Don’t Overlook Great Talent

Consider a job candidate whose skills perfectly match the needs of a position to be filled, but a background check automatically dings the applicant for having a criminal record… because she was once cited for violating a leash law. Believe it or not, minor offenses like this can appear often when screening, but they obviously don’t reflect the quality of work a candidate would contribute to the job.

Fishing without a license or bouncing a check once on accident seems harmless enough, but when employers instantly reject applicants who have one of these “crimes” counted against them, everybody misses out. By the same token, candidates without a certificate of official training within a trade or skill may have enough previous work experience in that area that could go unnoticed on a restrictive job application. You may find candidates with previous drug history (with a wide mix of seriousness). Consider how rehabilitation and positive new habits have impacted this person’s candidacy. Review background check data thoroughly to make sure past experience provides a tangible threat against someone’s ability to do a job – and offer plenty of opportunity for applicants to explain the issues – before you toss out a candidate who could bring worthy skills and commitment to your business.

Look for Positive Patterns

Background screening that is too dependent on one facet of a person’s life – such as criminal history – tells only a small amount about a candidate when additional search parameters greatly improve educated hiring decisions. For example, a review of past work history can find that an applicant has years of steady employment with one employer, indicating a tendency to long-term work commitment. Similarly, other less obvious information may point to valuable employee traits, such as how accurately a person notes information on his or her resume, how long that person has lived in one location, how many personal or sick days a person routinely requests through the year and so forth.

Data collected through one source may not seem particularly revealing on its own, but compiled together with the information obtained through various sources, it can paint a better picture of a person’s willingness to learn, responsiveness to authority, involvement in the company community, investment in his or her own career and more. When smart employers cast a wide net for information and look beyond criminal history in screening, they can read between the lines to find helpful character clues and develop a more genuine sense of any person’s potential work fit.

Ban the Box that Rejects Personal Information

Many online application systems automatically reject those candidates who admit to a criminal past of any kind. The crimes may be very minor, like the ones above, or they may be more serious offenses that have no relevance whatsoever to the job in question.  They offenses may have happened far enough in the past that they may not legally be considered in a job search. If a candidate is providing information honestly about his or her past, chances are that the candidate is willing to enter a new job with honesty and integrity.

Eliminate “auto-reject” functions and consider the entire applicant when screening. In the end, a criminal past may pose a realistic conflict to the situation and be cause for rejection of an applicant. Regardless of that fact, it should not be the sole reason a person is excluded from the application process, especially when an applicant is willing to provide honest information up front.

Ban the Box to Stay Compliant

Broad, thorough and thoughtful screening measures better any employer’s chances of finding skilled employees and they also prevent those employers from landing in hot water with oversight agencies. Guidelines established by groups such as the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) exist to prevent discrimination in hiring, but all too often employers have difficulty navigating the complicated web of requirements. Unknowingly, employers’ own methods designed to streamline the application process often result in discrimination and possible EEOC fines, which also bring negative publicity.

Employers who “Ban the Box” that automatically rejects candidates for unique criteria not only open themselves up to a greater potential talent pool, but they also protect themselves from unintentional slip-ups with compliance issues. These employers can show that their processes do not eliminate candidates unfairly and that consideration of many factors go into the decision-making about each applicant. In the long run, that means fewer grievances by rejected candidates and less pain and frustration for employers. It is important to clarify that “Banning the Box” does not imply that hiring companies must hire hardened criminals for open positions. It means more candidates will be taken seriously and treated fairly.

Information Overload

If an employer spends the time, energy and resources to conduct background checks, every bit of information should be used advantageously. Employers who get the best bang for their buck evaluate red flags objectively, along with all the other data collected. They look for patterns of success when considering an applicant’s history and search for as many different types of information as possible. The best employers also ban the box that auto-rejects applicants, so they can make well-informed decisions about the real people who will help their business succeed.

Chris Dyer is founder and CEO of PeopleG2, one of the top human capital due diligence service providers in North America, leveraging proprietary processes and tools to serve clients’ risk management needs and support their most strategic people-related decisions. Photo Credit Mining Recruitment Jobs.

SmartRecruiters is the hiring platform with evermything you need to source talent, manage candidates, and make the right hires.

Today, SmartRecruiters announced the launch of the new Store on our hiring platform. You can now browse through our recruiting services in a single marketplace, to help you source, engage and ultimately hire the best talent for your team and company. All of our partners and their products are on display in the Store – including Job Boards, Recruiters, Assessments and Databases. If you haven’t checked it out already, click here and have a look!

Feature Walkthrough

You can access this feature by clicking on the new ‘Store’ link in the top header bar (next to ‘Jobs’ and ‘People’). You’ll find a healthy cross-section of all the different partners in our marketplace. At the top is our ‘Featured’ section, where you’ll see images of the most recognizable and in-demand partners in our Store. Below is our ‘New and Popular’ section, where you’ll find a mix of the newest partners we’ve teamed up with and those that are rising in popularity. The rest of the page is organized by product category (Job Boards, Recruiters, etc.) and highlights some of top partners in each.

At the very top of this storefront page, you’ll also notice there is a ‘Store’ header bar with links to each of our product categories. You can use these shortcuts to go straight to a particular page to browse specific partners. Some of the product category pages, like Job Boards for example, also have additional ‘sort by’ and ‘search’ fields to find the partner services that best match your needs.

If you click on any of our partners in the Store, you can view more details about their company, the services they offer, and the pricing of their services. In a few weeks, we will also support the ability to view media files showcasing our partner services (videos, documents, images) AND let you read and write reviews about them, both of which will help you make more informed decisions along the way.

What’s Coming Next?

The new Store brings all of our amazing partners to the forefront and puts a spotlight on all the recruiting services that we offer on the SmartRecruiters platform. This is just the first step and we plan to keep investing in the marketplace to deliver the best experience and value for our users.

What if there were useful recruiting applications and plugins that you could download? What if you could see what other users hiring in the same industry recently purchased? These are questions we keep asking ourselves, and we believe the answers will make the recruiting process easier for everyone. We continue on our mission to deliver these features into your hands. Stay tuned!

The post The New SmartRecruiters Store is Here! first appeared on SmartRecruiters Blog.]]> https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog/which-behavioral-assessment/ Mon, 26 Aug 2013 18:01:39 +0000 https://www.smartrecruiters.com/blog/?p=22423 We know that behavior is a key component to ensuring that each new hire fits the job and is primed for success and longevity in the role. We know that having a strategy to assess new applicants through a “weed out,” “weed in,” or “double check” approach is a simple and effective means to gather […]

“Gamification is the concept of applying game-design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging.” –wiki

Forget all your recruiting challenges for a moment, and think about the future. How would recruitment ideally function?

First, you’d have a seamless process. Every candidate, active or passive, who saw your company had an open position would make their full work history, personality, aptitude, and other relevant skills/information available to you for selection purposes.

Second, the process for gathering that critical information – resume, assessment, interview – would be as easy as posting a photo online or swiping the unlock screen of an iPhone.

Third, you would have access to an unlimited, broad, and deep talent pool that touched nearly everyone qualified for the position you’re looking to fill.

Back to reality

Unfortunately, the talent search and selection process is far from this Utopian ideal. At the present, most candidates (not all) are still asked to do a huge amount of work just to get their “application” (whatever that means) available to your recruitment team.

Successful recruitment organizations – those who consistently receive far more qualified applications than they can possibly use – recognize the reality of the application process from the candidate perspective. They adopt the same tactics used by online advertisers. These best in class organizations realize that the company is paying a high advertising cost to get in front of candidates. In your case, that may be on-campus recruitment, fees for posting to job boards, or recruiter time to directly reach out to candidates.

Don’t believe me? Well, if you’re like most (non-SmartRecruiters) companies, you only get 100 applications for every thousand people who see your ad. If you were an online marketer, you would work tirelessly to improve that conversion ratio.

And what are the things preventing you from getting all 1000 people who saw your ad into your candidate pipeline? How many candidates start an application and never finish? Chances are you’re losing applicants because your process is just too damn annoying and time consuming to complete.

How games get you closer to the future of hiring

The power of games in recruitment becomes apparent in their ability to help you convert more of the people who see your job opportunity into active applicants in your pipeline. Treating candidates like customers is widely regarded by the top thinkers in recruitment as essential to ensuring that top-quality talent develops an interest in your company as an employment destination. Just like optimizing the conversion flow for a customer, you want to optimize the conversion flow for a candidate.

That’s the genius of games! If you can disguise your application and assessment process as a game, you’re much more likely to not only convert the top talent who saw your ad, but also engage candidates who would normally never consider your company. That’s the power of creating a viral loop.

At ConnectCubed, we find that candidates enjoy our games so much that they spend over 3x the required time. That’s right – they finish the assessment and come back for more! And remember, every minute they spend on your application is an opportunity to get your brand and your message front and center.

It’s amazing to see the process spread from person to person. Back in 2011, I joined our user experience team on a trip to conduct live user testing of a new game at a US college campus. In between focus groups, I wandered in to the library to see a group of students we hadn’t met with playing the new game.

Thinking I was being witty, I leaned over the shoulder of one of the students and said, “Hey, cool game you’re playing there.”

He turned his head and said, “Have you heard about this? It’s so cool, right?”

Two hours later and the game was already clear across the other side of campus. More students came pouring in throughout the day.

Additional benefits throughout the candidate pipeline

If you are using a tool like ConnectCubed, not only are your games adding to the attractiveness of your application process, but also delivering actionable insights into candidate fit for the role. This type of data not only helps you improve performance and reduce turnover, but also allows you, as a recruiter, to focus on only the most promising candidates in your pipeline.

If you use games in your application and assessment process, there will be a statistically significant boost in employer brand. It’s a fast and easy way to differentiate your company from the competition. If you’re fighting for talent, you want to put your company’s best face forward. Candidates who are given a game as part of their application process come into interviews with a noticeably higher opinion of the interviewing firm as an innovative and forward thinking place to work.

Isn’t that something we all want?

Doing the right thing

Recruiting is hard. It’s hard to manage overflows of applicants, and it’s hard to seek out top talent in tight labor markets. Sometimes, that means we cut corners. We let our technology take over the human element of building strong relationships with candidates who ultimately become our colleagues.

If the candidate is willing to share part of his or her day with our organizations, we owe it to him or her to make the process as easy and efficient and fun as possible. Through games, we can do that. We can get closer to the ideal of a seamless application process that provides a deep and broad talent pool, with meaningful data on each applicant.

It’s good business sense. And it’s the right thing to do.

Michael Tanenbaum is CEO of ConnectCubed. Using the power of big data, ConnectCubed utilizes epistemic gaming technology and psychometric testing to create next-generation pre-employment screening tests.

Meet Mike June 26 in SF at Smartup: Art & Science of Talent Assessment. More on information on the new SmartRecruiters Assessment Center.

The Skills to Pay the Bills

“People are rapidly accumulating new skills every day,” says Jennifer Fremont-Smith,  CEO of Smarterer, a Boston-area startup offering “a seamless web technology that provides total clarity about candidates, quantifying skills in less than 120 seconds.”  Says Fremont-Smith, “Paper resumes and interviews can’t capture an accurate picture of a candidate.”  And that’s why “assessments are becoming a fundamental step in the hiring process, helping recruiters make more informed hiring decisions, and decreasing time-to-hire by surfacing the best candidates faster.”

According to Scott Marsho, Director of Distribution at Findly, “assessments are a cost-effective way to ensure that organizations are hiring the right people.”  Marsho lists the key benefits of using assessments as “streamlined selection process, decreased turnover, increased productivity, and increased legal defensibility.”

“Now more than ever people are getting degrees, credentials and learning from free resources that are inconsistent in terms of grading and content,” says Guy Friedman, CEO of HigherNext. “This increases the need for an adequate filtering system based on knowledge and skills relevant to a specific job.”

The Missing Piece

And while hard skills are in demand, so are soft skills such as the ability to adapt, collaborate and iterate creatively.  And skills like those don’t necessarily show up on a resume. Increasingly, companies are using online solutions to measure these abilities as well, tapping into a growing field of companies offering personality, cognitive and job fit assessments

“Resume review is one of the least accurate predictors of job performance,” says Michael Tanenbaum, Founder of ConnectCubed, a maker of gamified psychometric assessments.  “Even work experience comes in at a measly .18 correlation with future job performance according to some researchers. If you’re hiring based on a resume, you’re missing critical data – and that means hiring mistakes and lost revenue.”

So not only are the latest assessment solutions time-savers, they can lead to huge cost savings by avoiding bad hires.

“You can review a report in seconds,” says Tanebaum, “saving you years of stress and hassle by weeding out bad hires, and helping you capture great new revenue opportunities by weeding in perfect fits every time.”

Better Living Through Chemistry

And the science behind candidate assessments keeps getting better.  “Personality assessments have come light years in both quality and the ability to scale,” says Christine Bird, co-founder of Cream.hr.

“By combining high quality scientifically-backed assessments, scalable online technology and Big Data, for the first time, hiring managers don’t have to rely on the subjective hiring process — they can get the critical data to match the right applicant to the right positions.”  Cream.hr backs up their personality assessments with cutting-edge behavioral research, something the average hiring manager is not likely to be on top of.

Tom Janz, Chief Scientist at PeopleAssessments, stresses that “employers need to ‘science up’ to recruit smarter. Online assessments with a strong record of predicting job performance are the cost effective solution for today’s smart recruiters.”

According to Kerry Schofield, Cofounder/Chief Psychometrician at Good.Co, “the way things are developing, heavily automated, online psychometric recruitment is going to be standard very soon, and companies who don’t use this resource are going to be missing out.”

Trust But Verify

Another crucial component in the assessment process is reference checks.  Gone are the days of tracking down former employers on the phone to gauge a candidate’s suitability for the job.  Just as technology allows us to quickly and effectively assess a candidate’s skills, so, too does it now allow for effortless reference-checking. Products such as Chequed now automate what was once an old-fashioned, time consuming process.

Says Matt Gough, Co-Founder of Chequed, “Our solution empowers businesses to not only streamline their talent selection process but provide objective, consistent and predictive information about their candidates.”  Anyone familiar with labor law will immediately grasp the importance of objectivity in hiring, and, increasingly, the “predictive” part of the process is attractive to hiring managers looking to avoid costly bad hires — and to save time.

A New Standard

Assessment solutions are fast becoming an integral part of any smart hiring process.  The technology is there — and at an increasingly low cost to the hiring manager — so companies are starting to view it as a crucial step in the hiring process.  Given the high cost of a bad hire, it makes sense to do it right the first time.

“Is it possible to get great hires without including any assessments in the process?” asks Ravi Mikkelsen, Co-Founder and CEO at jobFig.  “Of course you can. But similarly to how technology helps to improve the  building of cars, houses, computers and just about everything we use, why not have it help build the teams we’ll spend most of our waking hours with?”

Honest Abe couldn’t have said it better himself.