Category: Candidate Attraction

High-Volume Global RPO Solution for International Hospitality Brand

Posted on by Kate
High-Volume Global RPO Solution for International Hospitality Brand

Global RPO

High-Volume Global RPO Solution for International Hospitality Brand

An international hospitality brand—and longstanding PeopleScout client—was experiencing growing pains after an acquisition. The client needed to source, screen and hire an additional 20,000 staff for both corporate and on-site positions at hotel properties across multiple continents—bringing the annual headcount to 65,000 new hires. PeopleScout’s global RPO solution proved agile enough to seamlessly scale up to absorb the increased hiring volume, while hitting target service levels across regions.

65,000 Annual Hires
+90% % Customer Satisfaction Scores Amongst Hiring Managers
84% % Time-to-Fill Targets Achieved for In-Market Roles
~100% % Time-to-Fill Targets Achieved for Corporate Roles

Situation

PeopleScout facilitates more than 65,000 hires annually for the hospitality brand, delivering RPO through a 350-member team across continents. Roles include management and hourly hiring needs in both corporate and in-market environments, including sales, accounting, technology, e-commerce, infrastructure, risk management, engineering, architecture, property management, customer service, housekeeping, culinary and more.

In addition to corporate hiring in the U.S. and Canada, we’ve recruited for their operations centres in the UK and India and hospitality properties spanning North America, Latin America, EMEA and APAC.

Solution

Starting with a small pilot in 2007, our relationship has developed into a strategic partnership over 15 years. At the start, the client had disjointed hiring processes across regions. PeopleScout’s RPO team streamlined their recruitment processes and developed robust, standardised compliance practices across the entire recruiting program.

Following an acquisition in 2017, the client gained nearly 1,300 properties across over 100 countries. PeopleScout scaled our global talent acquisition program to ensure the established standardised processes and compliance practices were applied to the newly acquired properties, while keeping costs down.

PeopleScout seamlessly absorbed a 20,000-position increase and easily increased resources to meet a 50% increase in the scope of services. This included scaling our RPO solution to cover the end-to-end recruitment process for management positions for all hotel locations and the U.S. and Canadian headquarters. This allowed the in-house HR team to focus on training, workforce planning and employer branding.

PeopleScout also supported the client through three talent technology transitions over the course of the partnership, creating new levels of efficiency through automation. Plus, our in-house creative agency TMP assisted the client with their recruitment marketing efforts, creating attraction content in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.

Results

In just two months, PeopleScout was able to achieve the same level of performance at the newly acquired locations as they had at the legacy locations.

  • Created standardised recruitment processes and robust compliance practices across all in-market locations resulting in significant cost savings through efficiency
  • 84% time-to-fill targets achieved for in-market hires
  • Nearly 100% time-to-fill targets achieved for corporate hires
  • 90%+ customer satisfaction scores hit for both in-market and management hires
  • Achieved nearly 100% consistency in SLAs thanks to standardised operations across PeopleScout’s global delivery centres.

AT A GLANCE

  • COMPANY
    International hospitality brand
  • PEOPLESCOUT SOLUTIONS
    Recruitment Process Outsourcing
  • ANNUAL HIRES
    65,000
  • LOCATIONS
    Hospitality properties, corporate offices and operational centres across North America, Latin America, Europe and APAC
Contact Sales

The Importance of an Employer Value Proposition and Employer Brand Strategy

Posted on by skatz

As employers face increasing competition for the best talent, a well-defined employer value proposition (EVP) and employer brand strategy have become more important than ever. In a candidate-driven market, employers need to stand out to their target talent audiences through a unified EVP and employer brand. High-quality candidates know what they want out of a future employer, and organisations that don’t effectively show their value to candidates risk losing them to the competition.

If you google EVP and employer brand, you’re likely to find thousands of definitions. At PeopleScout we define EVP and employer brand as the following:

  • Employer Brand: The perception and lived experiences of what it’s like to work for your organisation.
  • Employer Value Proposition: Captures the essence of your uniqueness as an employer and the give and the get between you and your employees.

Both concepts revolve around the qualities that make a company a great place to work, as well as the benefits, career growth opportunities, work-life balance and company culture that attract top talent.

EVPs are particularly important in today’s job market, as a majority of candidates heavily evaluate companies before they even consider applying for open positions, and it can be a critical differentiator in a company’s ability to attract talent.

Key Elements of a Successful EVP

As HR Technologist explains, “An employee value proposition must be thoughtfully designed since it has a direct impact on behavior. It must look into the tangible and intangible elements of the psychological contracts between the employer and the employee. It must start way before the employee joins, even before the person is a job candidate; it must appeal to the person irrespective of whether the person intends to work with the organisation or not.”

A successful EVP articulates the value that you offer to your employees. At PeopleScout, we establish three elements to support a successful EVP:

  • Pillars: Pillars are the core components of your EVP and are informed by insights into your cultural DNA and your audience’s motivations. Pillars are used to define the relevance of your EVP and are based on research.
  • Narrative: The narrative is usually a single, manifesto-style paragraph – it’s the emotive “sell” of what you offer. The narrative defines consistency throughout your EVP and employer brand strategies.
  • Strapline: Finally, the strapline is a concise phrase that summarises your overall offering – it focuses on being memorable rather than detailed. The strapline defines a point of focus throughout your EVP materials.

By creating pillars, a narrative and a strapline to support your EVP and employer brand strategy, employers will be set up for a successful deployment both internally to current employees and externally to candidates and the broader marketplace.

For example, we recently completed an EVP and employer brand project for a global law firm based in the UK called Linklaters. Here are the pillars, narrative and strapline that we created to bring the project to life.

Linklaters employment brand pillars
Linklaters employer brand narrative
Linklaters employer brand strapline

Benefits of a Well-Managed Employer Value Proposition and Employer Brand Platform

Organisations that effectively deliver on their EVP can enjoy a host of benefits, including decreased annual employee turnover and increased new hire commitment, according to Gartner research. Other benefits include improved brand sentiment, increased reach to target audiences, a greater sense of commitment from current employees and cost savings related to compensation.

Improved Brand Sentiment

Organisations with effective EVPs are more attractive to candidates and are considered employers of choice – organisations where candidates want to work. In order to make yourself an employer of choice, you have to be able to appeal to your ideal candidates by differentiating your company from your competitors.

A compelling EVP and employer brand can move your brand sentiment in a positive direction. A clearly defined EVP creates the foundation on which to build your internal and external employer brand messaging, which allows you to have greater influence over what you are known for and how you are perceived.

Increased Reach

A thoroughly researched and tested EVP is designed to speak more effectively to your target talent audiences. When you are able to tailor the core of your message to individual audiences, while keeping your narrative and strapline consistent throughout, more diverse groups of candidates will respond favorably. This has real business impact. According to a Morgan Stanley study in The Atlantic, there is a positive relationship between equity returns and the gender composition of an organisation’s employee base, as an example.

We work with an organisation in the UK that was once an online automobile magazine but is now a digital publication. The organisation struggled with brand perception. Many candidates thought the company was old-fashioned, and they struggled to attract women to their open positions. We developed an “adventures in awesomeness” EVP that spoke to the digital transformation that had already happened at the employer. This EVP not only increased brand attractiveness and shifted sentiment, but also increased the number of women visiting the careers site by 300 percent.

Greater Employee Commitment

Organisations with strong EVPs enjoy significantly higher levels of engagement from employees. In one example studied by Cornell University, a beverage bottling and distribution company launched an initiative to develop an integrated employer brand. Around the same time, the company decreased headcount by more than 6 percent and maintained tight control over salary raises. Despite these difficulties, employee engagement grew at the company from 36 percent to 55 percent over a five-year period.

This study suggests that when you clearly articulate your EVP and the behaviors you’re looking for from employees, it can be a factor in successfully attracting and retaining employees with the right cultural fit for your organisation. This yields more engaged employees.

Compensation Savings

Organisations with effective EVPs are able to reduce the compensation premium required to attract new candidates. Another example highlighted in the Cornell paper found that organisations with a well-managed employer brand had a 26 percent economic advantage in terms of labor cost.

Key Considerations When Creating an EVP and Employer Brand Programme

There is ample data that shows that effective EVPs generate real business benefits. To realise those benefits, there is a lot of work that goes into creating a successful EVP and employer brand. Before launching an EVP internally or externally, it’s critical that companies spend time researching, defining, developing, optimising and deploying an EVP that accurately represents the company’s value to employees.

Recruitment for Retention

Posted on by skatz

“Where do you see yourself in five years?” It is perhaps the most time-worn question in a job interview. But if the candidate answers that if they are hired, they will be happily working in your organisation, the odds are against this ever happening. Why? The average time workers in the U.S. remain in one job is just 4.2 years. And in other leading economies, the average single job tenure can be similarly brief. In the UK, workers change jobs every five years, while in Australia, the national average job tenure is just three years and four months. In Canada, the average length is 8.5 years, but the averages vary widely depending on the industry.

For those hoping to attract and retain top talent, these figures can be familiar – and a cause for concern. When human resource professionals look inside their organisations and identify employees who have defied the statistical average, staying with the company far longer than five years and contributing significantly to its success, they wonder “how do I get more of them?” With low unemployment making many job markets the most challenging in recent memory, there is genuine urgency not only to retain the best talent but to find a way to attract talent that will stay with an organisation for the long-term. In other words, there is a need to recruit to retain, but how?

Know Your Talent: Why They Leave and Why They Stay and Thrive

Like many organisations, your company may already have an employee retention programme in place. Enterprises are making considerable efforts to retain talent, and the processes they deploy to improve employee retention can also be incorporated into your recruitment process.

For example, it is relatively common to have exit interviews with departing workers to better understand why they are leaving the organisation. When a sufficient number of exit interview results are available and evaluated, trends can emerge that can lead to actionable items to improve employee retention. Certain common traits or characteristics may also appear among those who voluntarily leave their jobs.

Less common, but potentially just as valuable, is the “stay interview.” These interviews with current employees allow them to express their concerns before they are in a position to leave, which can help leaders address issues and take steps to retain top talent.

And just as exit interviews can bring into focus the characteristics of those who quit, the stay interview can help identify the traits of those who remain and thrive. Once a group of long-term successful employees is identified, a stay interview can be designed for this group with the goal of identifying why they have remained with the company, what factors have contributed to their success and what characteristics many or most of them have in common. Identifying these characteristics in your candidate pool during the recruiting process could be an indicator of future success.

In today’s tight job market, if you are not working to identify candidates with the characteristics that have been proven to lead to long-term achievement in your company, your competitors probably are. SHRMreports that “Many organisations are seeking more of a ‘whole person’ gauge of candidates, experts say, assessing not just skills or intellectual horsepower but also personality traits, cultural fit and motivational drivers that can prove the difference between candidates who thrive over the long run and those who quickly derail.”

Predictive Analytics: Unlocking the Key to Recruitment for Retention

Predictive analytics is a type of data analytics that uses data to find patterns and then uses those models to attempt to predict the future. Consider the most basic data you likely have about a single employee who worked for your organisation and left after five years. A sample of data points could include:

  • How they were sourced
  • Their addresses over their tenure at the company
  • Their education and certifications
  • Previous employers

These data points alone may not provide insight into why this employee joined your organisation and why they left. But, if just these pieces of information were aggregated for all your employees, both past and present, here are a few insights which could be determined:

  • Is there a correlation between how an employee is sourced and their tenure at the organisation?
  • Do employees who live far from the workplace quit sooner than those who do not?
  • Do employees from certain schools or that have particular certifications stay longer with the company than others?
  • Are there previous employers which produce more long-term employees than others?

The information found in even one of these examples could be built into your recruitment strategy and have a meaningful impact in recruiting talent that will remain with your organisation.

The right technology using predictive analytics can provide effective recruiting insight, as PeopleScout’s Allison Brigden explains:

“In this tightening talent market with unemployment rates at record lows, predictive analytics is emerging as an essential AI tool for employers looking to stay ahead of the competition. Predictive analytics allows employers to use the power of data to make predictions about candidates and drive efficiencies throughout the entire talent acquisition process…

Predictive analytics can’t tell you what will happen, but it shows what is likely to happen based on past trends. It’s as close as employers can get to predicting the future.”

Solving for Retention

The dilemma faced by a major auto retailer was challenging but not surprising. The annual turnover rate in the retail sector is much higher than the national average in the U.S. With a 50% turnover rate and a need for 10,000 annual hires, there was an immediate need for drastic improvement

PeopleScout partnered with this automotive retailer and was able to rapidly address their turnover challenges by implementing the following solutions:

A Standard Hiring Model

An uneven hiring process was replaced, and a standard hiring model was put in place that included consistent OFCCP compliance and standardisation across the company.

An Efficient Process

PeopleScout deployed a time-efficient screening process which focused on the quality of the candidate, with a guaranteed response from recruiting teams within 48 hours of application. To quickly present candidates to hiring managers, PeopleScout implemented block interview scheduling with great success.

Hiring Diversity

To help source and engage more diverse candidates, PeopleScout developed a comprehensive network of community organisations for partnered recruitment.

In-Region Recruiters

Collaborative relationships between recruiters and the client’s area managers were fostered by in-region placement of PeopleScout recruiters.

Transparent Reporting

Continuous improvement was driven through transparent reporting and analysis for the client’s executive and field leadership.

The Results:
  • PeopleScout hired 10,000 employees in the first year of the engagement.
  • The technician turnover rate improved by 5% and retail turnover by 6%.
  • Hiring diversity improved by 40%, including an increase of 2% for veterans and 6% for female hires.

Attitude is the New Experience

Posted on by epadmin

There have been numerous studies on turnover rates in multiple industries, and they all land on a similar conclusion: a high proportion of staff fail within the first 18 months of starting a new job. In fact, one study found that figure to be 46 percent of 20,000 new hires in America. When you look at the reasons why, 89 percent of those who failed did so due to cultural misalignment or attitudinal reasons, rather than technical capability.


To try and buck this trend, I’ll share with you a few tips on why it’s so important to attract and retain the right people, rather than the right skill set and how you can adopt this approach in your organisation.


First, you need to have a great culture, which is essential to keeping people in the building. Each company’s culture and mission will be unique, and you need to make sure you have values that you stand by. Secondly – and this is the main area that I’m going to focus on in this article – you need to have a recruitment strategy that is aimed at finding the right people for the organisation rather than the right skill set at every opportunity, from graduate roles through to senior management. At our client PHD Media Worldwide (PHD), we’ve focused on hiring people that align with our values of collaboration, courage and curiosity with conviction – and it’s really, really helped!


“Hire for attitude, train for skills” is a phrase that every HR professional has uttered once or heard being uttered from colleagues. However, unfortunately, only a small number of businesses apply it (like, actually apply it) to their recruitment strategy. Whilst a lot of job advertisements will focus on the soft skills and cultural alignment piece, often the interview process can revert to focusing purely on the hard skills and capability a candidate has from day one.


We work in an ever-changing industry, with the constant emergence of new technologies, new software and increasing shift in focus from traditional channels to more sophisticated digital channels. Change takes place now at a faster rate than ever before, and what you knew yesterday might not necessarily prepare for you tomorrow. So, with that in mind, why do some businesses focus on purely trying to tick skills boxes? The candidate who feels fully aligned with their organisation’s strategy and beliefs and is a part of its continued success will be more motivated to learn the necessary skills for tomorrow than someone who only has today’s skill set and not the buy-in.


Here is how we can go about finding those right candidates in various levels of the organisation:


Graduate Roles


For so long, the media industry, for example, has only considered candidates from a media/advertising/marketing-related field and often opt for interns who have gained first-hand experience working with their particular agency. When interviewing candidates with a specific degree and asking them what they know about a media planning and buying agency, their knowledge levels are comparable with that of any other degree – very little!


A huge amount of the first 12-18 months in a media agency is about learning as much as possible. A very small amount of what you learned in university actually applies to what you are now working on in terms of real briefs with real multi-million-dollar budgets attached. With that mind, at PHD we’ve had a lot of success in opening up our doors to entry-level staff from any degree/non-degree background.


Zac and Tiffany, two great coordinators who joined PHD in the last 12 months, even wrote an article recently on how university prepares you for your first job in media. Notice how throughout the article, it never mentions that it’s the marketing theory they were taught in school or the principles of advertising that has helped them succeed. Instead, it’s the focus on meeting deadlines, presentation ability, working under pressure and as part of a team. These are the skills that you need to succeed in your first job, and when you couple them with the right attitude, you can really learn anything, relatively quickly.


More Senior Roles 


Believe it or not, it’s those same soft skills that apply to the more senior roles that we look to fill. Let’s face it – at one point or another, we have all had to “fake it ‘til we make it” in our careers. A little white lie in an interview, a little oversell of our abilities and BANG, we’ve landed ourselves a gig without a clue of what we’re actually going to do. When faced with this situation, those with a good attitude, flexibility and the ability to learn quickly will be able to adapt and succeed in their roles better than those without these critical skills.


Additionally, no one knows exactly what they are doing on day one. We all have our own systems, processes and ways of doing things. At PHD, we have our proprietary planning tool, SOURCE. Unless you have worked on it before, there is a learning curve for everyone to pick it up, and it’s the pace and ability with which people pick it up that matters, as they would have zero experience in using it before. All companies have their own processes and tools, which they will expect you to learn over time.


Yes, you need to have a fundamental understanding of what you are talking about and the more senior the role, the more of an understanding we expect you to have. But we want to talk to someone about their attitude towards certain situations, learn how they act when everything goes wrong (because it does sometimes) and what they would do in the difficult times and how they bring a team along on the journey with them. Ultimately, someone who ticks the attitude box will get the job, and we will often wait until that person comes along, rather than simply fill a role with a candidate who doesn’t fit.


So, What is Attitude?


Attitude, for me, is a collection of soft skills that you can apply to every job. It’s not necessarily something that someone has been taught (or could be taught) but more an approach to work, an approach to learning and the way someone conducts themselves personally and professionally.


What does one look for when gauging attitude?
  • People who look for solutions to problems rather than people who find problems without resolve.
  • People who raise their hand rather than point their fingers.
  • People who make mistakes and have a sense of humility but then focus on what they can do next time to improve.
  • People who, when times get tough, dig in and rally everyone to achieve the same, rather than openly complain to others.
  • People who genuinely love their job and are interested in joining the organisation – this is half the battle, finding someone who wants to be on the same journey as you.
  • People who genuinely seek development/career growth opportunities.

Too often, and it’s so easy to, we get bogged down by the immediate needs of our new hire. It may be replacing someone who has left, or it might be a new role that has popped up because of workload increases. However, it works, every time, to be cautious and focus on hiring the right person for the organisation, because the longer-term impact of having the right person will really pay off and the struggle of having to dig a little harder to find them will soon be forgotten.


Read the original article on AdNews.au.

Through The Grapevine: How to Create and Manage an Employee Referral Programme

Posted on by epadmin

A well-managed employee referral programme may be the single most powerful weapon in an organisation’s recruitment arsenal. In fact, according to Silkroad’s Sources of Hire Report, employee referrals continue to be a top source for hires.

By encouraging employees to refer contacts in their professional networks for open positions you can reduce recruiting costs, improve candidate quality and increase employee engagement.

In this article, we explore the case for employee referral programmes, some of the top considerations organisations should be mindful of and how to properly manage a referral programme.

The Case for Developing an Employee Referral Programme

Intuitively, developing a formal employee referral programme makes sense. After all, who better to refer great candidates and sell those candidates on why they should join your organisation than your own employees?

Employee referral programmes make good business sense. Some of the benefits your organisation may reap from an employee referral programme include:

  • Faster time-to-hire: A LinkedIn study uncovered that it takes an average of 29 days to hire a referred candidate compared to 39 days to hire a candidate through a job board.
  • Less impact on your talent acquisition budget: An employee referral programme is an inexpensive sourcing strategy that relies primarily on word-of-mouth and internal communication. You don’t have to pay to advertise job posts. Due to the faster time-to-hire, organisations can cut internal costs as well, since recruiters won’t be spending as much time sourcing and interviewing candidates for open positions.
  • Top talent begets top talent: Another LinkedIn survey revealed that star employees tend to refer other star employees. Tapping into your top talent can help organisations source and hire high performers more effectively.
  • Better employee retention: Not only are candidates hired via an employee referral typically of higher quality, they also tend to stay at their jobs longer, with 46 percent remaining in their position for at least three years.

Employee Referral Programmes as an Extension of Employee Engagement

With employee referral programmes, saving time and money is just the beginning. Employee referrals also add value through improved employee engagement. Using employee referrals to hire candidates builds a more robust corporate culture by intersecting performance and engagement to drive business success through tapping current employees for qualified candidate referrals, thus simplifying the sourcing process.

Employees who recommend a new hire have a vested interest in onboarding and retaining that person, as many referral programmes include a requirement that the referred employee must be with the organisation for a specific period of time before the referring employee can get a referral bonus. What’s more, employees who refer candidates will feel a sense of commitment to ensure their referral’s success because they recommended the position.

Moreover, employees who are involved in the recruitment process may feel a greater sense of purpose towards the future of your company. By encouraging employees to submit referrals, you are letting them know you value their input and contribution.

What to Consider Before Implementing an Employee Referral Programme

Set Programme Objectives

Before implementing an employee referral programme, organisations should outline objectives in order to set a clear goal. Defining objectives early on in the process helps ensure your team is on the same page and knows exactly what is expected and when.

Setting objectives can be achieved by holding planning sessions with key stakeholders where you share the vision for the programme, develop strategies to achieve success and find solutions that are mutually agreed upon.

Objectives for an employee referral programme might include:

  • Improving quality-of-hire
  • Increasing new hire retention
  • Boosting employee morale and recognition
  • Lowering overall recruiting costs
  • Increasing diversity within the organisation
  • Sourcing candidates with a specific skill set
  • Reducing the time-to-hire for external candidates
  • Better targeting and sourcing of passive job seekers
  • Deepening the pipeline of potential applicants

Leverage Technology

Technology can help make the employee referral process better for both employers, employees and referrals. Using your technology tools can streamline processes and minimise inefficiencies and missed opportunities in the referral programme.

In an article with SHRM, Jennifer Newbill, Director of Global Employment Brand, Dell explains that Dell uses a combination of “white glove” and automated communications to manage its more than 40,000 annual employee referrals, making the process more manageable for the organisation’s talent acquisition teams.

Social Media Referrals

Recruitment marketing technology can allow you to post jobs on your organisation’s social channels in seconds. You can also leverage your existing employees’ social media networks – if your employees are willing to post on your behalf – to expand your reach.

Auto-Posting Open Roles

In order to get your employees more engaged in your employee referral programme, you should consider sharing job openings on a regular basis. Instead of sending out emails manually every time a position opens, you can automate this process through your recruitment email marketing tools.

For example, gig-economy start-up Fiverr leverages employee referral software that gamifies the referral process by adding a competitive element to referring candidates. The software assigns points to employees and credit for all the actions they take. The software also keeps employees up-to-date on the status of their referrals.

Make Jobs Shareable Through Employee Portals

Make it easier for employees to share job opportunities through their social media accounts and email. Adding social links on job posts will allow employees to automatically share job openings with just a few clicks. The quicker and easier jobs are to share, the more likely your employees will participate.

Referral Tracking

Tracking and appropriately attributing a referral is crucial to the programme’s success. To make tracking easier, a referral field should be added to applications. The referral field on the job application can be filled in with information about the referring employee, making referral tracking easier.

Managing an Employee Referral Programme

When it comes to managing a successful employee referral programme, there are a few elements to keep in mind. Ideally, every programme includes the following:

  • Incentives
  • A simple process
  • Feedback

Below, we explain how your organisation can manage each of these three elements within your employee referral programme.

Employee Referral Incentives

According to a survey conducted by LinkedIn, 40 percent of respondents were motivated to refer candidates for a monetary reward. What’s more, 68 percent stated they submitted a referral because they wanted to help their organisation. If you want to get the most impact out of your organisation’s employee referral programme, you should offer a combination of monetary and creative, non-monetary incentives for referrals.

  • Experiment with monetary reward amounts because there is no magic number that will motivate all employees. Periodically testing different amounts can allow you to optimise your financial incentives.
  • Employees who are more altruistic in nature may prefer the option of donating their referral bonus to a charity or cause close to their hearts.
  • An alternative to offering individual monetary incentives is to hold a quarterly prise drawing where every employee who has made a successful referral during the period is eligible to win.
  • While prises and cash incentives can be great motivators, other perks can be just as effective. Non-monetary rewards can include reserved parking spots, extra time off or first choice of shifts and schedules.

For a PeopleScout client and multinational auto parts and accessories manufacturer, we encourage their store managers, area managers and team members to refer quality candidates, including friends and family, to current job openings.

Once the employee’s referral applies to a position, our client lets a member of our recruiting team know that a referral has applied. In the system the candidate selects referral and the client lets us know.  This ensures we do not miss a referral and/or they selected the wrong source code when applying.  Our team then schedules an interview with the referral and if qualified, proceeds to extend a verbal offer.  If the referral is qualified, they will be scheduled with the store/hiring manager for an in-person interview, unless the referral was a quality candidate from the store manager and they already met them in person.

To assist our client in tracking the referrals coming in, our recruiters maintain a digital log of the number of referrals that were phone screened and referrals that were hired. Our client values this referral programme because it yields quality candidates and results in a faster time-to-hire for critical positions.   When a referral is screened the recruiter ensure the source code is correct in the ATS so we provide stats and results of referrals.

Programme highlights include:

  • When we onboard and train our client’s new managers, PeopleScout emphasises the employee referral programme and its importance to the recruiting process
  • PeopleScout’s team has specific SLAs to ensure referrals are expedited
  • PeopleScout tracks time in status and conversion rates specifically for referrals
  • More than 25 percent of hires for our client come from referrals
  • More than 50 percent of referrals submitted are ultimately hired
  • PeopleScout hires between 9,000 and 11,000 people for this client annually

Simplify the Employee Referral Process

According to a survey conducted by RolePoint, 95 percent of HR professionals believe their employees fully understand how to submit referrals. However, 63 percent say they “very often or frequently” receive feedback that employees find it too complicated to refer someone.

When evaluating your programme, ask yourself these questions:

  • Do employees know about your referral programme?
  • Is it clear with whom or where an employee should submit a referral?
  • Is the technology used to submit referrals user-friendly?
  • Is it easy to track if the referring employee was given credit?
  • Is it easy to track the incentives that were earned?

If the programme makes your employees jump through hoops to place a referral, you can be sure that it won’t attract many participants.

To simplify your programme, start with the following steps:

Explain your employee referral programme: Employees need to understand exactly how your referral programme works to make it successful. How you teach employees about the programme depends on your size and how the workforce is dispersed geographically. You might gather your employees together and give a brief presentation or create an online training course. Or, you might do something as simple as sending an informational email or flyer for employees to review.

Set your requirements up front: If you want your employees to refer quality candidates, they need to know what traits and skills you are looking for. Share the open positions you are hiring for and provide employees with the job descriptions, so they get a feel for the types of candidates that would be a good fit.

Provide regular reminders: You should periodically remind employees about the referral programme. If you don’t, they may quickly forget about it.

InMobi, an Indian-based mobile technology company, offered a motorbike—a very popular vehicle in India—to any employee who referred a successful engineering manager candidate. To keep the referral programme top of mind, InMobi parked a motorbike right in front of their corporate headquarters so employees were reminded of the referral incentive every day while entering the building.

When you have an influx of open positions, send a reminder to your employees that explains how they can refer candidates and what the reward is for hired candidates.

You can also promote the referral programme when you aren’t actively hiring. An employee might refer a candidate you do not want to miss out on. You should add those candidates to your talent pool.

Collect and Provide Feedback  

Measure Programme Results: Measuring results is critical to evaluating the success of the programme and to finding improvement opportunities. While metrics can vary depending on the goals you’ve set for the programme, here are some good metrics to track:

  • On-the-job performance of referral hires
  • Retention/turnover rate of referral hires
  • Programme ROI or the cost/benefit ratio
  • Employee satisfaction with the overall process

Provide notifications after an employee referral is made: Referring employees may be nervous about whether their referrals were any good. The best practice is to notify employees immediately when their referral is accepted/rejected, if the candidate is invited for an interview and when the candidate is finally hired or not.

The Gist

Employee referral programmes remain one of the top sources for candidates because they are a cost-effective, engaging talent acquisition strategy. To get the most out of your referral programme, understand what motivates your employees to refer candidates, make the process as easy as possible and maintain good communication with both the referrer and referee.

Rethinking Candidate Generation Strategies

Posted on by epadmin

In this time of rapid transformation and high competition for talent, employers face the challenge of evolving their talent generation strategies to stay ahead. For years, employers focused on attracting as many candidates as possible with the hypothesis that generating more applications was the best strategy to yield better quality hires. That approach to talent attraction and the metrics used to measure success are changing.

The old goal: Attract as many candidates as possible.

The new goal: Attract the strongest candidates who are the best motivational fit for your organisation.

In this article, we cover the changing landscape of candidate attraction and why employers should develop a new, data-informed way of looking at job postings. We also present some specific strategies employers can put in place now and explore the benefits of these strategies.

Change is Not Optional

Many organisations remain stuck with outdated candidate generation strategies. Job titles and descriptions can go years without being updated to reflect the reality of the position or the ways that candidates look for jobs. Long, expensive contracts with specific job boards are common, even though the return on investment may be decreasing. There are several reasons why the old way is no longer working.

1. Employers look at the wrong metrics.

Many employers assume that a large number of views, clicks and even applications indicate an effective strategy, even when those numbers don’t translate to strong hires. At the same time, candidates are left frustrated by applying to jobs that are different than advertised and then facing rejection because they don’t align with the true requirements of the position or with an offer or a job that isn’t a good fit.

If a job posting yields too many unqualified candidates, it creates the risk of harming an organisation’s employer brand. This is because when there are too many unqualified candidates, there is the risk of poor communication. Those candidates could become frustrated with a lack of communication and form a negative opinion of the organisation which they could share with their own networks.

Employers need to modernise their candidate generation strategies and metrics to keep up with changing candidate expectations and advancements in workplace technology.

2. The process is expensive.

The practice of attracting large numbers of applicants is expensive. Employers pay to attract and process candidates who aren’t good fits. At one UK organisation, we found that a dismissal at the CV review stage cost £1.92. This organisation hired 6,000 employees for every 67,000 applicants. This means the cost of just the first stage was £117,000.00. The process of dispositioning an applicant after an interview is even more expensive.

3. Job postings aren’t optimised for the changing landscape.

The changing role of job boards is also disrupting the traditional process. The rollout of Google Jobs, for example, has made it easier for candidates to search for job postings the same way they search for everything else on the internet – and candidates have grown to expect this. Because of this, employers need to optimise job postings and use SEO strategies to ensure candidates will see those postings.

Strategies for the Future

Building a Centralised Recruitment Function

By centralising the recruitment function, employers build a team that can adapt more quickly to change and works more efficiently to put new strategies in place. HR leaders find that a centralised function allows all members of the team better insight into the full hiring process and helps them better understand how each step impacts the broader candidate journey.

It is also easier to test new strategies and deploy successful ideas throughout the entire recruitment function. Because there is no need to get the buy-in of other offices or teams, a centralised function can deploy changes quickly.

A centralised recruitment team also helps maintain consistent metrics and employer branding. When multiple teams are accountable for different parts of the process, those teams can start to shift over time to the point where aspects of an employer brand or the metrics used to define success can look different from team to team.

When processes are siloed it makes it more difficult for leaders to get a full view of the recruitment team and maintain consistency throughout the process. When the entire recruitment team is accountable to the same leader, the process remains more consistent.

Benefit: An accountable and synchronised recruitment team that can more effectively share your brand message.

Sharing an Honest Employer Brand

An authentic yet aspirational, unique and dynamic employer brand is key for employers looking to stand out in the competitive talent market. This type of employer brand will speak to candidates who fit with the current company culture but can also be an effective way to keep current employees aligned with shifting organisational priorities.

According to a report by Cornell University, organisations with a strong employer brand experience less turnover, a higher level of employee commitment, more buy-in to the corporate culture and increased engagement.

Successful deployment of an employer brand will include the development of media toolkits, with language, images, videos, social media posts, emails and more than the recruiting team can use to disseminate brand communications. Materials like these can be used to make sure your employer brand consistently comes through in job postings and advertisements.

Benefit: A strong employer brand will generate applicants who understand and fit in with your culture and who are excited to work for you.

Swapping Vanity Metrics for Sanity Metrics

As your goal changes from attracting the most candidates to attracting the right candidates, you need to adjust what metrics you monitor to see if you’re achieving your goal.

Vanity metrics can include data like the number of clicks or views you have for a job posting and the number of applications. These metrics don’t tell you whether the people who are clicking on your job advertisements or the candidates who are applying are good fits for the position or enthusiastic about working for you.

Sanity metrics are numbers like the ratio of clicks-to-hires or applications-to-hires. Sanity metrics can also include data about the performance and tenure of your new hires. These metrics tell you whether or not the right people are finding and applying to your job postings.

If you are looking at vanity metrics, you cannot tell if you are attracting the strongest talent.

Benefit: A more clear measure of whether you are meeting your goal of attracting the strongest candidates who are enthusiastic about working for you.

Using Data to Inform Decision Making

Data should be central to the candidate attraction process. Your team should consistently ask these four questions and make alterations to your recruitment process based on the answers the data provides.

1. Are you marketing your job properly for the audience you’re looking for?

Sanity metrics will tell you if your tailored approach to candidate attraction is working well. The exact ratios will vary from organisation to organisation and position to position, but your goal should be to decrease the ratio of clicks-to-hires and applications-to-hires while increasing performance metrics and tenure numbers on those hires. If you aren’t already tracking this information, you should gather historical data on the relevant positions and continue tracking performance and tenure data.

If, for example, you spend a significant amount of time and money reviewing applications from unqualified candidates, you can revise your job copy to reflect the more challenging parts of the job. One of our clients had challenges hiring for a door-to-door salesperson. The job posting gave a rosy view of the position, without mentioning the tougher parts.

This led to a high number of applications, but as candidates moved through the process, many realised they didn’t want the position. The cost of processing these applicants was high, as was new hire turnover once candidates started in the role.

By making the job posting more transparent about the challenges, applications decreased by 11 percent, despite a 10 percent increase in the salary for the position. The client saved 305 hours of hiring manager time over a three month period, made the same number of hires as before, spent less on candidate attraction, held fewer phone and face-to-face interviews and new hire turnover in the role dropped significantly.

2. Is your job title optimised for your audience?

Often, job titles at individual organisations are informed by organisational culture and tradition. These can lead to titles that haven’t changed in years or new and creative titles, like “digital prophet” or “crayon evangelist.” While these titles may function well inside an organisation, they can’t attract candidates who search online for positions like “business analyst” or “design director” because those candidates will never find the positions.

Regardless of the job title you use internally, the job title you use in a posting should be informed by data. Tools like Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner can help develop SEO-friendly job titles that will help put your position at the top of search results. Popular job boards also provide click data, and you can perform A/B testing with your recruiting team to determine which job titles bring in the best candidates fastest.

One client was struggling to hire for a position they called “help desk advisor,” although the position was customer service related. Data showed that more people in the client’s location searched for jobs like “customer service representative.”

By changing the job title in the external job posting, the client received the same number of applications in two weeks that it normally received in six to eight weeks. Because of this, the time-to-offer and time-to-fill both decreased, and the client spent less on attracting candidates.

3. Is the most important information in your job posting laid out in the best way for readers?
heat map of job posting

If your marketing and optimisation efforts are successful at bringing job seekers to your posting, you also need to make sure they get the information they need to decide if the position is the right fit and they want to take the step to apply. According to research by The Ladders, job seekers spend an average of 49.7 seconds deciding that a job isn’t right for them and 76.7 seconds deciding that it is a good fit. This only provides a short window of time to provide the information you want them to see.

By developing a strong employer brand, marketing the position properly and optimisng your job title, you will be able to provide the type of information the candidate needs to see to decide if your role is the right fit. Your challenge is to make sure they can digest it in less than one minute. The Ladders’ study used eye-tracking software to determine that most job seekers follow an “F” shape as they scan job postings.

This means, as you write up and lay out a job posting, you need to put the most important information in the first places a candidate will look. Using headings can also help candidates identify key criteria.

4. Are you using job boards effectively?

The introduction of Google Jobs drastically changed the landscape of job boards. For our UK client base, we are already seeing a decreased return on investment from job boards which has decreased our own spending. To ensure you are spending effectively on job boards, you need to constantly evaluate which boards perform better.

To do this, you need to find out which job boards send an appropriate number of the right candidates. Some boards may send a lot of candidates but very few are qualified. Others may send fewer and fewer candidates altogether. By monitoring this data, you can invest your budget into the right job boards to attract the right candidates. You should also monitor whether the job boards you use integrate with Google Jobs and what impact that will have on your application data because it could vary among different industries.

More benefits of data-driven methods:

  • Increased candidate quality and decreased turnover because you are attracting candidates who are enthusiastic about the position and your organisation and who understand the responsibilities and requirements of the role.
  • Decreased time-to-fill and cost-of-vacancy because candidates who aren’t a good fit self-select out of the process, so you don’t waste money evaluating the wrong people.
  • Increased ability to attract the candidates of the future because you’re speaking to them where they are and in ways they expect as they search for new positions.

Key Takeaways

  • Rather than attracting as many applicants as possible, employers should focus on decreasing the number of unqualified or uninterested applicants while increasing the number of strong applicants.
  • Employers should use a data-informed process to guide their candidate attraction strategies.
  • Employers should consistently evaluate their use of job boards to match the quickly changing job board landscape.

Four Factors Impacting the Way Employers Interact with Candidates

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Across the globe, employers and candidates live in an accelerating state of change. Adapting is difficult for both workers and employers, but the process of changing strategies as an organisation is more complicated. There are legacy systems in place – especially for large organisations – and traditions can become entrenched. Remaining nimble is a challenge. For that reason, it is important to watch the employment landscape and respond with smart and targeted strategies.

In this article, we will explore four factors driving changes in the way that employers interact with job candidates: the digital transformation, current global economic conditions, shifting trust and privacy expectations, and the changing landscape of job boards.

1. The Digital Transformation

In a study by Gartner, 80 percent of executives reported that they have a digital initiative underway and 69 percent believe that they need to become significantly more digital to remain competitive.

According to McKinsey, 51 percent of job activities can be automated, but fewer than 5 percent of jobs are can be completely replaced by machines. The report also determined that the pace of change is so rapid, that by 2030 as much as 14 percent of the global workforce could need to change occupational categories.

Employers need to respond by finding candidates who can lead through change and learn and adapt – rather than candidates who only excel at a job as it exists today. This is becoming even more difficult as top candidates are in high demand due to record-low unemployment rates in many major global economies.

Fast Company reports that in May 2018 employers posted 314,000 tech job openings and only filled 8,700 of them. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also projects employment of software developers to grow 24 percent through 2026, faster than the average for all other occupations.

What does this mean?

Employers need to be able to attract and identify the candidates of the future – the people who have the skills and mindset needed to drive success into the future. That means developing an employer value proposition, or EVP, and an employer brand platform that is unique, authentic yet aspirational, and dynamic, sharing your EVP with your target audience, using innovative, data-driven strategies to attract candidates for the future and assessing candidates to identify those with a growth mindset.

2. Global Economic Conditions

In the decade since the start of the global economic downturn, many countries have recovered and now have competitive, candidate-driven markets for talent.

In the U.S., the unemployment rate is down to 3.7 percent. In the UK, it is down to 4.0 percent. There are strong employment numbers around the world. In a competitive market, employers need to be proactive about attracting both active and passive candidates.

Additionally, people are starting to feel more comfortable leaving their jobs, which is both an opportunity and a challenge for employers. It means that you have an opportunity to bring in strong candidates, but it also means that some of your strongest employees could leave for greener pastures.

With all of the press coverage about the state of the global economy, in-demand candidates will also recognise that the hiring landscape has changed. This, coupled with the potential for multiple offers, means that top candidates will have higher expectations – not only in regard to salary but also the purpose, mission and culture of the employer they choose.

What does this mean?

Employers around the globe should look for the best talent and use innovative assessment techniques to identify those who derive purpose from the work done by the organisation and who are passionate about the mission. Employers should also ensure their offers and workplace culture lives up to and exceeds the expectations of the best candidates, and they should invest more in retaining top talent.

3. Shifting Trust and Privacy

Candidates are growing more cautious about which organisations they trust and who can have access to their personal data. Candidates in the U.S. and Europe have been exposed to political disinformation campaigns that left many reevaluating their sources of information. Additionally, privacy issues at Facebook have motivated many candidates to increase their social media privacy settings.

As a result, research shows that many people have grown to distrust traditional advertising from brands. Instead, more people are relying on recommendations from friends and relatives, according to Nielson. Forbes reports candidates are asking more about reviews on Glassdoor and issues that they read about online like turnover rates and layoffs. Consumers are also taking steps to avoid ads, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that 80 percent of adults in America use at least one ad blocking method.

While most candidates have some information available online for employers to find, some of the most tech-savvy are cutting back. According to Pew Research, 74 percent of American Facebook users have either taken a break from the site, adjusted their privacy settings or deleted the app from their phone. Another survey found that half of consumers in the UK don’t trust anyone with their personal information.

Beyond reactions from candidates, employers also face increasing regulations. The GDPR, or EU General Data Protection Regulation, took effect in May 2018. It requires businesses to protect the personal data and privacy of EU citizens for transactions that occur within EU member states. TechRepublic reports that 61 percent of compliance professionals say they’re concerned that the reduced data availability and new requirements of GDPR could impact future sourcing and recruiting. In the U.S., California recently passed the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018. These laws are popular with voters, and employers should expect privacy concerns to be a continuing issue.

Despite these issues, Forbes reports that HR teams still have more data now than ever before. Employers benefit from the growing amount of data available, but they should keep in mind its limitations.

What does this mean?

Employers should work to build an authentic EVP and employer brand platform to gain trust and buy-in from candidates. This should include the development of brand ambassadors who can reach candidates who are skeptical of traditional information channels. By developing an employer brand platform that takes advantage of peer-to-peer networking, employers can break through the walls put up by ad-blocking software and ad-skeptical candidates. The authenticity of the message is key to appearing more trustworthy.

4. The Changing Role of Job Boards

The role of job boards is also changing rapidly. Google Jobs makes it easier for candidates to search for job postings the same way they search for everything else on the internet – and candidates have grown to expect this. According to Forbes, the second page of Google search results accounts for only 6 percent of all website clicks. This means that to ensure your target audience can find your available positions, you must have job descriptions optimised for search.

Inc. reports that Google’s preference for relevant text- and video-based content will also apply to Google Jobs results. Employers need to be SEO-savvy to get postings in front of candidates. Additionally, many candidates now search for jobs using the same search engines that supply information like Glassdoor reviews and news stories about your organisation.

Job boards and aggregators have also changed in response to Google Jobs. Candidates no longer need to search a variety of job boards to find postings that match their skills. Because of this, for our UK client base, we are already seeing a decreased return on investment from job boards which has decreased our own spending.

What does this mean?

Employers need to be able to respond quickly as the job board environment changes. Google Jobs has only been available in the U.S. since 2017, and it was only introduced in the UK in 2018. This means there are still more changes to come. Employers should constantly evaluate which job boards bring in the most high-quality candidates in a cost-effective way and consistently adjust their strategy.

Where to Go from Here

In response to this rapid change, these four factors should be seen as challenges and opportunities, not barriers to success. Employers can use strategies like employer branding, new ways of generating candidates and assessments built for the future to set themselves apart. 

Employee Retention: Combating Turnover

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Employee retention is a major concern for many organisations. More than 50 percent of organisations worldwide have expressed difficulty in retaining some of their most valued employee groups according to a Willis Towers Watson study.

Although hiring has increased in recent years, turnover and attrition rates have also increased globally across all industries by more than 3 percent since 2013.

Turnover is not just an inconvenience for organisations, it can be expensive. Research from the Work Institute’s 2017 Retention Report uncovered that it currently costs 33 percent of a worker’s annual salary to replace them, with the major costs being recruiting a replacement, reduced productivity, cost of onboarding a new hire and training expenses.

This means for mid- to enterprise-sized employers, turnover can cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year. With turnover costs this high, it is important for organisations to improve employee retention.

Employee Retention: Employee Turnover and What To Do About It

The strong economy and historically low unemployment rates have made workers more confident, and as a result, they are more comfortable exploring the job market.

In the U.S., the unemployment rate reached 3.7 percent in October. Low unemployment is not confined to the U.S. The unemployment rate has also dropped to 4 percent in the UK and 5.3 percent in Australia.

In LinkedIn’s Why and How People Change Jobs study, the top three reasons employees leave a position are to advance their careers, dissatifaction with their workplace culture and dissatisfaction with management.

Moreover, the study found that once employees resigned, 42 percent said they might have stayed if their employer had done something to show they valued the employee.

Below, we address some of the main causes of employee turnover and provide insights into how to improve employee retention.

Create a Positive Workplace Culture  

Stressful, negative and inhospitable workplaces are a recipe for high employee turnover. Research bears this out, as the American Institute of Stress reports that workplace stress can lead to an increase of nearly 50 percent in voluntary employee turnover.

How we feel about our work often depends on the relationships we have with coworkers, managers and the overall company culture. According to a study conducted by the University of Michigan, there are six essential qualities of a positive workplace culture:

  1. Caring for, being interested in and maintaining responsibility for colleagues as friends.
  2. Providing support for one another, including offering kindness and compassion when others are struggling.
  3. Avoiding blame and forgiving mistakes.
  4. Inspiring one another at work.
  5. Emphasising the meaningfulness of the work.
  6. Treating one another with respect, gratitude, trust and integrity.

As an organisation, you should work to foster these qualities in your workplace. The University of Michigan research points to two key strategies:

Encourage Trusting Safe Relationships

Employees who trust that their coworkers and managers have their best interests at heart feel safe, as research by Amy Edmondson of Harvard demonstrates. Workplace cultures where leaders are inclusive, humble and encourage their staff to communicate and ask for help lead to better learning and performance outcomes for all employees.

Be Empathic

A brain-imaging study found that when employees recollected instances when a manager had been harsh or lacked empathy, they showed increased activation in areas of the brain associated with avoidance and negative emotion, while the opposite was true when they recalled an empathic manager.

Moreover, Jane Dutton and her team at the CompassionLab suggest that leaders who demonstrate compassion toward employees foster individual and collective resilience in challenging times. Thus, creating a workplace environment more conducive for overcoming challenges and obstacles.

Key Action:

Develop a workplace environment that meets employee needs whenever possible to drive positive organisational outcomes and increase employee retention.

Professional Development

In an article published by HR Dive, Laurie Bienstock of Willis Tower Watson states that “We know from our research and consulting that career management continues to be a top driver of attraction, retention and sustainable engagement for most employees…Effective career management at many organisations remains elusive. That’s one of the main reasons so many of today’s employees feel they need to leave to advance their careers.”

Well-thought-out professional development programmes can provide your employees with opportunities and clear direction on how to increase their skills and advance their careers within your organisation.

With an expanded skill set, not only will employees feel more empowered, they will also have more tools to help your organisation. A win-win for your organisation and staff.

When starting a professional development programme, you can leverage the expertise you have within your organisation. Senior employees, for example, can serve as mentors and help mentees sharpen both their soft skills and technical skills, gain practical knowledge, institutional insights and hands-on guidance, and can help mentees become more valuable and versatile employees.

At PeopleScout, for example, we sponsor a programme where employees are paired with mentors at different levels within the organisation to provide mentorship and career guidance. During the first three cycles of our programme, 10 percent of participants received promotions after completing the programme.

Key Action:

Invest in your employees’ career development and tie their career success to the success of your organisation.

Management and Leadership

It’s often stated that “employees don’t leave organisations, they leave managers.” This is not a mere business platitude, there is evidence to back it up.

In a study conducted by Gallup, 50 percent of employees said they left a job “to get away from their manager to improve their overall life at some point in their career.”

What’s more, according to an article by SHRM, “Employees who trust their managers appear to have more pride in the organisation and are more likely to feel they are applying their individual talents for their own success and that of the organisation.”

To curb employee turnover that stems from mismanagement, organisations should train managers on how to constructively engage, develop and motivate their teams to improve employee retention.

One challenge managers may face lies in the fact that what motivates employees is often unique to the individual. To uncover the diverse factors that drive their team members, emotional intelligence is required.

Training support for managers should involve teaching them how to build better relationships, communicate more effectively, notice the early signs of employee burnout, delegate work and shift their mindset from being “the boss” to becoming a leader who empowers their team for success.

Moreover, managers should not have to wait for HR to step in with retention initiatives. Instead, managers should feel empowered to provide incentives and rewards, as well as the ability to develop their staff and offer meaningful opportunities to their team.

Managers should also be aware that meaningful recognition and praise can be powerful. Employee awards, recognition programmes and praise might be the single most cost-effective way to maintain a happy, productive workforce.

Managers can send positive emails at the completion of a project or monthly memos outlining the achievements of their team, and organisations can develop peer-recognition programmes to provide positive feedback to individuals as well as their teams as a whole.

What’s more, organisations can create formal employee recognition programmes. These programmes let employees know that their work is valued and provides employees with a sense of ownership and belonging within their organisation.

Creating a culture of recognition is something any organisation can do to improve their employee retention. The key to success is identifying how your employees like to be recognised and then finding ways to show recognition in their preferred method consistently over time.

While recognition programmes can help improve employee retention, you still need to make sure managers are provided with coaching and training programmes as well as supplied with the resources they need to become more empowered.

Key Action:

Enable employees to have positive social interactions with leadership and a rewarding work environment to increase satisfaction with their role in the organisation.

Using Predictive Analytics to Track Turnover

Today, organisations are more data-driven, using AI and predictive analytics to better analyse data and drive business decisions. Predictive analytics can be leveraged by organisations to monitor and manage employee turnover by identifying which employees are at risk of leaving the organisation.

Organisations should build their predictive models based on employee data tracked and stored in their HRIS or ATS. This historical data contains a wealth of information relevant to predicting employee turnover. Successfully leveraging predictive analytics to improve employee retention begins with the validity and quality of data fed into a predictive model.

Some of the most commonly used employee information for turnover-focused predictive modeling includes:

  • Tenure or duration of employment
  • Compensation level or ratio
  • Date of, or time since, last promotion
  • Percent of most recent pay raise
  • Job performance score
  • Commute distance
  • Job satisfaction score
  • Number of previous positions held
  • Years with current manager
  • Engagement score

These points of data can be analysed to predict the likelihood and rate of turnover across roles within an organisation.

For example, a PeopleScout client uses data and predictive models to assess turnover trends. The client uses employee demographic information such as age, tenure and their previous employer to predict when an employee might resign based on historical trends and patterns of similar employees.

Equipped with this data, the client is better positioned to prevent valuable employees from resigning by taking preemptive actions during periods or junctures where the employee is most likely to resign.

Leveraging Interviews to Improve Employee Retention

A key to improving employee retention is uncovering the unique issues your employees face day-to-day. Exit and stay interviews can give you a wide variety of perspectives from which to tackle issues that are driving employees away.

Exit Interviews

Exit interviews are designed to gather feedback from departing employees, and can provide an organisation with insights that can be used to make current and future employees less likely to resign.

For example, if your exit interviews uncover that employees feel their duties didn’t match their original job expectations, consider changing your job descriptions and your onboarding sessions to better reflect the duties within a specific role.

What’s more, recruiters and talent acquisition stakeholders should be educated on the competencies and skills that are needed to be successful in a specific role and be able to communicate them effectively to candidates.

Tips for conducting effective exit interviews:

  • Choose the Right Interviewer: When conducting an exit interview, the interviewer should be someone with little connection to the interviewee or someone they feel comfortable sharing their true feedback and concerns with.
  • Ask the Right Questions: To get the most out of an exit interview, it is important to ask the right questions – e.g. what is the attraction of the new position?; how were relationships with colleagues?; was there an issue with benefits or compensation?; what could be done to make this company a better place to work?
  • Analyse the Interviews: Make sure you analyse the results of each exit interview and aim to find any common issues that are causing your employees to leave.

Exit interviews shouldn’t be the only time you solicit feedback from employees. Rather, you should foster a culture of constructive feedback. Employee engagement surveys are a good way to take the pulse of employees throughout their tenure with your organisation. That way, you’re more likely to get honest, constructive feedback from current employees, as well as when employees leave.

Key Action:

During an exit interview, ask about things like the quality of leadership, teamwork across and within departments, opportunities for advancement and internal policies.

Stay Interviews

In some ways stay interviews are similar to exit interviews. They are both used to identify reasons employees like or dislike their job and can uncover concerns or issues an employer may be unaware of.

However, stay interviews can be more valuable than exit interviews because they provide insights managers can leverage to motivate and retain employees before they make the decision to leave.

Questions to ask during a stay interview:

  • What keeps you working here?
  • What do you enjoy about your job?
  • What would cause you to leave the company?
  • What would you like to change about your job, team or department?
  • If you could change one thing about the company what would it be?
  • Have you ever thought about leaving the organisation?
  • What motivates you at work?
  • Do you feel appreciated in your role?
  • Where do you see yourself in five years?

After conducting a stay interview, be as transparent as possible with the interviewee about what you can or can’t do to remedy a particular issue.

Key Action:

Aim to conduct your stay interviews at least once per year to augment the more general information about team satisfaction obtained through engagement surveys. Schedule them separately from performance reviews so the goals of each meeting remain distinct.

The Gist:

Unmanaged employee turnover is costly and disruptive to organisations. Approaches to retaining top talent need go beyond compensation and benefits to include improving employee job satisfaction with meaningful engagement, organisational commitment to managing employees’ relationships with their managers and clearly communicating opportunities for growth and advancement with the organisation.

Ghosting in the Workplace

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Employers are concerned about the growing trend of candidates who don’t show up to scheduled interviews, don’t arrive on the first day of work or even quit without giving notice. This trend is also known as “ghosting” in the workplace.

“As labor markets tighten, recruiters and hiring managers say they’re experiencing a surge of workers no-showing at interviews or accepting a job only to never appear for the first day of work without explanation. Some employees are even quitting by walking out and saying nothing,” wrote LinkedIn’s Chip Cutter in an article on workplace ghosting.

What’s more, an article published by USA Today reports that 20 to 50 percent of job applicants and workers are pulling no-shows or ghosting in some form or fashion.

The ghosting phenomenon is global. “I thought it could only be in pockets of a country like the U.S., where the unemployment rate has sunk to an 18-year low,” wrote Pilita Clark in an article in the Financial Times. “When I asked around in the UK, where unemployment is at its lowest in over 40 years, I found a surprising number of victims of what is known in the online dating world as ‘ghosting.’”

To further explain what ghosting is, why it’s occurring and what your organisation can do to minimise its effects on your talent acquisition programme, we explore the phenomenon and its effects on employers.

So, What is Ghosting in the Workplace?

In the dating world, “ghosting” is the practice of ending a relationship by stopping all contact and communication with a partner without apparent warning or explanation.

The discourteous act of ghosting is no longer confined to romance; it has now entered the world of work.

Ghosting in the workplace is similar to ghosting in dating. Essentially, candidates or employees avoid having potentially unpleasant conversations with recruiters or their employers by going radio silent instead.

Instead of telling employers, “I am quitting” or “I have accepted another job offer,” some workers are thinking: “If I ignore you long enough, eventually you will take the hint and leave me alone.”

Simply put, many job seekers do not want to have an uncomfortable conversation with a recruiter or manager, so they take the easy way out by ghosting them. Ghosting in the workplace comes in many forms including:

  • No-Showing for an Interview. This occurs when candidates do not show up to scheduled interviews. This can happen for initial interviews, or interviews further along in the hiring process.
  • No-Showing on the First Day. This occurs when candidates accept a job offer but don’t show up on their start date.
  • Quitting Without Notice. This occurs when an employee leaves for the day and is never heard from again.

While job candidates and employees have ghosted in the past, what’s unique now is the practice has now become more prevalent. According to a survey conducted by Washington-based research firm Clutch, 71 percent of workers admitted to ghosting at some point in the application process. What’s more, 55 percent of the respondents said they abandon one to five applications during a job search.

Why are Workers Ghosting in the Workplace?

Some experts believe it is due to changing candidate attitudes and others believe it is a result of the booming job market and historically low unemployment. Whatever the cause, ghosting in the workplace is becoming one of the top issues talent acquisition professionals face in today’s talent market.

Change in Candidate Attitudes

In an interview with the New York Post, Rob Bralow, owner of BLVD Wine Bar in Long Island says he schedules interviews back to back because the majority of applicants simply ghost the interview.

“If I have 10 people who have confirmed interviews in a day, and three people show up, I’m happy,” Bralow says. “And we’re talking about all pay grades and positions. It doesn’t matter what the pay scale is. I’ve had ghosts [no-shows] for $50,000 to $70,000 jobs, and I’ve had ghosts for minimum wage jobs.”

Clutch’s survey found 41 percent of workers found it acceptable to ghost employers, while 35 percent found it unreasonable for an organisation to ghost an applicant. Clutch also found that of the workers that found ghosting acceptable, the most common reasons include accepting another job offer (30 percent) or deciding the role was not a good match (19 percent).

Improved Economy and Opportunities

Ghosting is not just a symptom of shifting attitudes in the workforce. It can also be the result of low unemployment.

At the height of the Great Recession, the unemployment rate reached 10 percent in the U.S. During this time, many organisations were inundated by the deluge of applications from job seekers and could not respond to every applicant.

What’s more, the global economy is expected to grow by 3.7 percent in 2018, further driving demand for talent.

As the economy and job market surge, the tables have turned. Employees are at an advantage because it’s a candidate’s job market and they have more employment options than they have in recent years.

In May of 2018, the unemployment rate reached an 18-year low of 3.8 percent. There were more job openings than unemployed workers for just the second month in two decades, according to the United States Department of Labor.

Low unemployment is not confined to the U.S., the unemployment rate in the EU has dropped to 7.1 and in the APAC region at 4.2 percent.

This means that employees have more options for employment and can move quickly from one job to the next, ignore employment offers they choose not to accept or accept multiple offers at once with little perceived negative consequences.

How to Survive Ghosting in the Workplace

Ghosting is not only frustrating for employers and recruiters, it’s also expensive. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) reports the average cost-per-hire for companies is $4,129 and the average time to fill a position is 42 days. Ghosting also causes lost productivity, as hard-to-fill jobs stay open longer than anticipated.

To combat ghosting, employers can implement the following strategies:

Develop a Talent Community 

With ghosting becoming the new normal, it’s essential to be more strategic and build long-term relationships with candidates. One method of building long-term relationships is with talent communities.

Talent communities are ideal for establishing long-term professional relationships with passive talent for future opportunities. This means getting to know the talent landscape and candidates regardless of whether or not they are looking to make a career change immediately.

Developing a talent community requires organisations to shift from reactive recruiting to a more proactive approach. Your organisation’s mindset should switch from recruiting to fill an open position to thinking about who your organisation should hire in the future.

By sourcing candidates earlier in the hiring process, you have ample time to engage them and develop closer and more personal relationships, reducing their likelihood of ghosting.

Tips for building a talent community include:

  • Determine what roles you want to target for your talent community (usually roles with high turnover or roles that are hard-to-fill.)
  • Look to past candidates, former employees and interns to build your talent community.
  • Source passive candidates by combining various sourcing techniques (e.g. social media, networking events, etc.)
  • Engage candidates through recruitment marketing until you have an open role for them.

Building a talent community isn’t a short-term strategy and takes time to develop and nurture, but in the long term the benefits are worth the investment and can help offset ghosting in the workplace.

Evaluate Your Onboarding Process

While candidates ghosting job interviews can be a challenge, candidates who ghost on the first day or who resign their position without notice can wreak havoc on an organisation.

To curb and deter this behaviour, organisations should start the onboarding process early to build an emotional connection with new hires.

In fact, according to research conducted by Inavero, 77 percent of candidates are willing to accept an offer that is 5 percent lower than their expected offer if the employer created a great impression through the hiring process.

That is important because new hires decide to stay or leave a job within the first three weeks, according to a study by the Wyndhurst Group.

Despite the fact that it can take a year or longer for a new employee to reach full productivity, only 15 percent of organisations extend their onboarding past six months, according to SHRM. If employers want to keep their new hires from ghosting, they should consider extending their onboarding processes through the first year of employment. Here are some ideas for successful onboarding techniques at different key points throughout an employee’s first year.

  • Before start date: Prior to a candidate’s first day, reach out with friendly messages welcoming the new employee or sharing an introduction to some of the benefits your organisation has to offer.
  • On the first day: When the new hire arrives for their first day, be sure they are personally introduced to their coworkers and designate a point of contact who will be readily available to answer questions.
  • The first six months: Now that the new hire has learned the ropes, continuous feedback is what is going to help them hone their skills, catch mistakes and take corrective action when needed. This is also a great way to establish rapport and trust with the rest of the team.
  • After the first year: After the first year, managers should start having conversations about a new hire’s future within the organisation and their career development as a way to show the employee that the organisation is invested in their continued success.

Conclusion

No one can say for certain if ghosting in the workplace is a trend that is here to stay or if the emergence of an employer-friendly job market will curb it. But one thing is certain; candidate’s attitudes have changed, so organisations need to take steps to adjust.

By building strong talent communities and engaging new hires early and often, you can better position yourself to reduce the likelihood of candidates and employees ghosting you.

How the Skills of the Future Will Impact Enterprise Recruitment Teams

Posted on by epadmin

Technology is disrupting nearly every industry, at a pace that has never been seen before. As we shared in our earlier article on how to create a workforce equipped with the skills of the future, this pace of change means that employers need to take a proactive role in ensuring their workforce is prepared for this change. As in-demand skills shift towards prioritising complex problem solving, critical thinking, emotional intelligence and creativity, workforce leaders need to rethink the way they are acquiring talent.

We’ve explored the pending change of skills in the workplace and its impact on employees, but what does this mean for an in-house recruiting team? As roles are redefined and employers move from traditional job descriptions to skills-based definitions, traditional recruiting teams must learn to adapt.

In this article, we’ll examine the need to change the way jobs are defined and categorised to attract the right talent, how the shifting candidate experience drives continued focus on digital sourcing and recruiting strategies and what these changes mean to in-house recruiting teams.

Changing Skills in the Workplace and the Impact on Recruiting Teams

Jobs are being redefined, which impacts the way recruiting teams must work to find the best candidates. How can internal recruiting teams that have traditionally been aligned to specific business units adapt to meet the needs of workforce 4.0?

  • Some companies are realigning their recruiting teams away from business units to talent segments, where they focus on recruiting for a specific skill set
  • Others are outsourcing select talent segments to RPO providers for additional support and expertise
  • Other employers are moving from job-based recruitment to skills-based recruitment

The shift towards aligning recruiters with specific skills creates a challenge for in-house recruiting teams, which may not have the bandwidth or ability to shift to this model. In-house teams are struggling to keep up with the pace when recruiting for a large variety of roles and skill sets, as the number of jobs being redefined to adapt to new skills increases. Analysis of some in-house client teams show time-to-hire is actually increasing as teams find difficulty with new skills and unique roles to fill.

The digitisation of work is also having a major impact on recruiting. It’s difficult for enterprise recruiting teams to keep up with the pace of change in talent acquisition and HR technology. Recruitment teams have access to more technology, which should increase productivity and improve the quality of candidates. But in truth, it can be overwhelming. The HR technology marketplace is valued at more than $14 billion, and new technologies continue to enter the space.

As employers continue to shift their recruiting processes to keep up with the pace of change, many are turning to outsourced providers, like RPOs, to help with talent segments they’re having trouble with. Partnering with an outsourced firm also brings access to improved talent technology. At PeopleScout, for example, our Affinix™ technology is equipped with AI, machine learning and predictive analytics tools that enable our clients to connect with the best talent faster. We are also continuously evaluating and implementing new tools and features, so our clients are on the cutting-edge of emerging technologies in the marketplace.

Changing Candidate Experience: Ways to Engage with Candidates Online

Employers need to contend with changing candidate expectations in addition to adapting their jobs for the skills of the future. Candidates today want benefits like flexible working hours and virtual work opportunities and have in-demand skills that translate across multiple job categories. And, candidates today have more options than ever. With very strong job growth and low unemployment in many of the world’s leading economies, it is becoming a more candidate-driven job market every day.

How do you find these candidates of the future? Employers need to shift their employment branding strategies to fit the digital era.

Many employers invest large amounts of time and money in their career sites and application process, however most candidates are not finding your career site organically and the application process is often still cumbersome and slow.

While it is critical for candidates to have a good experience when they hit your career site, you need to first find and reach candidates where they are. With the rise of Amazon and other personalised online retail experiences, candidates expect to be treated like a consumer throughout the recruiting process. Recruitment marketing tactics must evolve to meet these requirements, with career sites recommending jobs to candidates the way online retailers recommend products to consumers.

Developing candidate personas can help employers understand exactly who they are targeting. With the candidate in mind, you can develop targeted digital advertising campaigns, post positions on specialty job boards and develop recruitment marketing content to guide candidates through the application process.

It is also critical to closely monitor job rating sites. A poor candidate or employee experience can result in a loss of candidates due to negative reviews on sites like Glassdoor and Indeed. A positive review, on the other hand, can be more meaningful as it is coming straight from an unbiased individual, rather than a company career site.

The right talent acquisition technology tool can also help provide a superior candidate experience.

  • AI-enabled sourcing tools help recruiters find the best candidates faster.
  • A streamlined application process can allow candidates apply with just one click.
  • Personalised recruitment marketing tools like chatbots, SMS messages, email campaign and individualised landing pages provide candidates with the consumer-like experience they have come to expect online.

Why Turn to Outsourced Recruitment?

When enterprise recruiting teams are struggling to implement technology or source the right candidates for positions requiring new skills, some employers bring in a talent partner to focus on specific job functions or skillsets. Talent acquisition leaders are turning to RPO providers for their expertise in hard-to-source talent segments. They’re also looking for a partner who can bring the right technology to improve sourcing and hiring metrics. Visit our website to learn more about PeopleScout’s RPO solutions.