Category: Candidate Experience

Digital Series: Planning for Growth – Why Hybrid Hiring is Critical for Talent Acquisition Leaders

Posted on by mhill

What comes after your essential transition to virtual recruiting, when teams have shrunk and hiring needs are volatile? How do you ensure sufficient capacity and capability as organisations activate renewed growth strategies? The answer is hybrid recruiting.

We are delighted to invite you to join us as we investigate this hiring adaptation.  The first part of the series will be a bite size briefing that will explore the pros and cons of hybrid recruiting and why Human Resource and Talent leaders are turning their focus towards a flexible hybrid approach.

The Bite-Size-Briefing & Panel Debate are now available On-Demand.

Sourcing Candidates in 2021

Posted on by edyson

Sourcing candidates—even in the best of times—can be quite a daunting task. Sourcers and recruiters can spend weeks and sometimes months searching for the perfect candidate for a job opening and sometimes the person you want unfortunately may not exist. As the job market quickly recovers and candidates are now considering a move, organizations need to look to new and innovative ways to source, recruit and hire talent.

While you cannot wish the perfect candidates into existence or fast-forward past the pandemic, there are a number of candidate sourcing strategies you can deploy to help ensure that you have a quality talent pool at your fingertips as soon as you are ready to hire. In this article, we outline tips and strategies for sourcing candidates in 2021 that will help you improve your talent sourcing.

Sourcing Candidates Begins with Your Employer Brand

Your employer brand could be the difference between a candidate responding to your strategic sourcing and outreach or ignoring it. Candidates may not respond to your outreach messaging if they think poorly of your employer brand, so make sure you communicate your employer value proposition.

To improve your sourcing techniques and overall recruiting success, here are some tips on both repairing and building a better employer brand:

Respond to Reviews

Regularly check review sites like Glassdoor and respond to the feedback to let people know you appreciate their input and will take action where it’s necessary. This will generate goodwill, and help your employees feel engaged and heard.

Tell your Story

Engaging your employees in storytelling, encouraging them to personalize their LinkedIn profiles, starting a company blog, being active in the press and speaking at conferences are just a few of the ways employers can spread awareness about their brand.

Partner with your Marketing Team

The strategies and methods needed to help spread your employer brand to job seekers are similar to the ones marketing is using to promote your organization’s brand. Partner closely with your marketing team on both employer-branded content creation and distribution channels. 

Start Sourcing Candidates for Jobs Before You Are Ready

candidate sourcing

Sourcing candidates for jobs takes time, and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. To get ahead of the candidate sourcing curve, start sourcing talent even if you do not have open positions. Typically, sourcing goes like this: “I have X job to fill, I’m going to source people for X job.” But smarter sourcers get even more proactive with their sourcing efforts and get ahead on roles they will need to hire for in the future.

First, take a look at your business growth plans. Then, build a corresponding workforce hiring strategy that gives you insight into when hires need to be made across the year to sustain your organization’s goals.

Once you have a picture of which teams need to grow, you can work with department leaders and HR to identify the level and skillsets required. Aggregate those skills and what you know about your company and team culture so you can begin to strategic sourcing for specific profiles candidates in a focused and on-ongoing way.   

Social Sourcing Tools and Platforms

sourcing tools

If you want to find and connect with the best talent, you should create a comprehensive social media sourcing strategy.

Social media channels provide strategic sourcing professionals an opportunity to share targeted job content and details about their organization, mission statements and hiring process to keep candidates warm, and better source talent.

Social talent sourcing tools and technology like PeopleScout’s Affinix technology solution help sourcing specialists and recruiters narrow their search and identify qualified candidates quicker. Here are some social media tools and platforms that will streamline your sourcing:

  • LinkedIn with 760 million users has been the social network of choice for sourcers and recruiters alike and for good reason, as professionals share their career history, advertise accomplishments and interact with industry experts. A LinkedIn Recruiter license lets you search profiles and send personal messages (InMails) to potential candidates, making LinkedIn an essential sourcing tool.
  • With 2.8 billion users, everyone is on Facebook, making every user a potential candidate. What’s more, users frequently research potential employers, look for job opportunities and apply for jobs through Facebook. Consider using paid job ads and Facebook groups to help you source candidates
  • Twitter has 330 million users and offers various tools, like search, lists and chat that help recruiters source candidates. Get the most out of your sourcing efforts by being active on Twitter. Engage in Twitter discussions, advertise conferences you sponsor and follow industry-related hashtags to find the talent you are looking for.

While the most popular platforms for social sourcing are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, if you want to expand your sourcing efforts to non-traditional social channels, consider the following social platforms:

  • Slack is a platform that allows group communications between professionals with similar interests. You can use Slack to source candidates by joining channels relevant to the job candidates you are looking to source in a more casual setting.
  • Meetup is a website that facilitates meetings and groups for people with common interests.
  • Reddit is an online community forum where members (Redditors) discuss a range of topics and interests. Reddit is not a traditional sourcing channel, but Reddit’s communities (called subreddits) are great places to post job ads and engage with potential candidates, especially in the professional communities you are searching for talent in.

Creative Ways For Sourcing Candidates: Leverage Your Employees’ Networks

sourcing strategies

According to LinkedIn, organizations can expand their talent pool by 10 times by recruiting through their employees’ networks. Run sourcing sessions and employee referral programs with your team to see if anyone in your employee’s networks would be interested in one of your open roles. Your employees can help you reach more untapped talent pools, and improve response rates with warmer candidates. 

Facebook, for instance, will display to your team, different job candidate search results based on their social graph, so you can uncover passive job candidates you would not have otherwise discovered. Job sourcing sites such as Sourcing.io allow your employees to connect their social media accounts on LinkedIn, Twitter, and GitHub so you can view candidates who are connected to your team members. When you find a qualified job candidate, you should encourage your team to send warm introductions to increase your candidate engagement and response rate.

Perfect Your Outreach Messages When Sourcing Candidates

sourcing techniques

You and your talent acquisition team have worked hard to source the qualified candidates, but that does not matter if you fail to create a real connection. A few rules of thumb: Lead with a subject line that will stand out and make the candidate want to open and read your message; always personalize your recruiting message with the relevant information you found about them; paint a brief picture of the role and your organization; and explain how you think they could contribute to your team.

Narrowing down and building a targeted audience is a way to create a strong and more personalized outreach message. According to Glassdoor, 78% of sales professionals said they would accept less money to work at a company selling something compelling, 66% of healthcare professionals are likely to accept less money to work at a company with a great culture.

Improve your response rates by personalizing and focusing on the issues that matter to candidates of all categories. Your goal is to give your pool of job candidates just enough content and engagement to pique their interest and respond to your outreach messaging, you want to be careful about overloading them with communications. Ask your recent hires for feedback on your outreach messages, and use that feedback to test different messaging to improve your response rates.

If your talent team invests the resources to sourcing a robust talent pipeline, you will find more candidates in your talent pool qualified for open roles in the future. Re-engaging prospects is a missed candidate sourcing opportunity for many organizations, you should remind your recruiting team to source from silver medal job candidates first because they are qualified and vetted.

Remember Strategic Sourcing Begins with Reexamining Your Program

Despite setbacks caused by the pandemic, the best candidates will always be in high demand, making it more important than ever to reevaluate your talent sourcing strategy in 2021. Attracting top talent is essential to your organization’s ability to recover and keep pace during the great rehire. These strategic sourcing methods can help you fill your pipeline with qualified talent so you can choose the best hire for your team.

Diversity Sourcing: How to Recruit a Diverse Workforce

Posted on by edyson

Diversity, inclusion and equity are top of mind for many talent leaders and professionals. While much progress has been made, there is still much work to be done. Women and people of color are underrepresented in leadership positions, certain job categories, and entire industries. The wage gap is narrowing, but is not expected to close for quite some time. And for many, persistent injustices and systematic issues impact their lives far beyond the workplace.

Every employer has a responsibility to do their part to right these wrongs, and there is certainly no shortage of actions that could be taken right now to make an impact. We can start by building a more diverse talent pipeline that will feed into our workforce and provide more opportunities for people from underrepresented groups.

Many companies in several different industries still struggle to source diverse talent. One problem that persists is the lack of diverse professionals in the talent pipeline. Many fields suffer from their own version of the pipeline problem that has plagued the tech industry. A workforce that is diverse is more creative and innovative, research suggests.

Companies without a diverse pipeline will continue to hire the same groups of people, which will inhibit growth, progression and their competitive advantage. Being able to diagnose some of the causes of this problem can help organizations overcome this issue to create a more diverse workplace. What’s more, having a diverse set of employees can also attract a wider or untapped customer base, making your organization more profitable. In this article, we will cover strategies and best practices for sourcing diverse candidates.

Start with a Diversity Sourcing Audit

Diversity Sourcing

With any process or procedural changes, you need a sound business case for changing your approach. That is why it is always worth looking at your organization as a whole (job functions, processes, departments, markets) to find concrete ways in which bringing on board a more diverse workforce is likely to make a positive impact.

A diversity sourcing audit can help you in the following ways:

  • It informs which areas to prioritize. You have a general goal of diversifying your workforce across the board. Yet at the same time, you’ve identified that more diversity could be especially welcome in your customer service and marketing departments. Over in your technical department meanwhile, you are struggling to find suitably skilled people to fill key roles. These departments might be prime areas to focus your efforts.
  • It avoids you adopting a “quotas for quotas sake” approach. If you focus on how and why greater diversity in your workforce might benefit your business, it becomes possible to go about it in a way that benefits everyone.
  • It makes it easier to achieve buy-in. Establishing a strong organization-specific case for greater workplace diversity makes it more likely that key players within the organization (the board, departmental heads, all those involved in the selection and interviewing process) will take it seriously.

Diversity Sourcing and Institutions

how to recruit diverse candidates

Often, when organization’s begin a diversity sourcing program the easiest thing for many organizations is to source talent from local colleges and universities. While this strategy could save time, money and resources, it may result in a homogenous group of candidates in the talent pool. Expanding the search to more diverse colleges and universities can expand and widen the pool and increase the likelihood of finding candidates with a skill set that matches the open positions that must be filled.

Searching at historically black colleges and universities, Hispanic and Latino organizations, or professional groups like the National Association of Asian American Professionals, Global Diversity Alliance and Women For Hire are all great resources for sourcing a diverse candidate. Many professional groups have job boards where recruiters can post open roles.

Employee Referrals Are Key in Recruiting Diverse Candidates

Enlisting your employees through an employee referral program is a great way to source diverse talent. If you notice a lack of underrepresented groups in your talent pipeline, seek assistance from your diverse employees. For example, a woman in the STEM space is likely to know other women in STEM, and may also help your recruiters gain inroads into professional organizations representing women in STEM.

Employee referrals can also help lower your recruitment costs and may increase employee engagement. Because it’s so easy for an employee referral system to lead to preferential treatment and unconscious bias, particular attention and emphasis should be placed on identifying individuals from underrepresented groups.

Diversity Sourcing Strategy

Recruiters, Sourcing Tools and Hiring for Diversity

diverse candidates

Recruiters are human and may come with their own set of unconscious biases. Implementing technology into the recruitment process can help decrease the unconscious bias that may take place during diversity recruitment.

For instance, if you find that there’s a large drop in minority candidates moving between the onsite interview and skill assessment, unconscious bias training may be in order. Follow your data closely so you can make more informed decisions and continue making progress on your organization’s diversity, equity, and inclusion goals. What’s more, you should also build a team of recruiters who hail from a wide range of backgrounds.

There are also websites and job boards such as Jopwell that allow diversity recruiters to advertise open roles to a diverse pool of candidates.

Engagement Best Practices for Diversity Sourcing

Once you have a slate of diverse candidates, it is time to restructure your candidate engagement strategies to make them more diversity-friendly. With diverse candidates, you want to ensure that you can strike a chord that resonates with them by sending highly personalized and creative messages.

When looking for candidates, try to dig deep into their experience and their interests instead of just skimming through it. Looking for recognizable names of schools and companies won’t help you learn more about each individual candidate. You are looking for what they have done, not where they have done it.

You want to start looking through the different projects that they might have owned or contributed to, or the various levels of responsibility that they have in their current role. Remember, tenure does not always equate to impact. Also, don’t forget other clues beyond their resume. Dig into the different areas of the business they might have impacted through their organization’s social media or blog presence.

Recruiting technology tools like PeopleScout’s Affinix, allow you to build automated workflows so that your candidates receive scheduled messages from members of your recruiting team, sharing more information about your opportunity.

What’s more, Diversity and inclusion programs provide companies with the opportunity to tap into the strengths of their workforce. According to a survey conducted by Glassdoor, 67% of job seekers said a diverse workforce is important when considering job offers and 57% of employees think their companies should be more diverse. This means that companies that implement a diversity and inclusion program are more likely to attract top talent.

Conclusion

Diversifying your pipeline is not an easy feat, but by taking actionable steps, you can fill your candidate pipeline is with diverse candidates. By setting measurable milestones on your sourcing initiatives, you will ensure that you are progressing forward, and if you’re not, you can easily recognize it and adjust your strategies. 

Sourcing a diverse slate of candidates is only one part of building a more diverse and inclusive workplace. You must be intentional in your efforts to evaluate candidates fairly, so you are not unintentionally weeding out great talent at each stage of the pipeline. It can be helpful to leverage sourcing tools to track conversion rates between these stages to understand where you should focus your attention.

Candidate NPS: What are Candidates Saying About You When You’re Not in the Room?

Posted on by akessler

We hear a lot about ‘customer-centricity’, putting the customer at the heart of everything you do. For years, organisations have been using Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure their customer experience and to generate feedback that boosts data-driven decision making. However, when it comes to measuring the candidate experience, companies are missing out on candidate NPS.

What is NPS?

Net Promoter Score, or NPS, began as way for organisations to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. By asking one question—“On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?”—organisations can gauge which customers are promoters, and which are detractors.

Graphic depicts how candidate NPS is scored.

Overall NPS score can range between -100 and +100, and the higher the score the better.

Why Candidate NPS?

Why is NPS an important measurement for talent acquisition leaders? Our research into candidate experience revealed that: 

  • Only 5% of candidates rated their experience excellent
  • But 66% of candidates have never been asked to provide feedback on their recruitment experience.
  • Yet, 9 out of 10 have provided feedback when asked.

With such a small percentage of candidates having an excellent recruitment experience, it’s imperative for organisations to start benchmarking their candidate experience in order to make data-driven improvements.

Yet, so few organisations are leveraging Candidate NPS. This week, we hosted the second part of our webinar series, “Early Careers Talent: How to Get Ahead in 2021.” During the broadcast we polled the audience, asking whether they currently use, intend to use or have no plans to use NPS to measure their candidate experience. Our attendees told us the following:

  • 7% currently use NPS
  • 21% don’t plan to 
  • 64% intend to start
  • 7% have other plans

Getting Started with Candidate NPS

Consider adding a communication to your CRM after critical stages in your recruitment process like the assessment centre or hiring manager interview—regardless of outcome. By asking one simple question and the candidate’s reasoning for their rating, you can gather valuable data to drive continuous improvement in your candidate experience.  

After gaining an initial benchmark, you can measure Candidate NPS overtime to see how your process improvements are impacting the candidate experience. Combined with other metrics, you’ll be on your way to understanding the impact of your talent acquisition program and improving your recruitment outcomes.

Sourcing Beyond 2020: Building Global Pipelines for Adaptive Work

Posted on by edyson

This year, many organizations have had to rethink the strategies and methods they leverage to source and recruit talent. As the year ends and good news regarding vaccines brings us all new hope, you might be wondering what talent acquisition success looks like post-2020?

One of the first steps in preparing for the changes ahead in the talent landscape is to establish an efficient method of sourcing talent. Building a global talent pipeline strategy is an effective way to source and recruit the talent you need.  

More technology is available than ever before, designed to making global sourcing and talent acquisition more efficient. Video interviewing makes it simple to interview candidates remotely, virtual reality technology can provide candidates a realistic look at your office without ever stepping foot inside and a variety of solutions for remote work mean that candidates can work from anywhere.  

I recently had the opportunity to join Hiretual for their webinar Sourcing Beyond 2020: Building Global Pipelines for Adaptive Work. During the live Q&A, I discussed how to tap into the global talent pool, ways to attract talent faster during the Great Rehire and how to go about engaging with candidates for current or future roles.

In follow up to the webinar, I wanted to provide some additional insights, observations and takeaways from the current talent sourcing landscape and provide you with actionable advice to help you source talent in 2020 and beyond. You can also watch the recorded webinar on the Hiretual website.

My Three Biggest Sourcing Takeaways from 2020

Maximize Your Investments

At the onset of the pandemic, many organizations had to make hard personnel decisions. As a result, teams are lean, but sourcing systems and contracts are still in place, so companies are looking for ways to use what they have. When you have a lean team, it is really important to invest in sourcing tools that allow them to produce more with fewer people. And, if your team is in a position to have any downtime, they can use it to get the most out of the current systems, processes and plans they have today.

It is becoming more important to reach out to passive job seekers who possess the skills you need, as relying on those actively applying cannot be your only channel. At PeopleScout we have invested heavily in technology and sourcing tools with our proprietary Affinix™ platform. Specifically, it has AI sourcing to find passive candidates through various online channels and match skills against your internal databases as well. This augments your existing team and frees up people to handle the most important tasks.

Many of our clients are sophisticated technology buyers and they are also investing in some best in breed AI sourcing tools. In fact, many of them use Hiretual and so our recruiting teams have had access to use that as well, augmenting our strategy and providing the lift needed as we prepare for continued increases in hiring (The Great Rehire).

Get Ahead Where You Can

Focus on best practice building of consistent, authentic and meaningful communication, identifying talent locations and managing to keep former employees, alumni and prospects engaged. Use the sourcing tools you have, maximize your CRM potential, and keep the conversation going. This will ensure that when you are ready to hire candidates are aware of you and open to talk. On the call, Stockpiling was mentioned. Take a page from Executive search firms – research, map and have your ‘first 50’ calls or communication candidates ready to be engaged. Start with drip marketing on the ones you can.

Push relevant, authentic content to them around the company, its future, plans and opportunities. Make it engaging and not just ‘here’s a job.’ Talk about the company, it’s vision, plans for recovery or success. Looking for a job is a lot like looking for a home – when you decide it’s on, it’s on. It’s not often a constant search. Something triggers it and companies want to be top of mind when it does. Drip marketing and candidate engagement go a long way when the pipeline becomes hiring.

Be Flexible in Your Approach

With uncertainty in the talent market due to COVID-19, recovery efforts and just general unease after a big life-changing event – recruitment has become more unpredictable.

Most companies aren’t providing guidance on revenue and hiring initiatives because of this. Company goals are going to change, and so will hiring efforts to meet those goals. Your sourcing engine needs to be adaptable and ready to go as quickly as you can, but also be nimble enough to flex.

Using automation tools (like those for AI sourcing or lead generation) as well as easy to update marketing and drip marketing campaigns can take the weight off of your sourcers, who can focus on strategy and research for future needs and on how to go to market for these candidates.

How Should Enterprise Hiring Teams Structure Their Global Sourcing Process?

Processes will need to be nimble and teams will need to be tuned in closely to hiring needs. Just like sales teams need clear goals and a plan to execute successfully, the closer talent acquisition is to an organization’s strategic objectives, the ‘tip of the spear’ sourcing team can be ready and focused on building early talent communication and networking.

Now, with the pandemic upending a lot of the traditional norms of work – physical locations, workplace flexibility from home, less commute, and a broader candidate pool for most industries, sourcing has to shift from their traditional method of ‘going where they know’ to rethinking where great candidates are and how to adapt and qualify them. Having more candidates doesn’t make sourcing easier; while it sure helps, it also presents new challenges for teams and organizations.

On the flip side of this coin – companies that cannot have virtual employees – face a different type of challenge. First, combating the notion that work from home is for everyone and sourcing candidates that will want to work onsite. Second, the competition for these individuals will intensify as the ‘Great Rehire’ kicks into full steam. Getting ahead of this and doing everything you can to map that talent and build rapport early will go a long way to getting ahead of a rapid upswing in hiring volumes.

Both scenarios also present a unique opportunity for recruitment and sourcing teams. Often, we source where we know – we look for carbon copies of the person we are replacing or the last people we hired (which is a lot to unpack for another time – diversity, inclusion and attraction anyone?) but with this, there will be large talent groups displaced that have skills and abilities but will not return to their previous roles.

An example of this is Flight Attendants. All major airlines, worldwide, have reduced their staff by enormous numbers. There are hundreds of thousands of candidates looking for work in a new area. For the savviest of sourcing and recruiting teams, there’s a huge opportunity here to bring a new candidate type to the table for roles. Knowing where to find them, how to engage them and how to bring them to the table for your hiring community will be extremely important and a massive opportunity for them.

How Enterprise Recruiters Can Set Themselves Apart from the Competition  

We’re all on the edge of what’s being called the ‘Great Rehire.’ We know that an average of 70% of the workforce has and will continue to work uninterrupted both virtually and in the office. That leaves a large, displaced group of candidates that will either return to their current careers or new ones. When that happens is anyone’s guess.

What teams can do now is a lot of the above – optimise your recruitment channels, build compelling drip marketing and attraction packages, leverage smart scouring tools, and start your research now to be sure you are ready when the hiring begins. To the TA leadership, if you aren’t already involved in future planning, get ahead of it now. This has the potential to be a massive rehire, at least we all hope, and we don’t have a precedent in modern hiring to compare. Be ready to be nimble.

Choosing the Right Scouring Tools and Technology

There has been a lot of debate in sourcing about how technology will either eliminate the need for sourcing (just like it will eliminate the need to interview) or will it augment. I’m firmly in the camp that technology, for the near to mid-future, will be an augmentation of human efforts.

So, now is the time to look at your sourcing tools and tech stack and eliminate waste and optimize your process and efforts. Take your sourcing tools and position them for the future, look at your organization and your needs and choose the tools that will help accelerate your hiring teams through the process.

We have to assume, as we always do in recruiting, that hiring will come faster than we can prepare for. Choose and implement tools that maximize your sourcing ability and help the team be faster, better and smarter. Tools have the ability to augment your team, integrate with your CRM to ensure you can automate attraction and marketing, and report back on the success rate of your efforts.

Look at your reporting state now – can you measure each key piece of the process to see where you can tweak, adjust, or shift to get better results? Best in class TA teams have learned to measure the entire funnel – not just for speed of process but also for efficiency or ‘friction.’ The faster you can get to market, identify and/or attract, and bring that candidate through an impactful experience will help you both hire and retain great people. To do that, you need to focus on the holistic view of your process and be sure you can measure it effectively.

Planning Your Future Workforce and Building Robust Talent Pipelines

At PeopleScout, we see it across our client base and I’m hearing it from friends and former colleagues; we know we need to prepare; we know we need to get ahead, but how? What are we hiring for? When does it start?

The best practices we’ve seen and some of the lessons we learned after the Great Recession in 2008 was that the closer recruiting is to sales and to executive planning, the better we can be prepared to not just find candidates but to strategise on what roles are needed to help the business rebuild, and then where to find them and how to engage them.

Planning ahead will be critical but I would say more importantly, given resource constraints, cost constraints and the level of uncertainty, sourcing will need to ensure they have a clear understanding beyond just the number of hires and what’s in your funnel. This is a time for talent acquisition as a whole to show how strategic we really are. We have been solving company problems for a long time, and this will be a huge opportunity to get in the mix of future state analysis, building the plan for what type of candidate is both needed and available and then delivering on that plan.

Building future proof talent pipelines requires both a plan and sourcing tools to help you source, track and communicate with your Great Rehire talent. Starting earlier will be well worth it when it begins. It won’t be as simple as knowing where the right talent is when you need them. You will need to be sure you track and build rapport consistently given the uncertainty of the market.

Candidate Engagement is Key to Candidate Satisfaction

Posted on by akessler

The best recruiting organisations, and the best recruiters, put effort in to establishing open communication, sharing information, providing appropriate guidance, building confidence and even encouraging risk-taking in candidates.  Seeking feedback on candidate experience – providing a platform for applicants to have their voice heard and the space to share their thoughts – supports this too. These are all strategic focuses that an RPO partnership can deliver.

At PeopleScout, we are particularly focused on advocating for candidates throughout the hiring process. I believe this is why we consistently receive high candidate satisfaction scores (like NPS) on the candidate experience we provide for our clients.

Creating Psychological Safety through Candidate Engagement

Applying for a job seems an obvious example of taking a personal risk. Candidates deserve the same level of support as employees; after all, unless your search is poor at least one of them is your next colleague, right?

If a talented candidate does not feel engaged during an application, assessment, interview or any interaction with a recruiting team, what is the result?  An inability to express themselves, and their talents fully. 

When that talent is blocked, or overlooked, who is at fault? The candidate, or the designers and deliverers of a recruitment experience that failed to consider candidate experience?

It our goal to create a candidate experience in which every candidate can bring their best self to the process and find a new position that will create value for the candidate and the client.

Rethinking Required Skills to Engage More Talent

Through our strategic partnerships, PeopleScout helps a wide audience of candidates think differently about their own potential and skills, and what value they might add to an organisation.  That approach reaches and engages talent others might overlook.

Recently our team did some work with Defra to bring to life the purpose of Civil Service Success Profiles.  Asking candidates to “show off the true you” is a long way from a job advert (or a recruiter sat behind it) seeking experience in the exact same role or sector as an essential requirement.

A quick question to consider: what do you really need to know about a job applicant?  Biographical information, years of education, and even job experience are less predictively valid than other modes of assessment. You’ll get a much better indication of future success from behavioural- and skills-focused interviews and tests.  One of our teams recently put together a case for removing CV screening from a customer care recruitment exercise based on this principle.

Here’s to all of them for helping people – particularly those struggling to access employment – to think about skills differently and to put that thinking at the forefront of assessment and recruitment.  I’m particularly pleased to see Openreach represented here with the clear message:

“If people have got the right attitude, the right mindset, the right customer service and teamwork ethos, we can train them to be great engineers.”

That’s the spirit and confidence you want to see from a potential employer!  I’m proud to say that PeopleScout worked with Openreach on one of its biggest ever trainee engineer recruitment drives. Our success hinged on candidate outreach – breaking down preconceptions of video interviews, better informing candidates and giving them confidence in the process.

RPO: Changing Candidate Engagement for the Better

As a leading, global talent partner for a diverse range of businesses, PeopleScout’s RPO solutions have long been designed to amplify employer brands with a recruitment approach that focuses on an enhanced candidate experience. The missing talent can be won by placing the employee experience at the heart of your talent strategy and I’m proud to say in Q1 2022 we are re-delivering hundreds of employees each month into consumer goods and retail sectors for our client partners in the UK, with fulfilment trending positively each month.

Talent Pipeline and Candidate Engagement

Posted on by edyson

As we return to work, resiliency, business continuity and recovery are fast emerging as critical priorities for business leaders. Creating a talent pipeline strategy for vital roles is one way organizations can build greater resilience, have clear succession plans and ensure talent continuity. However, with hiring freezes and uncertainty around when hiring will resume has left many talent teams in limbo.

That said, there has never been a more important time to focus on building your talent pipeline strategy to ensure you have the best possible talent on your team and are well-positioned as things return to normal. You may not have positions to fill now, but by building a robust talent pipeline now, you will place yourself in a better position when we return to business as usual.

In this article, we cover how to build a better talent pipeline and engagement strategies and best practices for building stronger relationships with your candidate pool.

What is a Talent Pipeline?

A talent pipeline is a proactive talent acquisition strategy that seeks to identify, engage and recruit talent to build a robust pool of candidates to fill roles as needed. Similar to a sales funnel where leads progress through multiple stages of engagement and are eventually converted into clients, a talent pipeline moves potential job candidates through engagement stages that hopefully lead to making a hire. Like most modern recruitment practices, talent pipelining has been derived from proven sales and marketing strategies.

Talent pipeline

With a talent pipeline, organizations can pick and choose from a highly qualified group of candidates who are already familiar with the organization. The key to a successful talent pipeline strategy lies in candidate engagement because recruiting teams are not focused solely on filling open roles. Rather, they are thinking about how to best meet future talent needs through building better relationships with top talent. In addition to better candidates, talent pipelining allows you to diversify your talent pool, deliver personalized candidate experiences and improve your overall employer brand. 

How to Build a Pipeline of Candidates: Talent Pipeline Strategy and Engagement Starts with Your Employer Brand

how to build a pipeline of candidates

Talent pipelining is about influencing candidate behavior, so the first and most logical place to begin when creating a talent pipeline is the answering the following questions:

  • How do you generate interest in your organization?
  • What differentiating factors set your organization apart from other employers?
  • Why should candidates choose to work for your organization?

To find the answers to these questions, you need to turn to your employer brand. In a talent market that’s reeling from the effects of a global pandemic and calls for increasing racial diversity, your reputation as an employer is now more important than ever to attract high-quality candidates.

What’s more, at a time when candidates can quickly look up information about your organization, from compensation and benefits to the work culture and advancement opportunities, building a strong employer brand is paramount. In fact, according to the Harvard Business Review, a negative employer reputation can costs organizations up to 10% more per hire.

To attract and bring top talent to your organization’s talent pipeline, maintaining and personalizing your candidate-facing content should be a top priority. You can achieve this by improving the content on your careers page and in your social media outreach with high-quality resources, guides, videos.

So, how do you position yourself as an employer of choice in your industry and fill your talent pipeline with qualified talent? Below are some simple steps that can help you get started:

Leverage Your Career Site

The first place many candidates will engage with your employer brand will be through your career site. Use your career site to highlight your corporate values, culture and provide a real glimpse of what life for the employees of your organization is like.

Make sure that your employer brand messaging on your career site is consistent with that on your social media channels, company website and review pages such as Glassdoor and Indeed. Also, make sure your career site is mobile optimized as many mid-career professionals are more likely to search for opportunities on their mobile devices. The easier it is to apply and interact with your organization, the more top candidates you will be able to add to your pipeline.

Candidate Engagement Best Practices: Engage Your Talent Pipeline on Social Channels

Social media has fast become a top recruitment marketing channel. Moreover, according to Glassdoor, 79% of job applicants use social media in their job search, so engaging with candidates and presenting a positive employer brand on social media is essential.

For example, you can build a stronger employer brand and engagement with your target audience by promoting authentic conversations about life within your organization and asking candidates to share what they seek in an employer. You should also celebrate employee achievements, share real-life stories, photos and videos to show potential candidates what it is like working with you. This will make it more likely that candidates will feel comfortable applying for positions at your organization.

Your Employees Are Your Best Advocates

Building on your social media strategy, you can also look at employee advocacy as an effective branding and talent pipeline building tactic. Employee advocacy is the word-of-mouth marketing equivalent for recruitment. Your employees can tap into their networks, refer friends to open roles and bring in more candidates into your talent pipeline.

talent pipeline strategy

Identify employees who can act as your brand ambassadors and share the perks of working with your organization with their network and build a great referral pipeline for talent. Candidates are three times more likely to trust your employees over recruiters to provide credible information about your work culture.

How to Build Talent Pipeline: Communicating with Your Talent Pipeline

how to build talent pipeline

Send Confirmation Emails to Candidates

Sending confirmation emails to candidates in your pipeline who have applied to open positions should be an obvious step, as 96% of job applicants want confirmation their application has been received. However, just 8% say they always get one from a potential employer. You can leverage technology and automate your communication with candidates to make sure emails are sent on time and reach candidates.

You should include in your replies a “thank you” for taking the time to fill out your application, let candidates know when they can expect to hear back about their application status. You do not have to provide feedback to unsuccessful candidates, just make sure you tell any unsuccessful candidates that they have not progressed and thank them again for taking the time to apply. This reply can be automated too.

Keeping your Talent Pipeline Warm During a Hiring Freeze

You may have many talented professionals out of work looking for new opportunities but might not be in a position to do any hiring right now. That does not mean that your recruiting activity should be on hold. In fact, this is the perfect time to work on building and nurturing your talent pipeline.

Keeping candidates “warm” is a balancing act, especially in uncertain times. You can keep candidates engaged by sending them updated press releases, and managers can periodically send a personal note or text to keep the lines of communications open.

You can share updates about the conditions at your organization, statements your CEO has made, or other information to give them an understating of how your organization is dealing with this crisis. These efforts might impress candidates and make them want to work with you even if you do not have an opening yet.

Consider Using a Chatbot

Candidates in your talent pipeline will have questions for you – about the role itself, about the application process or the timeline between applying and hiring. If you have high-volume hiring needs, or your internal recruiting teams are stretched too thin to answer all of the questions, deploying a chatbot to answer some of the most common questions immediately can prevent candidates from losing touch with you or becoming frustrated.

If you are wonder if candidates would be happy accepting answers from a chatbot, modern candidates are already interacting with them, because like Alexa or Siri, they mimic our natural conversational styles.

Your job is to figure out what the most common questions will be and craft answers that the chatbot can supply. Just ensure you have a process in place if the candidate’s question was not answered satisfactorily – that the question then gets routed to a human who can answer it.

Conclusion

Ultimately, effective talent pipelining engagement boils down to how you plan, strategize and leverage technology to support your long-term business needs. The landscape for candidates today is drastically different from the past years. Empathy, flexibility and understanding will go a long way in building lasting relationships with candidates and successfully adapting to the realities of a post-COVID world.

Transport for London: Recruiting Talent from Every Walk of Life

Posted on by mhill

How we overhauled TfL’s entry-level talent brand and attraction activity.


TfL values the importance of social mobility. Being representative of London is something their success is measured on, and the same standards apply to their apprenticeship and graduate schemes.


TfL’s entry-level talent activities had proven successful in the volume of applications received but weren’t reaching talent from all sectors of society – TfL needed a diverse workforce from every social background that truly represented modern London. It was time to rethink their entire student attraction activity.

SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS

  • REDESIGNED RECRUITMENT AND ASSESSMENT PR
  • PROCESSES TO HELP CANDIDATES FROM A WIDE VARIETY OF BACKGROUNDS EXCEL.
  • DEVISED NEW OUTREACH PROGRAMMES TO CONNECT WITH YOUNG PEOPLE IN AREAS OF HIGH DEPRIVATION, THEREBY APPEALING TO A WIDER DEMOGRAPHIC.
  • CREATED A NEW SOCIAL MOBILITY-CENTRED EMPLOYMENT BRAND.

SCOPE AND SCALE

London’s growing population of 16-18-year olds is set against a backdrop of rising youth unemployment and some of the most deprived areas in the country. Naturally TfL play a major role in contributing to London’s growth, and so opening doors for people from disadvantaged areas was absolutely vital.

SITUATION

Our primary objective was to make TfL more relevant and accessible for our target audience. This meant removing barriers to recruitment, challenging stereotypes, and overcoming negative perceptions. We needed to change TfL’s attraction process so that people from every pocket of society would be interested in the unique opportunities available.
And we needed to re-position their entry-level employer brand as a progressive organisation in which everyone – regardless of background or financial situation – could excel.

SOLUTION

A NEW AND VIBRANT YOUNG TALENT BRAND
We started by transforming the way TfL recruited, ensuring talented people from all walks of life got a chance to apply. This resulted in a dynamic, unexpected youth brand – ‘The Next Move’ – which was designed to look different from other TfL communications, using vibrant, colourful graphics.


A CONFIDENCE-BOOSTING PRE-EMPLOYMENT COURSE
We then created a programme called ‘Route-into-Work’, a pre-employment course helping 16-25 year-old NEETs fill gaps in their knowledge and get the tools, insight, and confidence to be successful at assessment centres.


A NEW SCHOOL’S OUTREACH PROGRAMME STRATEGY
For their Apprenticeships, we designed a new strategy for our schools’ outreach programme, ‘Moving Forward’. We identified 251 of the poorest secondary state schools and ran over 50 events, with additional events in three of the most deprived boroughs in London: Newham, Tower Hamlets and Haringey.

RESULTS

We achieved amazing results in the recruitment campaign, comfortably meeting the social mobility criteria we had set out to achieve.


As a result of our targeted activities, we filled 32 graduate roles, five placements and 109 apprenticeships.

Texting Talent: Driving Engagement and Candidate Communication

Posted on by edyson

In light of the workforce disruptions caused by the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus, talent leaders are quickly adapting and transforming their organisation’s talent function to match our present reality. 

The current crisis gives talent leaders the opportunity to assess and fine-tune recruiting practices in a way that will keep both candidates and recruiters safe while better positioning their organisation for the future working conditions.  

Technologies such as text messaging tools built for recruiters offer enormous opportunities to improve recruiter efficiency, time to hire and build stronger relationships with candidates. What’s more, text messaging, when paired with a virtual hiring solution, is a safer alternative to traditional recruiting.   

Before you implement a texting solution, you need a solid understanding of use cases and best practices that can help ensure success and mitigate risk. In this article, we will outline the case for texting and share best practices for leveraging texting in your recruiting programme.  

The Case For Text Recruitment

Recruiters and talent leaders understand that good recruiting begins and ends with building strong relationships with candidates. So, why add yet another communications channel to the recruiting mix?  

The answer is simple: Times keep changing, and so do the ways we communicate. As that happens, the effectiveness of tried and true methods also changes as demographics and preferences shift. 

Texting is Straightforward: Text messages are typically short and to the point, which makes them easier to read and respond to than email messages. Texting also carries with it an expectation of informality which makes it easier to communicate. For example, saying “yes” instead of “Yes.” is totally acceptable via a text exchange. 

Texting is Convenient: Candidates can respond to texts whenever and wherever while they are running errands, on break at work or home watching a movie.  

Texting Has Greater Reach: Many hourly and elderly workers don’t own or have access to a computer and rely on their mobile devices exclusively for job searches. Texting is also more accessible for job seekers who don’t have unlimited data plans or who do not have a smart phone, making your application process more accessible to a broader population.

Texting Builds Dialogue: The nature of conversation is constantly evolving. That means candidates are becoming increasingly open to beginning conversations via text.   

Use Cases for Text Recruitment  

There are as many ways to integrate texting into your recruiting process as there are topics to communicate about. Below, we cover some of the best use cases for text recruitment. 

Automating Candidate Reengagement 

Many organisations already have a large database of candidates in their ATS. Sending automated text messages is an extremely effective way to reach out to those contacts at scale to rapidly generate interest in new positions. You can also use automation to reach out to previous employees, if they have opted-in for texting. To gain that opt in, you could ask for consent as part of the off-boarding process for departing employees. 

Automated Updates  

Sending automated texts to candidates to confirm that their job application has been received and is under review can be a great way to keep them engaged in the process. What’s more, you can set up automated messages that are triggered at each phase of the hiring process to keep candidates up to date with their status. This makes the recruiting process feel more personal and less like their application was sent down a black hole. 

Automated Scheduling 

Interview coordination is ideally suited to texting. Your organisation can send text links for candidate self-scheduling to streamline interviews.  

Enhanced Screening Capabilities 

When handling a high volume of applicants, it can be difficult for recruiters to respond quickly and individually to each candidate. Using texts, you can qualify applicants faster using response templates and automated screening questions. Recruitment texting platforms can be programmed to send back follow up questions, job application links, or other content based on candidate responses. 

This exchange is an example of not just interview scheduling, but also actual interviewing over text. At PeopleScout, we have seen client’s receive an 85% response rate for this type of question and answer exchange, which is higher than other communication channels. 

Better Interview Completion Rate  

Recruiters know that coordinating with the candidate is only half the hiring battle. Recruiting teams can use texts to send automated interview reminders to hiring managers and colleagues, so nothing slips through the cracks. Fewer missed or reschedule interviews means a shorter time to hire. 

Field Recruiting 

Retail, hospitality and other employers with large physical footprints can also utilise text short codes to capitalise on walk-in applicants. Signage placed on doors, at the register, or elsewhere connects job seekers directly to the online job application forms and minimises distractions for managers in the field.  

SMS short codes are five to six-digit numbers that are often paired with keywords for use in text recruiting (e.g. ‘Text JOBS to 123456’). You can utilise them on signage at job events to maximise ROI.  

Best Practices for Text Recruitment  

While mobile phones and texting have become ubiquitous tools in everyday life, it is important to realise that communication preferences vary from individual to individual. It is also critical to recognise that the attributes that makes texting such a powerful recruiting tool – that’s it is direct, convenient and personal – are the same things that make observing best practices so important. 

Secure Permission from Candidates 

Text messages are governed by different laws and standards than email. Employers in the U.S. will want to consider how the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), or similar laws such as the European Union regulations regarding electronic communications, namely the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), apply to different types of recruitment texting activity. Talent leaders should consult their legal counsel and get comfortable with the ins and outs of the TCPA when formulating a text recruiting strategy and all related policies.   

Before you text candidates, you must first obtain express consent from the candidate and it must be easy for them to opt-out of communications. As a starting point, review your organisation’s website and application process and add simple, clear language stating that phone numbers may be used to message applicants. The notice should be placed near the phone number entry field, rather than buried in lengthy terms of service statement and privacy policy should also be updated.  

Consider Compliance Requirements 

Even if your organisation does not have a text recruitment platform, chances are that some recruiters are using personal devices to communicate with candidates via text. This may produce positive results, but places you at greater compliance risk because there is no centralised record of communications. Using personal devices, or even dedicated company devices, also makes it difficult to exercise effective oversight to ensure that organisational guidelines are followed. 

Text messaging activity is increasingly likely to be included in compliance audits, so make sure your bases are covered. Follow all of the same protocols – business and legal – that you would in writing, email or telephone conversations. 

Define Messaging Guidelines for Recruiters 

Texting should be professional and consistent with your employer brand, just like any other type of communication. So, it’s helpful to provide high-level guidelines to your recruiting team to ensure that everyone is on the same page about internal text messaging practices. 

Communicate Clearly with Candidates 

The best text outreach messages get straight to the point. In any initial conversations, the recruiter should answer a few key questions candidates may have to get the best possible response: 

Who are you and why you are reaching out? 
 

What are the next steps? 
 

Setting context and expectations up front maximises engagement. What’s more, these questions can be set up as automated responses, so recruiters may only have to step in once the initial screening questions have been asked and answered.  

Timing is Everything  

Text only during the workday, from 8 a.m. at the candidate’s local time to 5 or 6 p.m. Texting a candidate during off-hours, may lead them to do the same and set an expectation of a response from your team. If job seekers do reach out on weekends or evenings and you do not want your recruiters to engage, you can steer their communications back to the normal business hours. For example, if you receive a text on Saturday, you might set up an automated response that you will follow up first thing Monday. 

Texting is Not Always Appropriate  

Some aspects of the recruiting process require a more personal touch than others. While many consider messaging “personal” and “immediate,” you may want to deliver important information (ex. “you didn’t get the job”) or discuss sensitive topics like salary using other means such as a phone call or email depending on the situation. 

Closing Thoughts  

Automation of the recruiting process is where the candidate experience is headed. As a result, it is going to free up time for your recruiters and allow them to seamlessly connect one-on-one with candidates and holding meaningful conversations.  

Texting has become such a big large part of modern life that embracing it can make your organisation an employer of choice to top candidates in your industry.   

Staying COVID-Safe: Are You Ready to be a Health Business?

Posted on by akessler

This week in the UK, many businesses are considering how to safely return their employees to construction sites, field work and offices in larger numbers. Schools, nurseries and—dare we hope—shops, bars and restaurants may follow in June and July.

What does your workplace look like today? Is it an empty office or a packed manufacturing facility? Wherever your employees and colleagues are, their health and safety have never been more important.

Post-pandemic, the vigilance around employee care will move from wellness to health. I don’t want to downplay a strong wellbeing policy, and it’s cool to have a yoga studio, but it’s essential to provide protection from harm. Government guidelines will likely mean it’s not a matter of choice, but it’s not legislation alone that will drive this cultural change. 

Some new examples of business responses are highlighted in a recent article from the BBC, from onsite medical teams to implementing temperature checks for employees and customers.

“We used to say every business will be a digital business. But today we say every business will be a health business.”

Gianfranco Casati, Chief Executive for Growth markets, Accenture

Businesses with high-risk environments have recognised the importance of keeping employees safe and healthy for a long time. I worked with an offshore drilling company who set ‘Safety’ as a cultural objective for all employees. It’s  sound reasoning—a payroll clerk doing their job with unerring accuracy gives someone on the drilling platform one less distraction on the job.

So, how does this impact recruitment and talent acquisition?

Candidate Experience 

In your communications plan, information on health and wellbeing should be mandatory information, not just positioned as a benefit. Recruiters and interviewers must demonstrate higher levels of responsibility and care to candidates, including guidance on safely accessing your sites.

Technology 

Implementing virtual hiring solutions can help to protect your employees and candidates by eliminating face-to-face interactions while allowing you to continue moving forward with your recruiting needs.

Employer Brand 

In late 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, prospective employees who wanted to understand a company’s culture and values asked their interviewers how they and their colleagues were treated, and how well they were cared for.

In a way, that shouldn’t feel new. People and culture are most companies’ greatest assets. Leading organisations recognise this and demonstrate it to their employees and candidates. Protecting your people must be more serious now, but it’s likely always been a priority.  

Haven’t you always been a health business?