How Curiosity Found Your Next Sales Hire

Past the impressive resume and sales numbers, breaking through the interview to tell the difference between a candidate good at selling themselves and a candidate who’ll bring repeated success can be a shot in the dark.

Why You Haven't Yet Found the Best Person for the Job

The push for workplace diversity is no new tale. It's not a race or a numbers game, either.

But defining your hiring strategy as finding the best person for the job? Ashley Doyal says you're missing the point.

The Two-Step Networking Primer to Replace Your Cold Outreach

Creating a plan for going out on the networking field is tough, yet doable. For some recruiters, however, the networking portion itself doesn’t always come as second nature. 

To put candidates at ease to engage with them means emitting that same calm and cool. Do that, and you’ve already taken care of half of the recruiting work. Here’s how.

Recruiters, Here’s How to Incentivize Your Hiring Process

Talent pros are familiar with the notorious roadblock between recruiters and hiring managers. At its center is the push and pull between hiring the best people for a team and understanding the reality of available talent pools. 

The candidate handoff from hiring manager to recruiter has been reduced to simply creating a list of open reqs and a list of potential candidates. The result? An unnecessary delay in hiring people. 

Calibrating your recruiters and managers doesn’t have to feel like a one-sided battle. Try these on for size.

Quantifying the Candidate Experience

Any talent pro who’s been in the space for some time has heard the perpetual push for creating a better candidate experience. 

To start, a recruiter’s warm, engaging outreach to a candidate, an efficient interviewing process, an informative onboarding process have all been cited as quick fixes hiring teams can make to improve the candidate experience. Each interaction with someone at the company builds a first impression – how the team communicates with each other, how the team prioritizes hiring and developing relationships with people. 

Measuring candidate experience, however, can be a bit of a grey area for recruiters. How can teams evaluate experience in the hiring process? Here are four questions to consider. 

3 Fundamental Tools for Successful Tech Recruiting

Making the successful transition into a tech recruiter doesn't require a former life as an engineer or developer. The search for tech talent is one of the industry's most difficult challenges to crack, and hiring pros might even equate finding this niche market to learning another language.

If you're looking to take on the mission of hiring one of the most in-demand, tough-to-find talent pools, consider these starting points. 

15 Recruiting Techniques to Hire Like Box

Hiring over a thousand people is no easy feat, but the folks at Box managed to do it.

Particularly, Kenny Mendes and his 20-person hiring team made the moves to bring the Los Altos cloud storage company from 40 to over 1,200 in a time when enterprise software was "really unsexy". 

Fast forward to 2015, Box is a publicly traded company with nearly 1,600 employees, and the cloud is a virtual seventh heaven.

Missed our webinar with Kenny on how to hire a recruiting team? We took note of Box's sourcing tactics, and the metrics and tools they used to build one of the top hiring orgs of all time.

Box's Kenny Mendes Shares Hiring Tactics to Successfully Grow Your Team

When Kenny started out as a recruiter on the Box team in 2009, his ATS was a plastic file box.

Six years later, Box is a publicly traded company boasting over 1,500 people. How'd they get there?

How to Scale Your Team Like Google and Facebook

Talent pros are no strangers to the challenges of building a pipeline of qualified candidates. Diversity, company culture, budget, and retention make up just the tip of the iceberg. Leading a whole hiring team is a different ballgame, and anyone in the space knows hiring and managing is more of an art than a juggling act. Marissa Huang is a paragon for both. 

As Thumbtack's director of talent and first in-house recruiter, Marissa made over 80 hires in a little over a year. At Facebook, she led recruiting for all of Instagram. She was also ranked in the top 3 percentile of sourcers during her time at Google. These days, she's heading talent at Figma, ready to do it all over again. What's the secret?  

Marissa recently visited the Entelo office for an upcoming episode of Hiring On All Cylinders (tune in here!) armed with a solid hiring playbook. So we took notes. Here's what she had to say.

Here's Why Your Talent Funnel is All Filler, No Killer

The talent gap is a scary place on the map hiring pros use to hunt down candidates. 

If that’s not enough of a cringeworthy metaphor, this iCIMS stat should shake you up: 80% of recruiters think they have a high understanding of the jobs they’re recruiting for. Here’s how 61% of hiring managers responded: “Nope!”  

The disjointed recruiter-manager relationship has notoriously been cited as one of the causes for bottleneck in the hiring process. Managers spend most of their time reviewing resumes. Time-to-hire is a relatively squishy metric, but if a majority of the hiring process is spent reviewing resumes, teams need to reevaluate the quality of their candidate pools. 

Recruiters quickly pick up the ability to sift through candidates, but without reviewing the remaining candidates with hiring managers, there’s a higher chance recruiters will need to hit Restart on the search. Evaluation can’t be a one-sided process.   

Here’s a start: Apply these four pre-hiring assessment techniques to train your team to have a better eye for the types of people the company wants to hire. 

4 Skills Talent Pros Need to Recruit and Keep Their Best People

By now, you’ve probably heard the broken record illustrating the Venn diagram of recruitment, hiring, marketing and sales, and whether you think it’s overplayed or revolutionary, or both, the model reigns true and relevant to any modern talent pro.

Approach hiring like a pro in the space you’re hiring for makes a difference in who you find and how you recruit and engage people. This skills list we came up with is practical, manageable, and timeless. Any recruiting tool can speed up the hunt, but what are you doing after you’ve honed in on who you could hire?

Consider this a running start.

Quick Fixes to Make to Your Retention Strategy

Getting people excited about their role with a company starts long before the first day in the office. Someone who isn’t riled up about your company’s mission, product, and people won’t end up working with the team.

When you do land a candidate who accepts an offer, it means you’ve found someone who believes in what the team is creating, wants to be a part of it, and has a general perception of the workplace environment. The moment the employer brand disconnects from the employee experience is the moment people become disinterested in what the company is working on, and the domino effect ultimately means these people produce lower quality work and will likely be searching for new opportunities in due time. 

One way to maintain a positive employer brand is through your onboarding program, but unfortunately, properly training people during the first few weeks on the job is one of the most overlooked, forgotten stages of the hiring process. 

Use these techniques to hold on to people for the long run.

Can Hiring Managers Resolve the Most Overlooked Retention Strategy?

After much searching and sifting, you did it – you made a hire. Filling an open role may very well be the most satisfying experiences of recruiting, but slowing down your hiring efforts here could be the difference between a candidate staying or quitting several months later. 

The way an employee transitions into a new org impacts how quickly they ramp up and integrate with their team, progress in the role, and fit in and contribute to the company's culture. Ultimately, it's crucial for a company's first impression on an employee to be its best impression, a relatively accurate representation of what's expected of each person paired with clear ways for reaching those goals. 

Your engagement strategy kicks into effect from an employee's first day on the job. Some talent pros might even argue it starts from a candidate's first interview with the team. In any case, making a hire lightens the load on the talent funnel, but it also marks the beginning of your retention strategy.

Set up the team for a successful year ahead (and longer!) with appropriate, thorough training, and companies can decrease employee turnover by 30%. Don't believe it? We asked iCIMS' Brendan Cyrus to share the details as we count down the days to our upcoming webinar, Key Components for Building a Successful Onboarding Program. Read on. 

President of the Sourcing Institute Reveals Boolean’s Biggest Problem

Being good at building search strings doesn’t make you good at finding talent.

The key to uncovering candidates can’t be found in just any set of carefully pieced together words and punctuation marks. If your hunt for talent is a one way street – plug in search strings, find candidates, repeat – you’re overlooking a significant number of qualified people.

Cue Shally Steckerl, President of The Sourcing Institute, who tells all about common recruiter mistakes using the foundational Boolean search method. Are you guilty? Read on for a teaser of what's to come in our upcoming webinar with The Sourcing Institute, The Recruiter's Guide to Boolean Basics and Natural Language Searches.

4 Underrated Traits of Top Hiring Teams

To build out the company’s A-team, you need to start with a strong foundation of skilled recruiters. Hiring your first employees is a big step for the company. Hiring your 100th employee is a big step for the company, too.

At either stage, the org’s hiring needs and strategies are completely different, and any setbacks in your recruiting (and recruiters, for that matter) triggers a stifling domino effect on your talent goals. All that planning and preparing won’t help the company find people if you’re not properly equipped with a robust, smart hiring team.

Keep a lookout for these traits in your next hiring hires.