Why an Engineering Employer Brand is Crucial to Recruiting Tech Talent

Recruiting technical candidates is its own beast. Engaging them takes a tailored approached, and with more thoughtless recruiters dulling the impact of their outreach with mass messages cut from the same cloth, you’re likely better off not emailing candidates unless you’re some sort of of engineer at the company.

A good employer brand has frequently been linked to better engagement, happiness, and retention. Portraying the team as true-to-life as possible attracts the types of people you want and likewise they want to work for you.

The engineer angle is one aspect of the employer brand most recruiters forget to focus on, and with tech talent in high demand, companies should be investing time in standing out from others. Here’s why.

4 Recruiting Strategies That Don't Work and How to Fix Them

There's nothing wrong with trying to spice up your hiring by testing out unconventional recruiting methods, but the wild and outlandish could be enough to go two ways: You could scare off great talent, or attract the masses of unwanted, unfit candidates. 

Are you using any of these techniques to find and engage people? You may have to reevaluate the team's approach.

6 Ways to Prep Your Team for the Post-Screening Interview

The in-person interview is a relatively nerve-racking, brief way for candidates and employers to get to know each other. Assessing good work and culture fit in the span of a few hours takes a keen, organized approach.

Round one, done. Now the rest of the team is tapping in to assist in round two. Use these six interviewing tactics for a more effective, speedy hiring process.

Here's How Measuring Time To Hire Is Hurting Your Recruiting

In recruiting, being good at your job has traditionally been broken down into three key metrics – how much you’re spending to find people, how long it takes to fill a position, and how well an employee performs in the role.

Open roles equate to a team running at less than full speed, hurting the company’s goals and culture in the long run. Who wants to continually attempt to do more with less resources? Building a pipeline of talent is a timeless, common challenge even for the most skillful hiring teams. Reducing how long it takes to get someone from the other end of the interviewing table into a seat in the office has been idealized as the key hiring metric to boast. The number of people a team hires in a quarter overshadows what happens after the fact. Are these people actually fit for the company? Now? In a month? How about next year?

Evaluate how your team defines success to avoid these common (and costly) hiring gaffes.

Evaluating Workplace Diversity is More Than a Numbers Game

Take a look in the mirror lately?

New hiring trends and initiatives have quickly emerged in the past five years – using tools and data to drive recruiting, catering to the ever-enigmatic Generation Y (endearingly named Millennials), and improving workplace diversity.

In the past year, some of the country’s largest tech companies released their diversity reports – many of them boasting a “largely white and male” workforce. What’s to say for other industries?

The immediate reaction for hiring teams may be to ramp up their own diversity initiatives, expanding their talent pool requirements, modifying job descriptions, and fine-tuning their employer brand to attract a wider set of candidates.

On the pie chart of a company’s makeup, it’s not just about getting an even split. If your team is still wary on spending extra resources to create a more diverse identity, read on.

The Recruiter's Checklist: 5 Questions to Ask Before Hitting Send

Hammering out dozens of emails to candidates every day is no easy feat, so finding a rhythm and flow that works is comparable to discovering a gem.

Like most talent pros who make the extra effort to test out a variety of outreach styles, you hold on to what works. There are likely at least two templates you alternate for each role. You’ve got go-to phrases you plug every few lines or so. There’s a honed conciseness that works better with certain candidates. Alternatively, storytelling connects more with others.

No matter what you’re changing out to improve open and response rates, there comes a time when your outreach hits a plateau and your team breaches writer’s block. Hitting refresh on the inbox yields squat, talent pools start looking bone dry, the office sees less interview action. Sound familiar?

Summer’s edge (now) could be the right time to revamp your candidate outreach techniques. Use this checklist to measure what’s working and what’s not working.

6 Steps for a Speedy, Successful Sourcing Session

You’ve done it all to get ready for the upcoming hiring season, and despite all the prep work, no to-do list in the world could’ve braced you for all the other tasks and projects that somehow squeezed their way onto your plate. Now you’re stuck with a zillion open roles and a less than impressive pipeline, and somehow, you still have just one pair of hands.

Sound familiar? Your team – sourcers, hiring managers, or not – is just the backup arsenal you need in this battle for the best, the war of talent, as most folks call it. No worries if they’ve never sourced before. Wearing extra hats and stepping outside comfort zones hardly hurt anyone, and a quick sourcing session can help the team get a sense of what to look for in hireable, skilled colleagues.

We recommend trying this six-step formula for the short notice, ad hoc sourcing session that could very well be a recurring (fun) event.

There Is a Bright Side to Employees Quitting, but Here's How to Keep the Team You Have Now

A few weeks back, we teamed up with The Resumator to share ways to make employee turnover work for your team. After pulling data from a recent study we did on when employees are most likely to leave their company, we sneaked to the other side of the fence and came back with strategies for how recruiters can use this to time their outreach and poaching, and how to use this to keep their current team.

Even if you didn’t catch the webinar, anyone in hiring understands turnover is all part of game, but you’ll rarely meet someone who looks forward to the day a talented employee leaves the company. Hiring someone with the mindset they’re eventually going to leave distorts the way you view their employment and your management. We’ll share four reasons employees quitting can work to your advantage, but we’ll also share four ways to turn these into applicable benefits now.

4 Ways Small Companies Can Stand Out to College Students

If you’re recruiting for a company most people have never heard of, there’s a 90% chance you’re itching to tell me the handy elevator pitch you crafted day one on the job.

“So what do you do?” is a question small org recruiters hear often; gaining momentum on a recognized employer brand like Zappos or Airbnb takes a long time and it’s easy to be outshine by the better known company.

This time of year is ripe with job fairs and college students who want to step foot in their first role. You’re competing with the big dogs. Here’s how to stand out.

Here's Why Candidates Are Failing Your Interviews

Is your interview process broken?

The talent gap has been long cited as one of the biggest reasons companies are left with open roles. Getting a candidate in the door after much screening and vetting is no deed to go unrecognized, but neglecting your company’s interviewing process could mean serious hiring hitches.

Here are five common interviewing errors companies make when looking for the right candidate. It’s not them – it could very well be you.

Quick Tips for Building an Effective Phone Screening Process

Sourcing candidates to create a substantial top of the funnel is one of the biggest challenges in the talent hunt. This is where most people fall off – having a long list of candidates becomes a good and bad thing. Without the right resources, recruiters can fall behind in reaching out to, following up with, and filtering through the right and wrong people.

One way to alleviate the candidate drop-off is to create a quicker interviewing process. Whether or not your company is in an active hiring mode, recruiters may often find themselves doing a multitude of screenings every day. A good phone screening communicates what the company and role is about, and gives a candidate an idea of what the culture is like since it’s the first point of real interaction between the candidate and the org.

Use these techniques to bustle through your candidate funnel.

#InTheLineOfHire: How to Make Employee Turnover Work for Your Company

Remember when we shared a study on when employees are most likely to move?

We answered the “Now what?” in How Recruiters Can Use Turnover to Their Hiring Advantage, our webinar with The Resumator’s Justin Keller.

Missed the live event? Here’s the quick version.

Believe It or Not, There's a Bright Side to Employee Turnover

Building your company's dream team is a tug of war. 

Talented people and employers have been in a perpetual conversation to find a workable middle ground – one that meets candidates' expectations about the role and the company's needs to reach its goals.  

Bridging the gap between what job seekers want and what managers are able to offer is one item on a laundry list of recruiters' biggest challenges. Shifts in employees' behaviors and preferences can be seen in how frequently people are moving from job to job. There were 5.1 million job openings in February in the U.S. alone – that's the highest its been since January 2001. Frequent employee turnover becomes an inbred, expected element of the hiring process.

The good news? More employers are learning how to keep up with evolving working and hiring trends. We refuse to spoil what's to come in How Recruiters Can Use Turnover to Their Hiring Advantage, our joint webinar with the folks at The Resumator. But we did get a chance to speak with co-host and marketing director, Justin Keller, to understand why employees are quitting and to hash out potential solutions to the underlying, "Well, so what?"

Here's what he had to say.

How to Hire Your Future Workforce

The ability to access people is becoming as important as keeping them.

With everchanging candidate demands, the fraying relationship between employees and employers makes it even more challenging to build a sustainable work model.

What's to come for the future of work? Entelo joined the stage with Deloitte, GLG, BrightRoll, and Bloomberg at the Milken Institute's Global Conference to find out. Here’s what we learned.

Announcing the Winners of the World's Greatest Sourcer Competition

It’s over – the World’s Greatest Sourcer Competition is finally complete!

After much tallying, reading, and rereading more than 700 entries from hiring pros worldwide, we’re excited to announce this year’s winners, Michael Stanley and Ralitsa Burneva.