I think most agree that for business processes, consistency creates enormous value. We all know how much easier it is to manage the complexities and intricacies of sourcing and hiring when everyone executes against the same workflow and process design.

In fact, consistency may often be a primary value of your global brand. For example, you won’t get a gourmet meal at a fast food chain, but successful chains are those where the quality remains uniform and consistent worldwide.

There are, however, some caveats. How consistent should hiring processes be? Let me show you how to determine the optimum level of consistency you should consider for your organization.

Some company leaders want to maintain universal consistency in recruiting and hiring practices because while they may operate globally, teams are mostly centered in one location. Other organization may operate in a more decentralized manner, with differing needs demanding more flexibility for hiring processes.

Which approach should your company adopt?

Focus more on business goals and reliability, less on process itself

After reviewing data on rolling out SmartRecruiters across many global enterprises – plus interviewing many leaders at these organizations – there are a set of advantages and pitfalls strikingly common in making the decision on consistency for hiring processes. Understanding these will help you better evaluate and refine your global talent acquisition strategy.

At SmartRecruiters, our values center on helping organizations meet global business challenges, not simply to adhere to specific processes. The quality of those you hire makes an enormous difference in successfully meeting your goals. If the nature of your organization and your needs calls for varying processes from location to location to acquire the best talent, doing so is a far better option than managing for global consistency simply for the sake of maintaining a uniform process.  

Indeed, it’s your business objectives that matter most, not process.

Insights from thousands of recent hires

In some cases, processes are consistent but reliably deliver poor results. You should find the most useful KPIs to evaluate to best optimize the critical balance between local and global control.

Our study of thousands of hires made by our clients reveals that successful companies are those that ask the right questions in deciding how much control to give to unit leaders. I hope you can come to Hiring Success 17 to learn what those questions are and how to determine the answers that meet challenging talent acquisition goals. I look forward to seeing you at Hiring Success 17.

Let’s say you’re on a hiring team, just completed an interview, and ready to provide your feedback. Do you first look at how other interviewers rated that candidate?

If you are like me, you probably do it sometimes. Let’s face it, we are all only human.

But those other opinions can influence your assessment. Two concepts, what organizational psychologists call “groupthink” and what strategists call “first mover advantage” can create situations where early opinions impact later opinions in a group discussion.

That can bias hiring decisions, so our new Spring 2017 release includes a new Independent Feedback feature that hides other interview ratings until you submit yours. It’s a simple idea, yet it adds so much value.

At SmartRecruiters, our mission centers on helping organizations succeed by building great teams. But how does everyone agree on, let alone decide, who’s great?

We all like to think we evaluate candidates fairly and impartially, but our decisions aren’t always driven by our opinion alone. Candidate evaluation bias is often based on what seems to be a consensus, but really isn’t.

Less group thinking, more smart hiring

I thought about this new feature as we evaluated our own hiring practices here at SmartRecruiters. Even the most opinionated of us “Smartians” admitted that in some cases we had reviewed other team member assessments after interviewing a candidate and before submitting our own —  and it had an impact on the resulting review.

We realized that could influence our hiring decisions, perhaps losing the chance to hire some great talent if only one or two of us had expressed views on attributes others may have missed. So we decided to add Independent Feedback as a feature to our own processes.  It’s now part of our new Spring 2017 release, so you are welcome to use it, too.

We want to build an organizational culture based on shared values, but if independent views don’t get heard because of a tendency to want to be like others — especially those who manage us  — the chances of making a poor decision, in hiring or otherwise, rises.

Think about it this way:

Let’s say Candidate A receives an overall 5-star rating when interviewers knew other interviewers’ ratings before submitting theirs. Candidate B receives an overall 5-star rating based on independent feedback with other interviewer ratings hidden. Who’s likely to be the most impressive candidate? I suspect Candidate B would be the better choice.

On the flip side, a candidate with low ratings is almost certainly less promising with independent feedback. If feedback were not hidden, that candidate may actually be more promising because poor assessments may have been biased by others.

More assessment on merit brings more fairness to diverse candidates

After we started this practice here at SmartRecruiters, we could immediately see how minimizing group think makes a big difference. It gives candidates who may have less traditional backgrounds — or see things from a different perspective — a chance to impress a member of the hiring team who could more easily see that view and share a positive opinion.

That deepens everyone’s evaluation during the hiring process and adds more diversity to our team. It also helps hiring managers focus on expressing their own views, not merely concur with what they think others might think. That’s why we added options to hide other people’s feedback on candidates not just from interviewers, but also from hiring managers.

Yes, we all have shared values. Yes, we subscribe to our “we are who we hire” philosophy. But we want A-class talent, not just seemingly A-class clones of ourselves, so adding Independent Feedback to our Spring Release was an easy decision.

Let me know what you think about this new feature — but I’ll only let you know what others think after you send me your opinion!

Your candidates are not data points. They’re people with unique stories, hopes and the potential to change your company for the better. However, the only way to give them the experience they deserve is to treat your candidate pipeline like a set of data points that can be analyzed.

This analysis helps you understand and eliminate the bottlenecks that drag out time-to-hire and drag down your employment brand by negatively impacting candidate experience.

Introducing Pipeline Analytics: Actionable reports of your hiring process

The good news is that now you can get deep and insightful information about your candidate pipeline. No spreadsheets needed! Starting this month, you can access easy-to-use Pipeline Analytics right from within the SmartRecruiters TA Platform. These include an intuitive and robust set of graphical insights grouped in two essential reports: Current Pipeline and Historical Pipeline.

Forget the enormous spreadsheets and number crunching! Whether it’s a weekly management meeting to review open requisitions or a quarterly offsite to refine your talent acquisition strategy, these interactive reports have your needs covered.

Current Pipeline Analytics: Optimize your hiring in real-time

The Current Pipeline report analyzes what’s going on now for all the jobs in your system. It helps you answer important tactical questions about the current health of your hiring process. Are we getting new candidates? Do we need more recruiting resources to manage inbound candidate traffic faster? How many good candidates are in advanced interview rounds? How many offers are outstanding, and which candidates are we hoping to close soon?

These questions routinely come up when Talent Acquisition leaders, hiring managers and executives discuss the current state of open requisitions and act fast on strategies that are not working. Communicating the status of hiring progress on a weekly basis empowers TA leaders to be proactive by identifying which jobs are “on track” and spotting obstacles before they become problems. Current Pipeline Analytics gives TA leaders a single portal to answer those questions, and more!

Historical Pipeline Analytics: Understand pipeline trends

The Historical Pipeline report analyzes your hiring process over time. These analytics help you understand hiring velocity, historical trends and bottlenecks. They are valuable for TA strategy reviews, especially discussions about hiring KPIs and projected performance.

For example, you can’t really set an offer acceptance goal without a comprehensive data review first. The ratio between offers extended and accepted is not enough to build a solid goal: First you need to analyze the outliers across your organization to see if data is skewed for certain departments, locations or even hiring managers. Analyzing outlier data for various subsets of your organization will help you understand the best practices from your hiring champions, identify teams struggling to close candidates, and as a result, adjust hiring methods and set better performance goals for the entire organization.

Likewise, your hiring velocity – the time candidates spend in the pipeline – may surprise you when you drill down to specific recruiters or hiring managers. Long wait-time to hear back from a recruiter or hiring manager is a top candidate complaint that severely impacts employer brand perception. However, every hiring process is unique: different roles and companies need different time to properly evaluate a candidate. Optimizing your hiring process so it takes just enough time – but not more – is a science-based art. You can achieve greatness only by establishing what good hiring velocity looks like for your organization (based on the data, of course), and then helping your hiring managers and recruiters get there.

Our Historical Pipeline report has even more details to accelerate your hiring velocity. By looking at different time periods, you can see whether you’ve got enough candidates to hit your goals and how quickly candidates move through the process for those periods. Comparing your recent performance to previous periods will establish whether your hiring velocity and offer acceptance are getting better or worse, including the factors driving those trends.

Win the war for talent with data-driven strategies

Great companies strive to deliver a great candidate experience and to optimize the hiring process internally. Few succeed because they don’t make fact-based decisions or track the progress of process improvements. The new SmartRecruiters Pipeline Analytics are designed to empower TA champions to achieve their hiring success goals through deep and data-informed decisions. In a world that is more and more data-driven, the choice is pretty straightforward: either turn your candidate pipeline data into a valuable asset or lose the war for talent to competitors who do.

Every manager wants to hire talented people and help their teams become high performing. But why do some managers and teams fail at it so often? Here is my list of five common mistakes that cost you good candidates – and suggestions how to avoid them.

#1 You Don’t Know What You Are Looking For

Not having a meaningful job description will cost you some of the best candidates. Talented people want to know upfront what it’ll take to succeed in your organization. They also want to know how the role will develop over time. Focusing on the future performance rather that generic requirements will help your job ad win the hearts of forward-thinking candidates.

What To Do:

• Develop a list of criteria that will define a person’s success in the role (remember that the criteria will need to match your screening, interview processes).
• Avoid restrictive requirements, such as “3 years of experience” unless you are positive that they are must haves.
• Think through and describe the future of the role.

#2 You Don’t Push Your Team To Make Referrals

Employee referrals is a secret weapon of many companies in the Silicon Valley known for fast growth of strong teams. Early years of YouTube or the current electric/driverless car team poaching between Apple and Tesla are good examples of employee referrals in action. Many startups struggle with getting top talent to help them take off and scale, but it never fails to amaze me how often they miss out on pushing the team to engage their personal contacts.

What to Do:

• If your employees don’t refer good people, your problem is either culture (people are not comfortable referring others), or employees who fail to engage talent from their past; figure out which one it is.
• Make referring talent a lens through which you estimate the value of employees
• Encourage referrals through recognition, token compensation – read Dan Ariely’s analysis of how market norms and social norms affect work performance

#3 You Don’t Focus On Candidate Experience

There is a common belief that best candidates never apply themselves: you have to poach them. That belief often encourages companies to neglect the candidate experience for the majority of candidates and focus on outbound sourcing only. That’s is a big mistake: today’s runner up candidate may be tomorrow’s winner, or a friend of tomorrow’s winner, or a partner. WhatsApp founder Brian Acton applied to Facebook and got rejected, but he kept warm memories of his candidate experience. Neglecting the common decency, such as taking time to respond to your candidates, always fires back.

What To Do:

• Make people applying for your jobs feel that you appreciate their time: make application process simple, send an acknowledgement message.
• Follow up with those you have to reject.
• Be transparent about interviews and next steps.

#4 You Throw Out The Baby With The Bath Water

We all know it: resumes suck. Yes, there is no proven scalable way to screen candidates that can replace resumes at this point. But while we are waiting for the next artificial intelligence way of predicting talent, skills and performance, there are small steps that we can take to prevent false negatives.

What To Do:

• Build a list of competencies (skills, personal qualities, technical knowledge) that are highly correlated with success in your team or company.
• If you can’t do it in big data way, just make your best guess – everyone does.
• Screen for those skills and remember that many of them can’t be on a resume anyway.
• Build job descriptions and interviews to encourage and probe for those specific skills.

#5 You Are Not Selling A Vision That Resonates

There is a popular line of thinking, especially among startups, that candidates choose to associate with “branded” teams. This means if no-one on your team went to MIT or worked at Google, you will have a hard time attracting talent. I think this is one of the most toxic hiring myths, as it takes attention away from the single most important way to attract candidates: selling your vision.

What To Do:

• Build a script, written down or not, clearly identifying the scope and complexity of problems you are tackling, the excitement of your product/solution and the market size.
• Share it with your team and make sure everyone is comfortable selling this vision to candidates.
• Drop the thinking that people who have applied are already sold on your greatness: they have simply allowed you to explain it to them.
• Sell to everyone, whether you think they are good fit or not.

In the follow-up to this post, I will discuss five most common mistakes that prevent hiring teams from making their interviewing a success. Good luck with your hiring! Go get them.

In the world of overwhelming data, it is increasingly easy to miss important information. This is especially painful for time-sensitive situations, like missing a flight because an email from the airline got buried in your inbox.  

To better manage your recruitment, we at SmartRecruiters have released a new version of notification center that allows you to configure a set of relevant emails that help you stay in touch with your hiring process. We are making it easier for you to stay on top of all important news about your jobs, candidates and recruitment services: we have released 12 emails to cover all major events in your hiring process and an email notifications control center where you can set your email preferences. Let’s take a closer look at the new candidate emails, the collaborative hiring emails, the hiring milestone emails, and view the notification control center, where you have access to all your recruitment email notifications.

New Candidate Email

We redesigned an email about new candidates. You’ll receive a quick summary about a candidate, featuring their latest title, education info and location. All emails are optimized for mobile devices (example below). You can immediately proceed to rating a candidate by tapping on a star rating in the email or click to view more candidates for that job. We group new candidate emails if your job is “on fire” and you’re getting a lot of candidates so that your inbox doesn’t get overloaded.

Collaborative Hiring Emails

We added emails to enhance your collaborative hiring. You can choose to receive emails when your hiring team members review candidates, share candidates with you, comment on your posts or schedule interviews. Interview scheduling emails allow you to add interviews to your calendar. You will also get a notification when someone adds you to a hiring team or when your hiring team has new members.

Hiring Milestones

Last but not least, we added emails about important milestones in your hiring process. These include new offers and hires, candidate assessment results and candidates withdrawing interest in a job.

Notifications Control Center

Email notifications control center is a new tab in your Admin/Settings where you can select to receive emails you are interested in. You can have different settings for jobs created by you and jobs where you’re on the hiring team. It’s easy to unsubscribe from a specific type of email or edit your email preferences by clicking on the links in the email footer.

Recruiting is very time-sensitive. Hiring managers and recruiters are always under pressure to move fast: they need to close great candidates before the competition, schedule interviews, exchange feedback about candidates and learn immediately when a candidate is no longer interested in the job.

We hope that our new email notifications will help you save time by keeping you up-to-date with the latest important news about your hiring process. You are always welcome to share your feedback about the new emails on our Get Satisfaction forum or via Twitter @SmartRecruiters. Here’s the full list of types of recruitment email notification options within SmartRecruiters:

12 Types of Recruitment Email Notifications

1. New Candidates for Intern, Product Management in San Francisco
2. New Candidate Reviews for Intern, Product Management in San Francisco
3. New Interview Scheduled for Intern, Product Management in San Francisco
4. New Offer Made for Intern, Product Management in San Francisco
5. New Hire for Intern, Product Management in San Francisco
6. New Assessment Results for Intern, Product Management in San Francisco
7. Assessment Updates for Intern, Product Management in San Francisco
8. Candidate for Intern, Product Management in San Francisco Withdrew Their Interest
9. New Hiring Team Member for Intern, Product Management in San Francisco
10. You Were Added to Hiring Team for Intern, Product Management in San Francisco
11. Check Out These Candidates for Intern, Product Management in San Francisco (Someone shared a candidate profile with you)
12. New Comments on Your Candidate Reviews

Check out the improvements we have made to the candidate rating functionality! We made it cleaner and more responsive to your actions, so that it’s easier for you to save and share feedback with your hiring team. Here are the 4 main changes:

1. You can decide whether you want to rate a candidate with or without a review. Select a star rating if you want to rate quickly or accompany the rating by a review. Click “Save” to save you rating or rating + review.

2. As you type in your review, the review box will expand. Now, you can see your entire review without having to scroll back and forth.

3. When you click the “Save” button, you will immediately see your review appearing under the “Reviews” tab, and the count of reviews on that tab will update automatically. Looking at the “Reviews” tab is a great way to compare your own review to what other people say about that candidate. Some of our users had been confused as to the location of the newly submitted review.

4. As always, your candidate rating will be shown to members of your hiring team on their HireLoop, but now we show review + rating in a single feed story to make your HireLoop feed cleaner.

We are looking forward to hearing your feedback on the new candidate rating and review functionality. What else can we do to make it easier for you and your colleagues to hire as a team?

You can’t make hiring easy for your entire company without good collaboration, which starts with engaging your hiring team into a meaningful conversation and instant exchange of opinions.

We are excited to reveal the new look and feel of the SmartRecruiters HireLoop to you! We hope that it will allow you hire more efficiently as a team and always stay on top of what’s going on with recruiting in your company.

You will see the new HireLoop look and feel when you log into SmartRecruiters.  The features of the new hiring activity include:

• New user friendly and intuitive layout of stories and comments.

• Better commenting functionality – get the conversation going with your team and start sharing and discussing your opinions on candidates.

• Cleaner look of candidate ratings and reviews from your hiring team members.

• Improved functionality allowing hiring team members to interact by agreeing with stories and comments.

• Improved filters on top of the HireLoop – you can look up and filter your HireLoop feed to feature stories dedicated to a specific candidate or job:

• Better notifications about new updates and comments from your colleagues or candidates.

We are in the process of making several key enhancements in this area and we will be rolling out the new features and improvements incrementally. Learn more by requesting a demo.

Over the next few weeks, we will roll out updates to the look of HireLoop feeds on Candidate and Job pages, improve grouping of the HireLoop stories and start displaying candidate images in your HireLoop feed. Stay tuned!

We don’t always build for recruitment agencies, but when we do, we build stuff that makes everyone’s hiring easier. We have just released a new feature that makes communication between recruiters and their customers – direct employers – more efficient. Recruiters, meet HireLoop, your own personal news feed.

We also improved the employers’ HireLoop with updates from their preferred recruitment agencies. The previous iteration of HireLoop took employers’ engagement within SmartRecruiters to an all-time high. We hope that the new HireLoop for recruiters will allow both recruiters and employers to do more and be smarter about managing relations with recruiting business partners.

Why We Built It

Being a great recruiter is no cakewalk. As your network and clientele expand, it’s more difficult to keep up with all the assignments, proposals and prospective leads, let alone candidates. As a recruiter, you want to keep a keen eye on important news and updates from your network, have an easily accessible log of your communications with customers, and be able to react quickly to business opportunities.

That’s exactly why we released HireLoop for recruiters in the SmartRecruiters recruiter marketplace. When a recruiter sends a proposal to a lead, submits a new candidate for a current assignment or sends a quick note to a current customer, that action creates a quick post – or as I say, a story – within their HireLoop. Recruiters can add comments to stories to boost a discussion of proposals, candidates and other important topics. If a recruiter works with multiple companies, each story on their HireLoop feed will be private for that recruiter and a company representative who posted the job.

Negotiation Perks

Whenever recruiters or their prospective customers change the details of a proposal and submit it for the other party’s review, comments for the revised version get added as a thread to the original proposal HireLoop story. This way, it is easy for both parties to securely keep track of the entire conversation about proposals.

If a HireLoop story involves a proposal, you can click on the “View Proposal” link in the story to view the latest version. The notes on each proposal version are added as comments to the story.

We Want (To Hear From) You

Are you a recruiter looking to become a part of the SmartRecruiters recruiter marketplace? Join the waiting list of customer vetted agencies. Once endorsed by an employer who is already a member of the SmartRecruiters family, a recruiter can begin submitting candidates and negotiating with SmartRecruiters 45,000+ employers.

Are you a recruiter already using SmartRecruiters? We look forward to hearing your feedback on the new recruiter news feed. Please share your ideas by starting a new topic on our community support page.

Thank you – and Happy Hiring!