It’s been three and half years since the Harvard Business Review declared that data scientist was the sexiest job of the 21st century. Since then the need for data scientists has skyrocketed but the supply has not, which puts recruiters in the delightful position of having to compete with more and more recruiters for a dwindling supply of talent.
How can you push diversity efforts through your company without the authority to make the necessary changes? What does it take to turn a passive supporter of diversity efforts into an active participant and champion? Can you get someone to unlearn a biased behavior?
These are some of the tough questions faced by employees who advocate for increased workplace diversity and inclusion. Over 40 members of the Diversity Advocates group, founded by Freada Kapor Klein, gathered at Entelo last Tuesday to share their best practices, frustrations and triumphs taking action with D&I initiatives at their organizations. Ms. Klein is the founder and Board Chair of the Level Playing Field Institute and Partner at the Kapor Center for Social Justice.
This week on Hiring on All Cylinders, Entelo’s Loni Spratt reports back on her European travels, where she met with recruiters and talent teams in London, Amsterdam, Glasgow and Edinburgh. She learned firsthand the challenges facing European talent acquisition teams and how they differ from their North American counterparts, namely in recruiting non-technical candidates.
Interview load balancing is a way of scaling your interview process in a structured way to protect your recruiters, hiring managers and other team members from burnout. The goal is to create a replicable, consistent and sustainable interview process.
Interviews can be really exhausting, and not just for the job candidates. If your interview process relies too heavily on a small, core number of interviewers, it can create points of failure within your hiring, like careless candidate feedback notes or a homogeneous evaluation system. Even worse, bad interviews are toxic for the hiring process, a huge waste of time and energy for everyone involved, and bad for your employer brand. That behooves organizations of every size to ensure that their interview process is optimized with interview load balancing.
So, I've got something I need to tell you. Your organization has an employer brand, whether or not it is being maintained. And, believe it or not, unless you’re turning away dozens of talented, qualified people for every job opening, your organization could probably benefit from a strong employer brand.
Employer brand is the human side of your brand identity. It’s not about your products or your earnings or your logo. It’s about who you (collectively) are and what values your organization represents. Your employer brand will always be intertwined with your company culture. In fact, your employer brand is, in many ways, the public side of your company culture. You can’t really have one without the other.
If you’ve ever planned a wedding, you know every single detail can consume your attention, no matter how small it may be in the grand scheme of things. That’s how hiring can feel. At every step of the process, there is the possibility of errors or mistakes that could prevent people from joining your organization. A typo here, a poorly worded message there. Who knows why candidates chose to drop out of the process or ignore your message? The truth is, most of the time you just won’t know, which is why sourcing is so important.
The Hiring On All Cylinders team was joined this week by Ryan Naylor, the CEO of LocalWork, a Phoenix, Arizona-based job board and career consultancy. Localwork offers a recruitment tech platform that helps organizations recruit better with a culture-based approach to talent acquisition and retention. Working with companies in many blue collar industries such as trucking, manufacturing, order fulfillment, and home health care, Localwork pairs organizations with passionate, motivated job candidates by focusing on shared values such as collaboration, growth, accountability, and success.
It’s official! Entelo is now a Gold Partner in the Oracle PartnerNetwork. This partnership establishes Entelo as a recognized recruiting solution that integrates with the Oracle Talent Management Cloud, providing talent teams with a holistic approach to data-driven hiring.
How many recruiters can say they’ve recruited everyone from rocket scientists to retail store managers and was one of the top contenders in the World’s Greatest Sourcer competition? Not many, that’s for sure, which is why it was such a thrill to have Maisha join this week’s Hiring On All Cylinders.
Hosts Rob Stevenson and Vivek Reddy chatted with Maisha about how much talent acquisition has changed since she first got her start over 15 years ago, which means far less cold calling and sorting paper resumes, and far more digital sourcing wizardry. Maisha also took time so share why her new gig in Strategic Talent Sourcing and Engagement at GitHub has been such a nice change of pace. But that’s not all.
The war for talent is so often associated with finding tech candidates (engineering/product/design talent) that organizations frequently forget many of the same hiring complexities apply to finding great salespeople. At any growing company, building out a strong sales team is central to bridging the gap between the product you’ve built and the people who need it – bringing in revenue.
Onboarding salespeople can take time, so it’s important to take a lot of care in your processes for hiring them. Understanding the product, knowing how to build great champions and decision makers, and mastering the environment they’re selling in can take anywhere between three months to a year. Because of this, the hiring risks are much higher – any success takes time to transpire.
How can you minimize risk and find the best salespeople for your organization? I recommend these six questions to help you identify strong candidates.
Beware of hiring people cut from the same cloth as your team – it could work against what you’re striving to build.
To start, let’s define company culture – an organization’s “genetic code”, an understanding of the overall vision, mission, and values demonstrated by employees’ actions and attitudes. Finding people who embody your company’s standards and principles can be a challenge, but lock in a few, key individuals, and it may seem like you have the blueprint to building a model team. That’s exactly the problem.
Referral programs are the single best way to net quality hires in less time. Referrals are more likely to be hired than non-referral candidates, complete onboarding more quickly, have higher retention rates, and generate more profit than non-referral hires. You may already have a referral program, but a few tweaks here and there could make all the difference. Here are five essential steps to creating (or refreshing) a referral program.
It’s the million dollar question: What do candidates really want out their jobs? Why? Because understanding what candidates look for in a role allows you to anticipate how to set yourself apart from other companies and what makes people excited to stick around long-term with your team.
Spoiler alert: According to Indeed, the major job criteria that matter to candidates are compensation, location, and flexibility. In other words, if you aren’t offering competitive rewards package, a manageable commute, and flexible work remote options, you might be in for a tough search. In fact, flexibility is now the third most important factor to workers, with 51 percent of those polled attracted to their job because of it, so make sure you’re keeping your policies up to date.
But that’s not all. When it comes to your hiring process, you’re also being evaluated by your candidates.
Effective writing is an underrated aspect of recruiting. We constantly discuss the ins and outs of finding talent, but the outcomes of your outreach will depend in large part on your ability to communicate with candidates. All the strategic sourcing in the world won’t get candidates to respond to badly written, poorly conceived emails.
I’ll start with a very obvious statement: Recruiting top engineers, even at the college level, has become a massive challenge. What might be a little more surprising is how the top 10% of innovative companies are adapting to this new reality. The tried and true methods of campus recruiting, which haven’t changed much in 30 years, are being turned on their head with the advent of technology.
