribute of your workplace culture.

Some companies hold regular meetings on the value of referrals, reward top referrers with not just monetary incentives but also praise, and make it loud and clear that being on the lookout for great candidates is part of everyone’s role.

Yes, monetary rewards are always welcome, but other perks boost promotional value. Perhaps leading referrers can have lunch with your CEO, win free tickets to an event, or use a special parking space for a month? Word will definitely spread quickly inspiring everyone to think more about referrals.

Be more strategic and more targeted

When specific roles need to be filled it may make sense to target the promotion of referral incentives to employees most likely to know others with those skill sets. For example, you may promote referrals to technical teams when you need to fill similar roles. Or if you need a social media expert, ask for referrals from employees who work in that specific marketing area.

Also consider zeroing in on employees who may have previously worked at companies you generally see as a high-quality source for candidates. And while you’re at it, your former employees, employee friends and family members, and even your vendors could provide excellent leads.

Respond quickly to demonstrate commitment

If you expect employees to refer others in a way that sells your organization, pay extra close attention to those candidates.

Perhaps you can guarantee that referrals will be “fast-tracked” so they are interviewed within a week, or provide a special contact for referrals so questions can be quickly answered. If they are left aside and don’t get extra attention, you’re not visibly demonstrating your commitment to referrals.

You can reduce hiring costs, hire excellent talent for hard-to-fill roles more quickly, and acquire new team members more likely to be successful with an effective employee referral program.

But you must bring that program to life and pay ongoing attention to it.

The next time you find yourself complaining about how difficult it is to source candidates for hard-to-fill roles, think about your employee referral program. Take it off the shelf, dust it off, and make a few changes. Your recruiting efforts will shine again.

Lou Adler’s article on first impression bias suggests that this is the “primary cause of most hiring mistakes.” He’s spot on. When someone you meet makes a positive personal impression, you might tend to ask easier questions, and ask more difficult questions of those that make an initial negative impression.

Few admit to such bias, understandable because in most cases it’s unintentional and subconscious. We are, after all, only human. But that doesn’t mean bias doesn’t exist, so we need to adopt processes and technology to be as objective as possible.

At SmartRecruiters we help recruiting and hiring teams make more data-driven and objective decisions. Even better, we help companies analyze those decisions to make even further improvements.

We’d all like to have excellent presentation skills and see those skills in potential candidates. But not all roles require these skills, and while some candidates may not present themselves well, they can end up becoming top performers. The other side of that coin is that someone with excellent presentation skills could be a poor hire for a wide variety of reasons, making those attributes mostly irrelevant.

Two flavors of bad decisions

When we form impressions of candidates, we tend to ask questions in a way that’s influenced by those impressions. This adds potential for “confirmation bias,” which may mean we’re tougher on candidates who leave a negative first impression – grilling them with difficult questions – and going easier on candidates we think of more positively at first glance.

The dangers of this bias come in two forms.

• We could end up hiring weak performers who present themselves quite well
• We may decline the opportunity to hire a top performer because we let our biases interfere – and may never realize the value we passed up.

Consider first impressions last

I think one of Lou’s best suggestions for reducing the impact of bias is to shift things around a bit. Want to consider first impressions? Sure. But do it later. It’s at the end of the interview when you can ask yourself about first impressions.

By the end of an interview, you may realize a negative first impression might be because a candidate was nervous. In other cases, waiting can help prevent you from being “seduced,” as Lou puts it, and “discover there isn’t much substance behind those you initially perceived to have a positive first impression.”

Another suggestion is to script interviews so that you’re conducting them in a pre-defined standardized framework and process that reduces the impact of first impression bias.

Tools for data-driven hiring

By using a variety of SmartRecruiters functionality and resources in our Marketplace, such as scorecards and assessments, you can put a lot more objectivity into your hiring processes.

Another form of bias Lou doesn’t mention is bias within your hiring team. Does the way one team member rate a candidate influence your opinion? It’s possible.

One new feature we recently introduced – Independent Feedback – reduces potential for this type of bias. By hiding the ratings of other interviewers before providing feedback, each interviewer isn’t impacted by the opinions of others.

As I pointed out, we are all only human. We will make mistakes, but standardizing processes and adopting technology to eliminate bias as much as possible will minimize those mistakes. That makes it easier to steer clear of those we shouldn’t hire and be much more likely to decide favorably on those we should be hiring.

Just “the tip of the iceberg.” That’s how Ray Tenenbaum describes several fundamental complaints about the candidate experience in a recent article.

As I talk to candidates, I hear similar complaints and know full well that each one represents similar views held by many more. And you know what they say about icebergs — you only see the top 10 percent or so.

The common thread that weaves these complaints together boils down to poor communication throughout the entire hiring process — from initial discovery of opportunities through accepting an offer. Fortunately, recruiting software makes it a lot easier to communicate far more effectively.

So here are a few of the top complaints:

“Your career site isn’t mobile friendly.”

I might have viewed this as a rather mediocre “less than ideal” practice only a few years ago, but today it’s absolutely inexcusable. According to a Glassdoor survey, 45% of job seekers say they use their mobile device specifically to search for jobs at least once a day. Why would a top candidate even think about working for a company that can’t provide a decent mobile experience, let alone an excellent one?

Not only does SmartRecruiters automate delivering a delightful mobile experience to candidates, we do the same for recruiters and hiring managers as they collaborate on making hiring decisions.

“Your application is too long.”

How much information do you need? Only enough for an initial screen. There will be plenty of opportunities to ask for additional information later.

But more importantly, why not let candidates apply in just a few seconds, by uploading their resume or sending you their LinkedIn profile with just a click or a tap? Any modern talent acquisition suite such as SmartRecruiters includes this functionality – more important than ever as candidates grow weary of typing, cutting, and pasting the same information over and over and over again.

“Did you get my application?”

C’mon. Really? There are companies that don’t even acknowledge receiving an application?

Do these same companies fail to acknowledge customer inquiries? Believe me, it’s not hard to automate notifications like these. No SmartRecruiters client would ever knowingly fail to acknowledge a candidate’s application because those processes are fully integrated.

“When will you let me know about your decision? Is the job filled?”

Each job may call for different evaluation processes, a variety of interviews, assessments, tests, etc. While you know what that process looks like, candidates don’t. Be transparent so you can set reasonable expectations and follow through with timely status communications.

“How long will it take to get me the offer, because I need to give an answer to another company?”

Think about how candidates feel as they’re being considered for a job. Changing jobs can be a major life event. Choosing between taking an offer that’s been made by another company or waiting for an offer from you isn’t easy. The more time you take, the less likely it is that you’ll close an excellent candidate.

Melt the iceberg: Automate processes and gain valuable insights from recruiting analytics

These complaints about the candidate experience seem far too common. That’s frustrating because I know they’re mostly avoidable. Not only can tools within SmartRecruiters easily address all these complaints, you can also access recruiting analytics that show how your performance against benchmarks is improving.

I know that recruiters are only human, but as Ray explains, both people and processes need to be in alignment.

When candidates are happier, that iceberg of complaints will melt away and you’ll be building an even bigger pool of highly qualified talent interested in working for you.

It was Mark Twain who said, “Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation”

Sure, both recruiters and candidates need to communicate about opportunities — discussing experience, skills, culture to see if there seems be a great fit. But I know that I build more trust as a recruiter when I switch from “interview mode” to just plain conversation.

I was reminded of what Mark Twain said when I read Keenan Steiner’s post on establishing trust to make interviews more effective.

How do you have a conversation? It seems simple enough. People just talk, right? Somehow, however, recruiters make interviewing way more complicated in a way that seems untrustworthy to candidates.

Trust is, after all, a recruiter’s most valuable asset. Lose trust, and you’ll find it far more difficult to find key talent. As Keenan’s post points out, establishing rapport with candidates makes it easier to build trust — so I’m considered a candidate’s ally, not someone trying to sell a job.

As for me, I want candidates to not only see me as a human being who cares about their career goals and aspirations, not just some name on a resume. That’s why I’m always honest about both the benefits of an opportunity, and it’s potential pitfalls.

Conversation in a pleasant setting. Keeping it casual

As Keenan explains, a standard “Q and A” interview does not resemble a conversation between two genuine human beings, but can be seen by promising applicants as a very stressful experience.

He quotes Brad Stultz, HR coordinator at the web retailer Totally Promotional, who meets with candidates not in a conference room or office, but “in a quiet corner of the building on two sofas.” That’s a setting he says lends itself to putting a candidate at ease to build rapport which establishes trust.

To engage in conversation, avoid asking questions that seem like you’re grilling someone. Avoid the tough challenging questions. You’ll have time to go into more detail later. At the initial interview, keeping it casual leaves candidates with a much more favorable impression.

No hiding: Transparency above all else

If you’re going to build trust, you need to be upfront about the job opportunity, the evaluation process, expectations for each stage in the process, and your schedule, among other issues.

When candidates think you’re hiding something – or don’t provide straightforward answers – you can’t establish that trust and rapport so essential to recruiting.

But being honest and straightforward, while admirable, is merely meeting expectations.  Exceptional recruiters actually help candidates prepare for later interviews by giving them information on who will be on the interview panel and what types of questions they can expect.

Do you care? Show it.

Of course you care about candidates. If you don’t you’re in the wrong business. The problem is that all too few recruiters show it — making it clear that a candidate’s success benefits everyone.

So when you meet candidates for the first time, think of it as more as a conversation and less as an interview so that you can build trust.

And be transparent because as Mark Twain also said, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”

He’s right – and that makes your job a lot easier.

Sourcing candidates can get costly. You’re either paying outside recruiters or you’re spending precious time and money posting jobs and scouring other resources for talent.

But I’ll let you in on a little secret. The best candidates may be the ones you’ve already hired.

Certainly the opportunity for promotion and internal mobility is great for your current team because many of them are looking for new opportunities along their career path. Keeping them in your organization gives your team more reasons to stay – and helps you boost retention rates.

It seems obvious to me that starting a search for talent should begin within your organization. Yet I see all too many recruiters spending far too much time looking outside the company when there’s really no need. Of course you can begin an external search, but why not look internally first? It’s less cumbersome and promoting internal mobility creates a more engaged team.

Benefits of Internal Mobility: Fewer Unknowns, More Knowns

With a focus on internal mobility, your organization can take advantage of several benefits:

• Employee growth: How many of your current employees are open to new opportunities in other companies? You may not want to admit it, but probably most of them.Giving your team the chance to grow into a new role in your organization gives them incentive to stay and inspires others to look for opportunities to enhance their skills and grow without the need to move elsewhere.
• Retaining talent: If you’re losing your best employees to the competition, you’ve basically doubled your challenges.Not only do you have to recruit for new positions, you have to fill other roles vacated by those who’ve moved on, perhaps because they felt you didn’t value them enough to consider them for other roles.
• Excellent culture fit: True, an employee who moves to another need may need to acclimate to different colleagues, but from an overall company perspective, employees already understand your corporate culture.With a strategy based on internal mobility, culture fit isn’t an unknown attribute, plus onboarding goes much more smoothly.
• Less time and expense: If you know someone in your company who may be an excellent fit for a role you need to fill, you can make a quick decision.Avoiding extended processes for recruiting, screening, and interviewing saves time plus reduces the expense of promoting a job externally.

Internal mobility: A win-win scenario for inside the box thinking

Gallup’s 2015 Workforce Panel study pointed out that at least half of current employees are actively looking for new jobs, not to mention those passive candidates who’d be open to a new opportunity.

Why not meet that need for a new job in your organization? It’s a win-win scenario. You retain top talent and that talent gets a chance to shine and grow their careers while helping you grow your business.

Is it easy to find such candidates within your organization? With recruiting software such as SmartRecruiters, you can maintain talent profiles for employees as easily as for any other pool of talent.

Just remember — sometimes thinking outside the box means thinking inside the box.

Two seemingly unrelated ideas came to mind as I read Noel Cocca’s article at Recruiting Daily, “5 Tips to Manage the Human Candidate Experience.” In fact, they may even be polar opposites — automation and humanity.

At SmartRecruiters, we take pride in delivering a talent acquisition suite that automates processes to save time. But make no mistake. We are not creating automated tools to eliminate the human touch. Quite the opposite, in fact. Our goals are to help organizations augment and enhance experiences so they become more human.

As Noel says, “We need to focus on building and growing respect from not just our candidates but our clients as well. Recruiting is and always will be about the human element.”

Noels’ five tips emphasize humanity in delivering an exceptional candidate experience. Yes, automation is useful, but only to the extent that it gives recruiters more time to engage in more genuine dialogue with candidates, plus help hiring teams collaborate to make the interviewing experience more appealing and efficient.

Look, no robot can ever duplicate the kindness and compassion humans can offer. Organizations are run by real live human beings who must interact with others with empathy and compassion.

Have a heart: Recruiting is not just about processes and procedures.

How to be more human? Noel says that just being genuine, being yourself is a good start. It’s so easy to use jargon and talk about “sourcing” and the number of candidates in a “pipeline.” That’s okay as long as every so often we all take the time to see things from another perspective. Put yourself in the candidate’s shoes. Would you want to be perceived as some entity in a pipeline to be tracked?

Respect goes a long way to building strong relationships. Yes, you need to ask tough questions. Yes, you do need to make sure candidates have what it takes to do the job, but even if you know a candidate might not be the best fit now, there could easily be an opportunity to engage with that person later to discuss another role.

Demonstrating empathy, taking time to help candidates understand how their goals and experience may or may not match the role you need to fill, even helping candidates by referring them to other organizations, makes an enormous difference. In today’s increasingly automated world, that’s the level of respect that’s going to be long remembered and pay off in ways you may never expect.

A great candidate experience is person to person, not business to person

Out of Noel’s five tips, I’d say the fifth one strikes me as a strategy that delivers excellent results. She says, “Use your company’s STARS. Nothing shows your human culture more than a genuine and heart-warming message from a Senior Executive.”

That’s a great suggestion. It’s your team that represents your company. Companies don’t talk to people. People do. The more personal you can be in demonstrating why your company is an excellent fit and what your organization cares about goes a long way to enhancing the human aspect of recruiting.

Remember, the candidate experience is really a human experience

Yes, use all the automated tools and processes you can to be more efficient, but use the efficiencies you gain to spend time being more personal in your communications and more human in your interaction with candidates and colleagues.

This year a new generation just started entering the workforce. Generation Z, those born since 1995 are now beginning to graduate from college. Recruitment and hiring will certainly be changing as 23 million Gen Zers takes their place in organizations alongside 71 million older Millennials who range from about 25 to 40 years old.

Is there much difference between the two? You bet. That’s why you’ll need to be making some changes in how you recruit on college campuses and how you engage with today’s students.

What may be most intriguing, even ironic, is that in some ways, Gen Z seems to share more traits with much older Baby Boomers (born between 1945 and 1960) than other generations.

Although Gen Z knows no other world besides one where we’re all surrounded with technology, and prefer imagery and video in sharing stories more than by text or email, today’s young people actually appreciate face-to-face contact, a characteristic shared with Baby Boomers, who grew up in a world without email or smartphones.

That may be because as a generational study by Barclays notes, while Gen Zers are known for short attention spans and preferring digital communications, they aspire to security and stability as Baby Boomers do. That’s a sharp contrast to Millennials who have tended to put more value on freedom and flexibility.

Your employer brand: More important to recruiting than ever.

You’re going to need to pay much closer attention to your employer brand to attract today’s college students into your organization. And you’ll need to make sure it’s delivered engagingly online – not just on some static website, but across Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, and Facebook.

Remember that today’s young people have grown up in a world of “snackable” content, so keep it short and simple. They want to know more about your company than a specific job. What your organization cares about is way more important than how you make money.

Start now. It’s never too early

Some interesting statistics on Gen Z show that this generation focuses on the future in ways not shared by previous generations. For example:

• 55% of high school students say they feel pressure to gain early professional experience
• 72% want to start their own businesses, demonstrating a higher level of entrepreneurship
• 63% of graduating college seniors have held internship or co-op positions

That last point reminds me that internships are an excellent tactic for landing top talent among graduating students. That’s because on average, you’re likely to retain 75 percent of new hires for at least one year if they’ve interned with you.

It’s not just internships that make a difference. Hosting lunch-and-learn events, offering your executives as guest speakers in classes, sponsoring student events, and communicating often across social media all build rapport for future hiring success on college campuses. If all you do is show up at a campus career fair, you’re too late.

Being authentic in a transparent world

Growing up in a world that’s more transparent than ever, this generation is not easily fooled. So be authentic – completely upfront and honest. Introduce them to your team and give them a chance to understand your mission and values.

At SmartRecruiters we know full well that “you are who you hire” because it’s your people who drive success. For Gen Z, that becomes even more relevant because they place a high value on working with others who share their own aspirations.

We recently hosted a webinar on campus recruiting with plenty of additional information on Gen Z. If you didn’t attend, watch it now.

Hiring success is a lot like striking gold — enriching your business as you bring top talent onto your team.

There are some organizations, however, that will never strike gold because they don’t give candidates the respect they deserve. One recruiting expert who’s been on the other side of the table recently wrote about his own candidate experience. Like me, he’s astonished that so many companies don’t even understand the basics of simple common courtesy.

It’s not hard. It’s not complex. It’s not difficult. Treat candidates as you’d want to be treated – not just in a recruiting context — but as a real live human being.

Just follow the Golden Rule. And if necessary make it a company rule so everyone complies.

John Hollon, an award-winning writer and noted authority on recruiting describes his candidate experience in his article, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the Candidate Experience” at Recruiting Daily.

He points out the “good” in jobs that he was all but offered, plus the “bad” of promising job opportunities that seemed to evaporate for no reason.

But the “ugly” was truly obnoxious. As John says, some organizations that seemed to want to hire him, “suddenly went incommunicado and treated me as if I had Ebola. I couldn’t get them to respond to save my life.”

Silence speaks volumes: Far worse than “no”

As we pointed out in our own post, nearly half of candidates in 2016 reported receiving no reply at all two months after applying. John considers this one of his “biggest gripes,” explaining that “the worst answer in life isn’t no; the worst answer in life is no answer at all and to be left spinning your wheels.”

He’s right. If you’re not planning to hire someone who took the trouble to apply, the least you can do is let them know. Isn’t that how you’d want to be treated? That is, after all, the “Golden Rule” of life. Not following it hurts your employer brand and reputation as an organization.

Make the Golden Rule a rule

Like John, I find it so strange that many companies treat people as if they don’t even exist. Perhaps they don’t intend to present themselves in such a way, but intent doesn’t matter. Processes need to be put in place so that every candidate is treated with respect — even those that don’t even come close to meeting your needs.

So if necessary, make the Golden Rule an actual rule. Set up an SLA within your recruiting and hiring process to assure that every candidate receives an appropriate response within a specified time period. What type of response and how much time? That may differ in various organizations, but it’s important that an SLA be put in place to assure consistency.

Once again, this is just common courtesy. If you need to make business case for such a rule, consider that candidates are likely to assume that you treat your customers exactly as they are being treated. So you could lose a lot of revenue for years to come. And they’re likely to tell others about their candidate experience, maybe even online. Who knows how many talented candidates you’ll lose out on because you’ve treated others so poorly?

Fortunately, SmartRecruiters’ recruiting software makes it easy to automate these processes — so you can communicate in a timely way and deliver a candidate experience that’s not ugly at all, but as good as gold.