With so many ways to get recruiting wrong, how do you get it right? The growing influence of talent acquisition suggests that investing in recruiter training is one way for organizations to set themselves up for success. Josh Bersin listed “Cherish your recruiters” among his top trends for 2023.  He wrote,

Stop seeing them as just salespeople, and more as trusted advisors who can help decide if a candidate fits your culture, and arm them with powerful tools for sourcing, assessment, and selling you as a brand.

Josh Bersin in HR.com

We agree! Here are four reasons why investing in recruiters is a good idea.

1. Improve business outcomes. A Josh Bersin Company study found that companies that invest in their recruiting team are 4 times more likely to be leaders in innovation and 4.5 times more likely to achieve high levels of customer retention. That’s a compelling reason to invest in your recruiting team!
2. Expanded skillsets increase agility. The current decade has shown that change is the only constant. In just a few years, we’ve gone from mass pandemic layoffs to a talent shortage during the Great Resignation and back to mass layoffs again. When recruiters have a wide variety of skills in their toolbox, recruiting organizations can adapt more quickly to market changes. A diversely-skilled recruiting team can switch between activities such as sourcing, employer brand development, or assessment strategies as needs arise. Broadly-skilled recruiters who are experts in all things hiring become trusted partners to the business and add long-term value to your organization.
3. A positive influence on candidates. Recruiters are on the frontlines of your employer brand; they’re selling your employee experience to potential candidates every day. A dissatisfied recruiting team can influence candidates in subtle ways, while a disorganized hiring team can influence candidates in not-so-subtle ways. Investing in recruiters and elevating their position in the organization helps everyone align around a positive hiring experience–which should translate into a positive employee experience because the right people are in the right jobs.
4. Strategic positioning for talent acquisition. Empowered recruiters empower their leaders with current market trends, insight into candidates’ mindsets, and data that can both uncover roadblocks to meeting business goals and chart a path to business success. A strong recruiting team shores up a team leader, strengthening the value of their seat at the table.

4 Keys to Investing in Recruiters

What does an organization that invests in its recruiters look like? We spoke with Allyn Bailey, Executive Director of Hiring Success Services at SmartRecruiters, to come up with four key criteria of organizations that invest in their recruiting teams.

1. Time for upskilling. If recruiters are at 100% capacity, there’s no time left for training, experimentation, or open discussions that could lead to better processes and insights. Recruiters’ capacity needs to be taken into account before implementing any training program.
2. Ongoing training. What, exactly, do your recruiters need to learn to stay up to date? And what do individual recruiters want to learn? Whether it’s a monthly training session on a new area of recruitment or access to the latest classes on LinkedIn Learning or Social Talent, recruiters are at their best when they feel empowered to learn and discuss what they learn with peers. At Doka, a global formwork and scaffolding company, quarterly trainings help keep recruiters up to date.
3. Career pathing. As with any role in your organization, recruiters need to know about options for advancement. Career path options will help direct their learnings—and development check-ins will keep their newfound skills with you instead of without you at another company.
4. Access to modern tools—and the ability to experiment. Advanced recruiting organizations pilot new tools when new situations arise and sunset old tools when they become too cumbersome. Investing in a flexible ecosystem for hiring enables recruiters to adapt to the market so that they can ensure a great candidate experience while attracting the most qualified talent in the current age, not an age long past.

Essential Skillsets for Recruiters in a Strategic TA Function

Expertise with activities such as sourcing, employer branding, and interviewing are a given in recruitment. Allyn Bailey drew our attention to three additional skill areas that will help your recruiting team shine in their ability to become strategic partners to the business. A seat at the table for a talent acquisition leader hinges on a recruitment team that’s good at these three things:

1. Assessment process. Candidate assessment is the heart of the recruitment process. Exploring new ways to assess candidates through screening questions, AI- and game-based quantitative assessments, and capturing qualitative answers to interview questions helps recruiters strengthen their company’s ability to hire best-fit candidates. 
2. Data expertise. Leading with data is a requirement for any strategic talent acquisition function. Recruiters need to be able to report on their own activities, contextualize results, and determine the next steps in an informed way. Those newer to reporting may need to start with understanding what data they need to collect to make decisions, how to collect that data, and how to manage that data effectively. Read 6 Steps to a Talent Acquisition Reporting Strategy to learn more.
3. Talent analytics. Analytics backed up with labor market data allows recruiters to look across industries, skillsets, and locations to identify sources of talent. This type of intelligence is vital to operating a strategic TA function because it helps leaders come to the table with data-backed insights that can buck long-held assumptions.

A high-functioning recruiting team is just one aspect of leading a strategic TA function. For a deep dive into all the components, download our latest ebook, created in partnership with Allyn and the SmartRecruiters Hiring Success team.

Today, less than 10% of job advertising is managed programmatically, while well over 80% of brand advertising is managed through programmatic means. Brands’ shift to programmatic advertising over the last decade has been for one simple reason: it saves money. If programmatic advertising help advertisers reach more of the right eyeballs for less, why have employers been so slow to adopt it?

Part of the problem relates to the fact that most recruiting teams are not high-spending brands that can outsource digital ad placements worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to ad agencies. They are often small teams managing a few dozen open roles. To top it off, automation is harder with the multitude of variables in job ads, and job advertising platforms themselves have been slower to enable the technology that makes programmatic advertising possible.

The tight post-pandemic talent marketplace has left employers with a need to reach not just more candidates but the right candidates: ones that have not seen your listing before, have not been inundated with ads from competitors, and are qualified to fill your open positions. Aptitude Research estimates that 40% of job advertising spend is wasted, but which 40%?

Curious to learn more about how top employers manage job advertising today, I sat down with Jim Milton, SVP of Strategy at SmartRecruiters. Before his new role as head of strategy, Jim was the General Manager for SmartJobs, our programmatic job advertising managed service. 

Programmatic Job Advertising in North America vs. Europe

Jim started by describing the lay of the land across North America and Europe. “Universally, our customers are saying that cost per applicant (CPA) has risen dramatically,” he said. “It’s gotten so expensive to fish in the same pond as every other employer that companies need to save money, so they’re more open to trying out programmatic.” And the possibilities for programmatic have expanded, with more job boards making their inventory available. “European job boards, in particular, have been slower to open up their job board inventory to programmatic technologies, but our global customers are watching their counterparts in North America do programmatic. Now employers are starting to demand it from job boards globally.” 

He described how job boards in Europe are more varied and niche compared to North America, where employers tend to rely on a handful of leading job boards. Many of SmartRecruiters’ European customers use SmartDistribute, which helps them manage their job board contracts all in one place. 

The Barriers to Efficient Job Advertising Spending

No matter where your business operates, the manual management of job advertising typically results in wasted spending. Jim put it this way: “The problem with pay-per-click advertising is that it is often out of sync with actual pipeline needs. For example, you may have an open req with ten candidates in the interview stage and an offer extended, and if you’re not micromanaging your PPC campaigns, you might let the meter run and pay for unneeded clicks/traffic.”

The other problem companies have is not distributing spending across multiple job boards. “People get deeply entrenched in their ideas about the best places to spend,” he said. A programmatic solution offers an objective view into which job boards are actually working and adjusts spending automatically. “Only a data-driven approach can guarantee that you’re selecting the right boards for your jobs,” Jim said.

The solution of using a recruitment advertising agency to manage programmatic does not always deliver on the promise of cost savings. In addition to the typical agency fee of 20% of ad spend, the agency relationship adds another layer of communication regarding changes in hiring. It also adds another level of complexity regarding data management.

Cost Per Qualified Applicant: The Key to True Job Board ROI

With the SmartJobs managed service, companies have three benefits:

• Technology that automatically optimizes their job campaigns
• Humans operating the technology who have access to data on the entire talent pipeline
• Already existing data management agreements. 

“At SmartRecruiters, we have all the data from the top of the funnel – the number of people clicking on the job, applying, and making it to the interview stage and all the way to the hire,” Jim said. “This is unique. Job boards can’t give customers data from the middle and bottom of the funnel. Our reporting includes accurate data on cost per interview, cost per offer, and cost per hire. It’s not data that has to be joined together after the fact. It’s a continuous funnel with no gaps that allows for a true ROI measurement.”

Getting beyond cost per applicant to cost per qualified applicant is an exciting way to drive value in the recruitment pipeline. “Customers have different definitions of what qualified means,” Jim said. “For some, it’s passing the resume review stage, while for others, it’s making it to the third interview. Our perspective is that every company has its own definition, and we can show it in the reporting.” 

With this rich data at their fingertips, a recruitment team can step back and compare their results before programmatic. They can also compare their job board spending to outbound sourcing, other recruitment marketing, and events. “Instead of this false indicator like cost per applicant or cost per click, you get a real ROI because the data is in one place.”

Sometimes a Programmatic Boost is All You Need

SmartRecruiters recently launched Boost, a lightweight approach to programmatic job advertising. TA teams can purchase bursts of programmatic traffic ad-hoc by entering credit card information. Boost is a great fit for high-priority roles or roles that aren’t getting enough qualified applicants. It’s also a great way to try out programmatic advertising without having to provide a centralized job ad budget to SmartRecruiters.

When I asked Jim what was most exciting in the job ad space today, he shared these phenomenal results from a SmartRecruiters client who used Boost:  

• Boosted jobs saw candidate volume rise by over 200%, and boosted candidates were 150% more likely to make it to the interview, offer, or hire stage.

The Future of Job Advertising

Recently, Indeed shifted its business model from pay-per-click to pay-per-applicant. Jim expects that in the future, this will improve their ability to deliver relevant applicants, and the business model will evolve yet again to paying per matching candidate. “It will take time to evolve, but many players are already working on this,” he said.

On another front, Jim thinks the distinction between sourcing and job advertising is likely to blur. He said, “Imagine a system that takes a req and automatically farms it out to either a programmatic advertising network, or to qualified sourcers, or both, depending on the importance of the role and the budget behind it to use for talent attraction. I’d love to see the paradigm of a true sourcing engine emerge where the details of where and how to market a job are handled conditionally and automatically, as much possible.”

Until then, you can get started on programmatic job advertising with SmartJobs and Boost in North America and the UK. If you just want to save money and time by managing your job boards more efficiently, try SmartDistribute. And if you’re looking to save money in multiple ways across your talent acquisition function, download our ebook Guide to Evaluating the Business Value of a Talent Acquisition Platform

Companies have always been hiring for skills. But why has the topic become so hot in recent times? In a tight talent marketplace, companies need to reach further to attract more candidates, tap into diverse talent pools, and keep up their hiring velocity – and hiring for skills is one way to do that. And as they hire for skills, organizations can also attract people with the skills that will build the organization of the future as jobs shift and change.

In any area of business, there are multiple ways of thinking that no longer serve in the current marketplace. One of those areas in talent acquisition is the insistence upon a certain number of years of experience or educational pedigree. Both hiring managers and recruiters can get stuck in these requirements, limiting their ability to attract talent that has the capacity to do the job but lacks the exact pedigree. Hiring for skills helps you get over this outdated practice and focus on transferable skills and the candidate’s ability to develop them in the workplace.

The good news is that hiring for skills doesn’t require a massive investment in technology or a complete overhaul of your talent management processes. What it does require, however, is optimizing the essential steps of recruiting so that you focus on skills as part of a whole-person assessment strategy. Here’s how.

1. Start with Job Profiles & Job Descriptions

The easiest way to get started with hiring for skills is to start small. By starting with one job profile and one job description, you can build an iterative process to bring a skills-based approach to your talent acquisition processes.

The first place to look is your job profiles. Articulate each skill needed to do the job, and then consider, if candidates really need a degree or a certain number of years of experience to succeed in the role. In positions relating to finance, medicine, law, or data science, degrees and certifications may be required. But for others, looking at skills instead of pedigree forces you to think about what is actually needed to carry out the job’s tasks. It could have little to do with what they studied in college or if they went to college at all. Then, craft your job description to clearly communicate the skills needed for the role and eliminate unnecessary requirements. For more, check out our article, How to Write a Skills-Based Job Description.

2. Include Skills as Part of a Whole-Person Assessment

A potential employee consists of more than their skills. They have behaviors, competencies, preferences, interests, motivations, and experiences that contribute to their profile as a best-fit candidate. Skills are just one lens of many that you need to look through. Acknowledging this fact will help you define what is actually needed for each role in a way that you may not have previously.  This includes candidate interest, ability, and internal needs of the business and the team.

For example, a person may require technical skills for a role as a customer support technician, but they may also need to have a natural aptitude for empathy and understanding as they troubleshoot customer issues. Not only that, they have to be motivated to use both soft and hard skills throughout the day. Otherwise, they will feel drained by the job and be a poor fit. So the assessment for this position would include both skills and the candidate’s interests and motivations.

3. Design an Assessment Strategy

An effective assessment strategy defines what capabilities, behaviors, and skills you will assess at each stage of the hiring process. It also includes how each of these criteria will be assessed, by whom, and through which tools as candidates move through the hiring funnel. 

Your assessment strategy may include pre-screening questions, test-based assessments, and interview questions relevant to the role. It should align with a hiring scorecard to facilitate an objective evaluation process. An assessment strategy will include a map of each step along with roles and responsibilities. 

4. Ensure Consistency at Each Touchpoint

The most beautiful assessment strategy will not work without buy-in from every person in the interview process. Make sure that each person – sourcer, recruiter, hiring manager, and interviewer –  knows what skills and competencies they are responsible for assessing. 

Clear assessment criteria and a standardized method for documenting it will go a long way toward making whole-person hiring with an emphasis on skills effective. 

5. Communicate Continuously to Build Alignment

It may feel like over-communication, but regular discussion among stakeholders will help you build a skill-based hiring muscle and a better recruiting process overall. You may find that you have to revise processes, assessment strategies, scorecards, or interview questions as you go. 

In your communications, continually come back to what you set out to do in the beginning: assess candidates on skills and competencies needed by the company, in the role, and on the team. Frequent communication will help everyone stay aligned as candidates progress through the hiring funnel and final selections get made.

6. Let Technology Help Lift the Load

You might be surprised that your current tech stack can help you hire for skills – or that adding on one assessment tool offers a powerful way to level the playing field among candidates. Look for tools that help you assess candidates objectively, build a structured and unbiased interview process, and standardize feedback collection. 

As your company builds its skills-based hiring muscle, you may start to consider tools that focus on skills throughout the talent lifecycle. But if you miss the essential aspects of a strong hiring process – effective job profiles,  a clearly defined assessment strategy, and consistent execution of it – those tools will not fully realize their purpose. 

Features of the SmartRecruiters talent acquisition suite that can help you hire for skills include.

• Easy-to-configure screening tools expand talent pools by allowing for a skills-based approach rather than filtering people out by irrelevant qualifiers. 
• Candidate scorecards level the playing field by guiding hiring managers on skills-based interviewing. Scorecards make it easy for teams to collaborate, ensuring an efficient and objective hiring process that can help you hire more diverse talent.
• Integrations with leading assessment providers allow interviewers to view assessment results alongside candidate profiles, ensuring that skills are accounted for at every step.

Want to learn more about hiring for skills? Read our ebook  A Practical Guide to Hiring for Skills.

A recession is not an easy time for talent acquisition departments. If your company has decided to cut back or freeze hiring, how do you spend your time in a fruitful way so that your company is prepared when hiring picks back up again – which it surely will?

Proactively addressing gaps in your TA function during slow hiring periods gives you the opportunity to come out ahead of your competitors when the number of open roles increases again. It’s also an opportunity for you and your team to develop new skills as your activities shift. You could even develop a career win to put on your list of achievements.

In this post, we’ll share how a hiring slowdown is a great time to refine and optimize your TA practices, build your talent pipeline, refresh your employer brand, and revisit your recruiting tech stack.

1. Optimize Your Hiring Processes

When hiring at full speed, there’s little time to dive into the data and see what’s working well and what’s not. Hiring managers may be so busy that they don’t want to think about how to change what they’re doing. It’s a gift to have the mental space to sit back and diagnose roadblocks in how candidates move through the hiring funnel – from talent attraction to onboarding.  Questions you can ask include:

• Are diverse candidates making it through the pipeline? 
• Where are candidates dropping out? 
• Are some areas of the business performing better than others on your KPIs? What can underperforming areas of the business learn from them?
• Is our onboarding process delivering on the promise we set up in the interviews?
• Are our hiring criteria effective for identifying candidates who will become engaged employees?

As you look at key areas of your process, consider how you’d like things to look different once hiring ramps back up and work backward from there. The slowdown will give you time to build relationships and take meaningful action that facilitates change at a reasonable pace.

2. Improve Reporting

You may have less activity to report, but a slowdown is a good time to revisit your reporting strategy. How well are the current reports working? Are they truly helping your team make decisions, or are they just activity reports? What are the gaps? If you feel the need, you could improve your talent acquisition data literacy by getting training or consulting from an expert. 

The work you do to improve reporting should inform your efforts to optimize your hiring processes, as noted above. You can analyze data to see what worked and didn’t work in the past. Start with certain role types or business units that you anticipate will ramp up again when the economy stabilizes. 

A slowdown is also a good time to further integrate your talent acquisition data with HR data. Are all those hires you made in the last few years turning into happy employees? Are they being supported to grow within the organization? Connect data from different systems to uncover how talent acquisition can partner more effectively with L&D as roles change and individuals’ careers evolve.

3. Build your talent pipeline

If you’ve never used a CRM, now is a good time to start. If the recession results in higher unemployment rates, candidate volume for the open roles you do have could grow. By keeping those people engaged during a recession, you’ll have a database to tap into once hiring picks up again. Their careers will evolve; someone who didn’t look like the right candidate before may turn into one after working at another company. Your roles will also evolve; the perfect role might open up for someone who’s interested in your company but couldn’t find the appropriate fit in the past. A healthy talent pipeline is like insurance for your future hiring initiatives.

4. Revisit your employer brand

When hiring is in full swing, you might not have the time to collect employee stories, build branded communications, or even update your career site. In a recession, your recruiting team can shift gears. See who has the best skills to tell employee stories; they can conduct interviews and turn them into video or written content. Perhaps you can partner more closely with the marketing team on content and branded graphics.

For a full brand refresh and an optimized career site, you could deploy SmartRecruiters Attrax. Like building a talent pipeline, refreshing your employer brand sets your company up for post-recession hiring. When everyone else is fighting to hire, you could be effortlessly attracting candidates with an SEO-optimized career site and compelling branded content about what it’s like to work at your company.

5. Revisit your recruiting tech stack

In your quest to optimize processes, you might find gaps that technology can easily solve. Automating processes like candidate screening and interview scheduling can improve the candidate experience while increasing efficiency. 

If you decide you need a new applicant tracking system to fill gaps that your current system cannot address, the hiring slowdown will give you the time to evaluate vendors and set up the implementation properly. It’s harder to do a cutover to a new system when hiring is in full swing. Additionally, lower hiring volume gives people more time to learn the new processes, facilitating system adoption.

A slowdown is a good time to conduct an audit of your complete recruiting tech stack. Are you getting what you wanted out of each of your add-on systems? Are they being used in the way you intended? Is the data connected between them? Find out what’s working, what’s not, and decide what you want to eliminate or invest in further.

It’s also an excellent time to experiment with new add-on systems. Always wanted to try a chatbot? Now is the time to run pilot initiatives. It will be easier to work out the kinks when you’re not under high pressure to get it right.

Focus on positive change

The past few years have taught us that many good things come from change. Things can’t be going full speed ahead 100% of the time. Allyn Bailey, SmartRecruiters’ Executive Director of Hiring Success Services, put it this way,  

Companies that take the opportunity to shore up their systems and transform their processes will prepare themselves for the new future that is going to emerge at the end of the darkness.

Alllyn Bailey, Executive Director of Hiring Success Services, SmartRecruiters

If that darkness includes sub-par recruiting systems that make hiring harder than it needs to be, give us a call.

For a deep dive into how you can lead more strategically in any business secnario, download our ebook, A Seat at the Table: A Guide to Leading a Strategic Talent Acquisition Function.

Hiring isn’t getting any easier. Today’s talent acquisition teams must do everything they can to attract candidates, convince them to apply, and keep them engaged until they show up on the job. In a competitive marketplace for talent, a strong employer brand is an essential component in your talent acquisition strategy – and that includes your career site.

Here at SmartRecruiters, we have a team of employer branding experts who work on our SmartRecruiters Attrax career site product. I sat down with Warren Davidson, Client Services Director, to get the scoop on how companies can improve their employer brands on their career sites. 

“You can have the most beautiful employer brand in the world, but if your career site is dreadful, it’s going to undermine your employer brand,” Warren said. As an expert in career sites and with deep experience in marketing, Warren believes in a candidate-centric approach. The candidate, after all, is your prospective customer. “Your employer brand is intrinsically linked to the candidate experience,” he explained. Warren identified the key aspects of ideal candidate experience.

Personalized, Contextually Relevant Content

“First, they should land on a job that’s relevant to them,” Warren said. “And then they should see a piece of content that reassures them that the company is DEI-friendly, or has great benefits.” He recommends content that brings the workplace to life, such as employee stories that focus on topics relevant to candidates of all kinds, whether they’re parents or from diverse backgrounds. The SmartRecruiters Attrax system uses automation to ensure relevance and personalization. “Relevant, personalized content drives better quality candidates,” he said. “It should also improve your hiring velocity.” 

Organic Traffic from Google

Google visibility is a key piece of the candidate experience that many companies miss. Google is one of the most popular places to look for jobs – and it’s free to get your jobs listed there. By adding structured data to your career website, job seekers automatically find your listings when they search. If your career site is hidden behind the wrong URL and lacks structured data, you end up paying aggregators to get listed on Google. Organic traffic from search engines to an SEO-optimized career site and job listings is a gift that keeps on giving.

Easy Application Process

Many companies lose candidates to a difficult application process. “If they get presented with a login screen, application rates drop off right there,” Warren said. A one-page application with a resume/CV upload from the cloud increases the number of applications. For jobs that are particularly hard to fill, “we have some customers who don’t even ask for a CV anymore,” he said. Candidates can indicate their experience by answering a series of pre-configured questions, which is effective for many types of roles. 

The Power of Branded Experiences

These elements add up to a big impact. “If you have Google visibility, personalization on your career site, deliver contextually relevant content, and a good application process, the ultimate upshot is that when a candidate hits the website, they feel like they belong to your organization. They can see themselves working there,” Warren said. That relevancy drives self-selection, and the ease of the application process prevents the right candidates from dropping out.

Sounds amazing, right? I took a look at some of the results from SmartRecruiters Attrax implementations. All of them had stats such as:

• Increased career site traffic
• Increased candidate engagement (more pages viewed)
• Increased number of applications
• Decrease in abandoned applications
• Increased organic traffic from Google
• Increased traffic to employer brand content
• Decrease in the source of hire  from job boards and recruitment agencies
• Increase in the source of hire from organic career site visits

The Art of What’s Possible on a Career Site

Like a lot of things companies struggle with, legacy technology holds them back from addressing the needs of the current marketplace. Updating a career site may require the work of an agency or IT team. The application process required by the current ATS may be turning candidates away. Warren said, “When it comes to career sites, a lot of companies don’t know what’s possible.”

What is possible? An SEO-optimized career site that delivers personalized, relevant jobs and content to candidates, integrates seamlessly with an ATS, and can be updated by anyone, not just website specialists. Not only is a career site a place where the visual and creative aspects of your employer brand can shine, but also it’s a place where your employer brand comes to life by facilitating a stellar candidate experience.

The journey to Hiring Success is not always straightforward. The ability to attract, select, and hire the best talent for any role, on-demand and within budget requires an alignment across people, processes, and technology. Companies looking to improve their hiring practices often make the choice to implement a new ATS (applicant tracking system), but success will remain out of reach unless they develop a holistic strategy to create a compelling candidate experience, enhance recruiter productivity, and engage hiring managers.

When implementing any new system, a “Northstar” vision of the desired future state helps align the configuration and change management processes required. An enterprise-grade ATS like SmartRecruiters offers all the cutting-edge features that allow you to build a highly automated and fully integrated and customized TA function. But if your current process involves a decades-old system that has outlived its purpose, each people and process component of hiring will need to be evaluated carefully before you can successfully reach the next level of maturity with an ATS upgrade.

Building TA maturity doesn’t happen the instant you make the flip of a switch to a new ATS. The process starts long before that and continues long afterward.

To help you get started, we’ve developed a strategy to ensure that your new system gets implemented in a way that takes you to that next level of hiring success.

1. Evaluate

In this stage, you take stock of your current hiring practices and systems used. This includes a close look at the people, processes, and technology used across every area of your company where hiring processes might differ, such as hourly roles vs. corporate roles. If you’re implementing SmartRecruiters, you would take the Hiring Success Business Assessment, which would give you an overall maturity score after scoring you on each of the 21 dimensions.  

Once you have identified what’s working well and what needs improvement, it’s time to develop your Northstar, that desired future state where you’re hiring best-fit candidates at greater velocity. This evaluation stage helps you make sure that you choose the right options to implement and design processes that fit your team’s needs and your existing technology stack.

2. Strategize

In the strategize phase, look at each area that must be changed and consider how it fits into the big picture. The choices in this phase will determine configuration decisions in your ATS that cascade through each pillar of Hiring Success. The three pillars of Hiring Success are

• Talent Attraction & Engagement: Sourcing, CRM, job advertising, referral management, global mobility, brand, and candidate experience.
• Collaboration & Selection: Screening and candidate review, hiring team collaboration, interviewing, candidate selection, offer management, and onboarding.
• Management & Operating Model: Compliant and secure systems, mobile accessibility, global reach, integrations, reporting, and analytics.

Considering the big picture of how these processes work together sets you up for a smoother implementation. If this portion of the implementation process is overlooked, decisions can get made in a vacuum and cause unnecessary process breakdowns when the system goes live.

3. Transform

Innovative technology won’t stick unless people adopt it. To get the most out of any technology, the people who set it up need to know what’s needed so that it will be most effective for the people who use it. A typical change management process for an ATS includes:

• Identification of key stakeholders
• A detailed project plan with key milestones
• Strategic communications plan to inform and excite users

A common pitfall in this stage is omitting key stakeholders, business regions, or roles. It’s important to recognize that not everyone might not use the system in the same way.  You don’t want to catch people off guard when you roll out training and find out that the system will have an adverse effect on their hiring process.

4. Optimize

Transformation doesn’t stop once you’ve implemented the system. In the weeks directly following an ATS implementation, the system is tested and rapid adjustments may need to be made. As reporting reveals gaps in workflows, further adjustments may be required; you may not have considered everything you need to get accurate metrics on performance, productivity, and spending. Over time, business needs may change that necessitate further adjustments. Optimization is a continuous process that helps you uplevel your TA function over time – and move up the ladder of talent maturity.

You don’t have to do it alone

After implementing SmartRecruiters to more than 4,000 customers, we know the journey to hiring success is a complex process. At SmartRecruiters we support companies in navigating their new system implementation with SmartSuccess and TA Consulting and Insights packages.  These holistic implementation and consulting services support customers in assessing, planning, and configuring their instance of SmartRecruiters based on their unique needs. SmartSuccess gives companies everything they need to successfully launch SmartRecruiters with a predictable and proven approach that includes ongoing expert support.

With a dedicated Hiring Success consultant, you’ll get facilitated implementation sessions, configuration workshops, and train-the-trainer sessions. The consultant will take you through each of the four steps listed above so that your organization gets the most out of your new ATS and get closer to your Northstar – that next level of TA maturity where you’re hiring great people at greater velocity, on time, and within budget.

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. 

Across the world there are thousands of college campuses full of soon-to-graduate students eager to enter the workforce. Recruiters can enrich their candidate pipeline by forging relations with this demographic.

University or campus recruiting refers to the strategies for sourcing, connecting with and hiring college students and recent graduates for internships and entry-level positions.

While campus recruiting is most common with larger companies with significant talent needs, it can benefit firms of any size. Tech, finance, engineering, and consulting are industries that rely heavily on campus recruiting.

Common college recruiting strategies include working with campus career services centers, attending career fairs to interface directly with students, and utilizing social media campaigns. 

Who Should Be on Your Campus Recruiting Team?

An overly-simplistic approach to assembling a campus recruiting team would be to select young team members in an effort to appear “relatable” to young students. Certainly, relatability is important.

Having students talk with young professionals who were recently in their shoes, as college students attending career fairs, and can speak to why they chose to join your team can be an effective strategy. But effective college recruiting obviously entails more than the age of a campus recruiter. 

You need team members that are engaging, informed, enthusiastic, personable, and prepared to answer any and all questions students will have. Recent graduates you’ve hired that meet these criteria are optimal, but that doesn’t mean older team members aren’t also an asset.

Higher-level employees also have vital information to share with college students. After all, the people that come to your booth at a career fair aren’t just interested in how other people their age like working at your company. They also want to see the appeal of a broader career arc.

Building a Digital Campus Recruiting Strategy

Some recruiters question the efficacy of social media recruiting. We think this issue is less a question of whether or not social media recruiting yields positive results and more about the expectations recruiters place on social media platforms. In other words, social media recruiting works if you “ask” it to do the right thing.

As one recruiter writes, social media recruiting is a useful tool to offer a “peak behind the curtain” of a company. In fact, 60% of students who look for jobs use social media to get a better sense of a company’s culture. 

So don’t look to social media recruiting to generate applicants. Instead, think of it as a place to offer valuable information about your values, workplace environment, and culture. 

How to Host Virtual Career Fairs

We offer a much more in-depth look at virtual recruiting here. These are our best practices for creating your virtual recruiting event:

• Choose the right platform: Conferencing software like Zoom is very popular, but there are other options like Brazen that provide greater functionality.
• Promote the event across all of your digital platforms: Everything from your website to your social media pages should advertise the event in order to maximize candidate participation. 
• Follow-up with attendees: Make sure you send an email or direct message to all of your attendees thanking them for attending and encouraging them to reach out if they have additional questions. 
• Implement metrics to track success: In addition to tracking the number of people who register and attend your virtual events, you should also calculate the conversion rate and offer acceptance rate of attendees.  

Recruiting Gen Z

Be careful about broad generalizations about an entire generation of workers. Generic claims that Gen Z is “more determined to change the world than other other generations” are overblown. However, this does not mean that there are not unique features of the world Gen Z has grown up in that make their experiences and recruitment unique.

There are plenty of in-depth articles about recruiting Gen Z, like this one and this one. But when it comes to building a strategy for recruiting them, here are some general Gen Z characteristics and trends to keep in mind: Gen Z 

• Is tech savvy
• Is risk-averse 
• Is looking for companies that have a strong moral compass
• Values diversity & conclusion
• Cares most about salary and work/life balance

Building a Career Page to Connect With College Students and Recent Graduates

Some job sites do a far better job than others to cater to recent graduates. You can read more about companies that do it well here. Indeed and College Grad are two especially impressive models. Each of those sites offer easy to use features that allow candidates to sort available positions by “entry-level”  “junior,” “internship,” etc.  

Your job site should do the same. It’s an easy way to implicitly communicate to recent graduates that you want them to apply to your organization. 

Better yet, consider making a standalone career page specifically for students and recent graduates. Such a page could not only simplify and organize their job search by only containing entry-level positions and internships, it could also offer information relevant to students–i.e. benefits of particular interest to new hires like mentorship programs.

Use Internships to Identify and Retain Top Young Talent

Internship programs are one of the most effective recruiting strategies. They help you identify young people with potential and facilitate the building of a relationship with potential hires before they’ve entered the professional world.

Internships also provide an extensive period for you to familiarize yourself with a worker and for them to familiarize themselves with your organization and culture. 

All of these factors promote better hiring and better retention. Research shows new college hires who had previously interned at a company are more likely to stay with that employer long term.

Moreover, by establishing a track record of hiring your interns to full-time positions after graduation, you’re likely to generate substantial interest among promising candidates before they’ve entered the job market. 

Conclusion

Campus recruiting, when done right, is a crucial way for companies to attract promising young talent. By using a combination of tried and true recruiting techniques and more innovative technological tools, you can help ensure your organization is one young talent flocks to.

Are you interested in learning more about the benefits of campus recruiting and how SmartRecruiters can help? We’re just a click away!

A well-crafted career page has the power to win over and convert qualified candidates. However, in order for that to be the case, it requires careful oversight and to be recognized for what it truly is—a valuable tool in the recruiting tool belt.

Today there’s no shortage of creative and engaging ways for companies to attract candidates. And while it’s true that successful talent teams employ a healthy mix of recruiting tactics, few levers remain as important and relevant as the tried and true company career page.

Compared to in-depth employer branding campaigns and other forms of recruitment marketing, career pages might seem fairly straightforward and simple. But that doesn’t mean they should be neglected and unattended.

Rather, the most effective career pages require careful attention to detail and regular updating in order to remain relevant, engaging, and capable of converting curious candidates into applicants.

The Basic Principles

While there are many ways to set up a successful page, there are some core ideas that should inform how you design your page, what information to include, and how to use visual elements like videos and photographs to enhance user experience.

1. Be Consistent With Your Brand Identity 

The best way to convince people to apply to your company is to tell them who you are. Your career page needs to have clear and consistent messaging that communicates the uniqueness of your corporate culture.

Airbnb is often held up as a model, in this regard. Inconsistency will turn away discerning candidates. For example, if your career page speaks of your emphasis on inclusion and diversity, make sure the images you share of your team members reflect that.

Moreover, career page content shouldn’t just convey your corporate culture, it should help build your brand.

2. Help Your Candidate Form a Connection With Your Organization

Consider how people will experience your page. The first thing they see shouldn’t be a list of open positions. Instead, think of the top of your page as a good book or short story—the opening sentences should draw people in and make them excited to read more.

This introduction shouldn’t be long—two short paragraphs is sufficient. The first should offer a “hook” that piques a candidate’s interest and offers a concise, 2-3 sentence distillation of your business’ mission. The second should pivot to the experiences of your employees, allowing individuals to begin to envision themselves as part of your team.

3. Use Media to Strengthen the Personal Connection

Videos of your work environment, testimonials from your workers, photographs of employees, etc. are important ways to further encourage candidates to imagine themselves as part of your culture and convince them to apply to open positions.

Additionally, visuals can also be used to highlight awards or recognitions bestowed upon your company. Infographics can be really useful here, as they convey important information in an attractive and easy to remember fashion. Hubspot offers a good model for this strategy.

You can also utilize your greatest resource—your employees. Use your team as brand ambassadors and build your careers site around the photos and content they share, like Earl’s Kitchen & Bar has done.

4. Job Postings Should Sell the Company

An effective career site needs to translate visitors into applicants. Job descriptions should enhance the interest and energy you’ve built elsewhere in the page. Boring job descriptions squander interest. Effective job descriptions give readers a clear sense of the role and excites them to apply for it. So keep postings informative, engaging, and concise.

SEO Best Practices

Maximizing SEO on a career page is a complex process with many variables. It starts with the fact that most candidates begin their job search with Google, which sees more than 150 million monthly job searches. At minimum, companies should make sure their job postings include all of the requisite information to guarantee Google for Jobs will “find” your career page. That information includes:

But moving your job search to the first page of the Google search list takes work. So in addition to generating content to boost your company rating in Google’s algorithm, we also recommend utilizing keyword research and on-page SEO optimization. As we cover more here, Google’s Keyword Planner is a great resource to help identify the most popular searches for jobs within an industry.

There are three types of Careers and Jobs landing pages that generate the best organic traffic. Implement your keyword research to create these landing pages: 

It’s fine if your company website uses subdomains like careers.’site’.com, but subfolders are the SEO-preferred method for category page building.

After setting up these landing pages, it’s important to optimize each page for general job searches. The primary method for job landing page optimization is to implement current structured data, also known as Schema for job postings. Thankfully, Google has published extensive guidelines and Schema testing tools, which are available here and here.

Bottom Line

Your career page is a focal point of talent recruitment and brand construction. A sound, well-optimized page will help you attract job seekers who are a great match for your company and convert them into valuable applicants in your candidate pipeline.

Need a hand sprucing up your company’s career page? Luckily for you, we’re in the business of taking career pages from bland to bold. Let’s talk.

Looking to hire top talent at scale? With the right tactics and technology in place, the process can be streamlined without compromising quality.

High-volume recruiting refers to the process of hiring large numbers of candidates in a short amount of time. The job of a high-volume recruiter, in other words, is to identify high-quality candidates and connect them to the right jobs at scale. 

Whether in-house or outsourced, high-volume recruiters must find and evaluate numerous candidates for several jobs on a daily basis. A placement goal of 5-7 candidates per day—all of which must be identified, interviewed, evaluated, and moved through the hiring process—is not uncommon among high-volume recruiters. To stay on task and deliver consistent results, it’s important to have a well-defined process and to lean on the right tools. 

Tips to Get You Started

Effective high volume recruiting starts with doing your homework. Recruiters have to be researchers. With high-volume recruiting, conventional methods like job boards will not yield the quantity of quality candidates you’re looking for.

Unemployment websites, industry-specific job boards, and college outreach pages are all good areas to expand your search. But effective research also requires knowing what you’re looking for, a nuanced understanding of the geographic regions you should target, and intelligence on your competitors recruiting methods.

It’s also important to rely on employee referrals. By leveraging referrals to source candidates, you can easily widen and diversify your talent pool with little additional effort.

Fast-tracking vetted candidates boosts hiring velocity by eliminating the need for several steps in the recruitment process, including job description writing, ad posting, resume collection, and candidate screening.

Additionally, alignment between recruiters and hiring managers, an emphasis on crafting job descriptions that speak to the quality of candidate you’re looking for, and connecting with desirable candidates ASAP are all important elements of high volume recruiting success. 

Use Automation to Scale Hiring

To maximize efficiency in high volume hiring, recruiters should look to AI recruiting tools. For example, SmartAssistant, which is the industry’s first and only native AI-powered recruiting service.

Designed with a focus on candidate screening, sourcing, and matching, SmartAssistant allows recruiters and hiring managers to automatically evaluate job applicants with a match score, surface candidates from internal databases for open positions, and automate job alerts to candidates for opportunities that align with their skills and experience. 

SmartAssistant, and several other features of our talent acquisition suite, enable over 4,000 companies to automate myriad workflow steps, thus freeing recruiters to focus on finding the best candidates and hiring them in as timely a fashion possible.

Another must-have tool is our programmatic job advertising and optimization platform SmartJobs, which automates job distribution. With SmartJobs, recruiters can select the specific sources and parameters for the candidates they seek and let the software do the rest, posting their open positions and desired qualifications across multiple platforms.

In addition to unburdening recruiters of tedious, repetitive tasks, automated job distribution also yields greater return on ad spending.

Use the Right Metrics to Track Performance

When employing software for high-volume recruiting, it is also important to track performance metrics to ensure that you’re spending your marketing dollars efficiently. Relying solely on cost-per-hire is an antiquated strategy that ignores the difficulty of hiring for more niche roles, as well as the necessity of spending more to acquire top-tier talent.

Using a hiring scorecard will give you superior analytics. To create a scorecard, first measure your net hiring score by surveying both the hiring manager and the hire themselves about how they feel the new hire fits.

Subtract the percentage of negative responses from the percentage of positive responses and the delta is your net hiring score. Then take your hiring budget expressed as a percentage of total payroll, and your hiring velocity expressed as the percentage of jobs filled on time.

Doing what you can to toggle these three metrics based on your needs can lead to greater high-volume recruiting success. If your hiring budget percentage is low and your hiring velocity is high, but your net hiring score is negative, you may need to slow down your hiring and devote resources to reexamining your hiring criteria.

In this case, you may also want to increase your budget to more narrowly and effectively target potential candidates. This is especially true where a position requires specific knowledge and/or skills.

CVS: A Case Study in High-Volume Recruiting Success

CVS is a high-volume recruiting success story. In March of 2020, they set out a goal to hire 50,000 new employees, an increase of their workforce by 25%. Two months into the hiring push, “the company has received more than 1.3 million applications and has more than 60,000 candidates hired or in the hiring process. 

In a normal month that last number would be closer to 10,000, according to a CVS Health spokesperson, indicating that the recruiting function was almost six times more productive than it is normally.”

By pivoting to an entirely virtual hiring process during the COVID-19 pandemic, they were able not only to hire with incredible velocity, but to also ensure that their new hires’ skillsets matched their new positions. One clever strategy of theirs was to reach out to partner companies who had recently furloughed workers. 

Those companies had an intimate knowledge of their employees’ competencies, which allowed CVS to quickly place people where their abilities made the most sense. They increased both velocity and net hiring score simultaneously. Further, they conducted virtual interviews and virtual tryouts, allowing them to evaluate and hire new employees within as little as a single day.

While not all companies or industries have the infrastructure and partnerships of CVS, borrowing their best strategies can save any company time, money and frustration in the hiring process. Use a hiring scorecard to evaluate the effectiveness of your hiring process and adjust accordingly. 

Conclusion

High volume recruiting presents a unique challenge to organizations–how to significantly increase the number of hires while also not compromising the quality of candidates. Despite this challenge, by doing your research ahead of time, leveraging the resources at your disposal, and incorporating cutting-edge tech, and tracking performance through the right metrics, you can consistently achieve your hiring goals and master the art of high volume recruiting.

Want to learn more about the ways in which SmartAssistant and SmartJobs can help your company streamline high volume recruiting? Then let‘s talk!