Category: Recruitment

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10 Tips for Designing a Better Hiring Process

Summary

  • The hiring process is an employer’s first chance to make a good impression. It needs to be seamless to attract the best candidates.
  • 86% of HR professionals say that recruitment is becoming more like marketing. And in today’s competitive labor market, it’s easy to see why.
  • Applicant experience is crucial for keeping top candidates engaged and maintaining a good employer brand. Streamlining recruitment using technology can transform a good hiring experience into a great one.

In a tight labor market, hiring can make or break your chances of capturing quality new hires. It is often the first touchpoint between a company and potential new employees, and an excellent first impression is everything. A clunky approach to hiring will not only slow things down but also deter quality people from applying.

If you’re looking to attract qualified candidates fast while keeping things efficient, it might be time to rethink the hiring process. In this post, we’ll dive into 10 practical tips to improve your recruitment strategy.

1. Focus on setting clear hiring goals.

All of your recruitment initiatives will stem from your hiring goals. They act as your jumping point; if you’re unclear about these, you risk wasting resources and missing out on filling the company’s staffing needs. 

When determining what your hiring efforts should aim for, here are questions you need to ask yourself:

  • What are the staffing gaps, operational needs, or business needs you must address? Is it filling roles for a new business location, or is it to replace team members who left? 
  • What are the specific roles needed to fill the gap? 
  • What are the characteristics of an ideal candidate? 
  • What are the specific skills or experience candidates must have? 
  • What soft skills must they possess? Consider your company culture and define what characteristics would make a hire fit to work with the team. 
  • How fast should you be able to hire?

Talent acquisition requires significant effort, and you should focus your energy on defining hiring goals that drive business results.

2. Create clear job ads. 

“What’s in it for me?” – This is the question your job descriptions should answer for potential candidates. 

Try to frame your job listings through the applicant’s POV. First, the listing should cover the basics of the job role, which includes what’s expected in terms of tasks and responsibilities. Second, it should paint a picture of how an ideal candidate would fit in the organization, which can allude to the type of working environment you offer. 

Let’s discuss wording. Avoid overly technical jargon and internal corporate speak. Potential candidates won’t care much for those. Instead, keep your wording concise and direct and language neutral.

Here are crucial elements that your job descriptions should cover:

  • Job title
  • Duties and responsibilities
  • Required skills, competencies, and qualifications 
  • Preferred qualifications or nice-to-haves
  • Working location
  • Benefits
  • Salary range

In addition to the basics, you can include more information about the team they will be part of and brief details about the organization. 

Writing job descriptions can be time-consuming. We’ve curated a list of job description templates to give you a headstart. Feel free to download them and customize them according to your specific requirements. 

3. Be smart with advertising open positions. 

Generally, hiring teams utilize job boards and social media sites like LinkedIn to reach as many candidates as possible. While those are great, there are other opportunities to get the word out. 

Consider placing job postings in your place of business. Of course, no one has time to read a job description if they are just passing by your cafe or retail store, so why not simply print out a QR code that leads to the details of your job opening?  

Workforce.com’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS) lets you print customized QR codes that link to online job applications. Any interested applicant can simply scan the code and apply straight from their mobile devices, and you will be alerted when submissions come in. 

But before you go broadcasting an open position to the public, think about the roles you’re trying to fill. Consider hiring from within to reduce the time and resources it takes to onboard a new employee.

What about referrals? Nothing beats word-of-mouth advertising. Your current employees can be your best ambassadors since they have first-hand experience. They can share insight into company culture far better than any job posting you publish.

4. Get serious about employer branding.

Better branding attracts better candidates. In fact, 86% of HR professionals agree that recruitment is becoming more like marketing, according to a study. And with today’s challenging labor market, it’s easy to see why. Like marketing, you need to understand your target audience—your ideal candidates—and find ways to stand out.  

To get leadership on board, here’s a compelling stat: a strong employer brand can reduce the cost-per-hire by up to 50%. Plus, half of job seekers won’t consider working for a company with a bad reputation. In short, employer branding isn’t just nice to have; it’s crucial for staying competitive. 

Start by improving the hiring experience. Use data to track candidate experience and satisfaction, communication frequency, and key metrics like time-to-hire. Streamlining these processes with applicant tracking technology enhances efficiency and leaves a positive impression on candidates. Remember, every interaction counts, and a smooth hiring process can make all the difference. 

Keep in mind that negative stories spread fast these days, whether it’s a poor recruitment experience or a toxic work environment. With social media and online forums, you don’t want to be trending for the wrong reasons.

So, how do you build a strong employer brand? It starts with your core: a healthy company culture. Today’s candidates can spot inauthenticity a mile away, so your efforts need to be genuine. Once you establish strong values, they’ll naturally shape how you hire and manage talent on a daily basis.

5. Use technology to streamline the process.

There’s a lot of work that goes into hiring. Without the right tools to help you stay organized, you run the risk of mishandling important information, wasting time, and hiring the wrong people. Consider using an HR platform or an applicant tracking system (ATS) to streamline your hiring process. 

Workforce.com is a prime example of one such system. Its HR suite significantly reduces time spent sifting through resumes and onboarding new hires. Here’s how it improves your recruitment efforts: 

  • It helps you get more applicants. Every time you create a new job posting, you can generate a QR code associated with the listing and post it in your business to make access to applications easier. Workforce.com also collates all previous applications and the positions a person is interested in. When you post new job listings that match a previous applicant’s interests, the system notifies this talent pool, automatically getting you more traction from the moment you post the new job.
  • It helps you with the selection process and pre-qualifies applicants quickly by setting up role-specific questions about availability, experience, and requirements. This enables you to screen candidates before scheduling interviews, weeding out those who don’t meet your criteria upfront.
  • It reduces data reentry by using one user profile across hiring, HR, and payroll. Since the whole employee lifecycle is synced in Workfore.com, applicant information from the hiring stage is automatically brought into a new hire’s payroll and HR profile. This means that once someone fills out an application, they have essentially already filled out about 80% of their employee profile. If you decide to hire them, all of this information is used—there’s no need to create multiple profiles with repeat information. 
  • It helps you onboard new hires right away. Within minutes, your new hires can fill out onboarding forms, provide their personal information, and submit their W-4s and I-9s. No lengthy paperwork and manual entry is needed.
  • It helps you track recruitment metrics. It gives you an overview of hiring progress, spotting delays, and identifying roadblocks. Plus, it covers all your locations, so you can see who needs extra recruitment support.

An ATS is great for hiring, but one that’s housed in the same HR system as onboarding and payroll is a game-changer and can save a significant amount of time. It streamlines the entire journey—from recruitment to onboarding to that first paycheck. 

6. Eliminate unconscious bias.

We’re human, and we’re naturally wired to have biases. However, if these biases are left unchecked during the hiring process, they can lead to poor decisions. Take steps to eliminate anything clouding your judgment from focusing on what a candidate truly offers. 

Reduce unconscious bias by focusing solely on an applicant’s technical skill sets instead of their demographic details such as gender, race, and age. Furthermore, you can view job applications with redacted names or personal information so their skills and experiences are front and center.

7. Improve how you interview. 

The interview stage is crucial for applicants and the company to get to know each other better. It’s an opportunity to assess technical skills and values, making it the ideal time to evaluate cultural fit alongside qualifications. And you do that by asking the right questions. 

Whether you utilize structured questions or free-flowing discussions is your prerogative. But regardless of what route you choose, make sure that it helps you evaluate applicants objectively.

Structured interview questions help you gauge how applicants fare against each other. This interview style makes it easy to compare and judge applicants based on their answers to a series of important and relevant questions.

On the other hand, a less structured approach can better reveal a person’s values, personality, and soft skills, helping you assess their cultural fit. Unstructured interviews can also make applicants feel more comfortable during interviews. 

Ultimately, the goal is to find the best fit for the role. Whether you prefer a structured or flexible interview style or a mix of both, ensure it leads to a fair and informed hiring decision.

8. Understand who you’re hiring. 

Not all hiring processes are the same, especially when it comes to salaried versus hourly roles. Your recruitment approach should adapt to each, from sourcing, screening, onboarding, and compliance. 

For instance, recruiting a line cook for one of your restaurants is a much different process than hiring a finance manager for an insurance agency. Hourly roles often require a faster and leaner process to meet urgent staffing needs. Having a system that lets candidates apply easily and keeps unnecessary data and timelines to a minimum is ideal.

In contrast, hiring for salaried positions usually involves multiple interview stages and a more thorough vetting process. For these hires, it’s crucial to have a comprehensive applicant tracking system that monitors each stage efficiently and keeps candidates engaged throughout the process.

Ultimately, hiring for hourly positions prioritizes speed, volume, and efficiency, while salaried roles focus on depth, fit, and long-term alignment. Understanding these nuances allows you to tailor your hiring processes and shapes how you manage time tracking, shift scheduling, and payroll for each type of hire.

9. Always communicate with applicants.

You don’t want to be labeled as an employer who ghosts applicants, do you? 

While you will undoubtedly need to prioritize some applicants over others, you should never leave unqualified candidates hanging. Keep candidates informed every step of the way —from confirming their application to updating them on the next steps, whether they qualify for an offer or not.  

Additionally, offer a channel for applicants to reach out when they want to follow up or ask a question. This will help them feel at ease and keep strong candidates engaged in the process.

10. Regularly evaluate your hiring process.

As new technologies and trends emerge, your hiring process can quickly become outdated. Conduct regular assessments of your hiring process and practices. Identify what works, spot areas for improvement, and tackle any roadblocks. A flexible, evolving hiring process keeps you aligned with market shifts, maintains efficiency, and positions you to attract top talent.

Fill roles faster and simplify your recruitment process with applicant tracking software

Workforce.com hiring app

Hiring hourly employees? Workforce.com’s online hiring system can help you find the best talent to fill your staffing needs.

Workforce.com is end-to-end HR, scheduling, and payroll software for hourly teams.

The cloud-based platform features an applicant tracking system that streamlines hiring—from posting job advertisements to pre-qualifying candidates, interviewing them, and eventually onboarding them—all without lengthy paperwork or double entry.

Discover how Workforce.com can help you with hiring and more. Book a demo today. 

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Slow rehiring of child care workers may stymie employers’ return to workplace plans

child care

Employers are navigating a variety of issues as employees gradually return to a more permanent physical workplace.

According to a new survey by Aon, 52 percent of employers said employees will return onsite in the third quarter, and 81 percent of those organizations already have a tentative date in mind. A May 2021 survey by law firm Littler, however, reveals a disparity in employers’ plans and employees’ preferences when it comes to hybrid work models and returning to physical workplaces.

There are several reasons employees may hesitate returning to the workplace. Chief among them for parents of young children, returning to work means finding quality, affordable child care.

Reestablishing pre-pandemic connections to daycare facilities is a challenge for many workers who are remote or unemployed and looking to return to work. The pandemic has crushed many small businesses, and child care centers are no exception, said Lauren Gill, head of people at New York-based child care provider Vivvi, which has 200 employees working on three campuses. Thousands of child care facilities have closed since March 2020, Gill said, and experts say that will have a profound impact on working families, especially women.

“Our challenge as an industry is how to rebuild and provide increased access,” Gill said.

Women bear the brunt of caregiving

The Center for American Progress found that the pandemic led to a 144 percent increase in child care-related work absences from September through November 2020, compared with the same period in 2019. The pandemic also led three in 10 women with children under 18 to temporarily or permanently leave the workforce to become a primary caregiver to children.

“The pandemic exacerbated the issues, resulting in over 2.2 million women leaving the workforce and the average parent spending 27 more hours per week on child care,” Gill said. “This has forced organizations to confront the fact that child care is a universal concern that affects all employees and that employee benefits have inadequately addressed this issue. Inadequate access to quality child care has been a challenge for individual families, for employers and for the U.S. economy for a long time.”

Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, said that child care providers bring invaluable benefits to children and their families every day.

“Our entire economy is dependent upon their labor, yet razor-thin margins and a dearth of public investment mean the workers themselves receive poverty-level wages and few benefits,” Goss Graves said in a statement commemorating National Child Care Provider Appreciation Day in May.

Early childhood education is already a physically and emotionally demanding field, said Kae Bieber, education programs manager at nonprofit ACCA Child Development Center in Annandale, Virginia. The additional workload from health precautions coupled with the stress of working in a field that exposes employees directly to COVID-19 has made it difficult to fill positions.

At the pandemic’s onset ACCA kept its doors open for the children of essential workers, Bieber said. The number of children dropped from over 210 to 40 in the early days of the pandemic.

Struggling now to fill positions

As more parents returned to work and enrollment increased, Bieber said they have struggled to find qualified staff to fill positions vacated by employees who left during the pandemic. Some employees felt pressure to find a less stressful, safer choice for them and their family, so they left, she recalled.

“With the limitations on capacity due to COVID regulations and the need for staff, wait lists for quality child care are increasing,” she said. “Most often, a parent may get the call to return to the office but then still must wait until child care is available. This causes stress on the parents during an already extremely challenging time.”

Kae Bieber, child care
Kae Bieber, education programs manager at the ACCA Child Development Center.

As ACCA — which has an infant-toddler center as well as a preschool building with 12 classrooms — began restaffing its workforce of 65 hourly employees, Bieber found job candidates were hesitant to join the field. Early childhood education previously was seen as a good starting point for someone interested in working with children and education, she said.

“Now a potential candidate must consider the low wage in comparison to the sacrifice they will be making with their lives for themselves and their family,” she said. “We may have 30 responses to one job posting but when a potential candidate sees the reality of the amount of work and exposure in-person, they do not see the value in their work due to the low wage.”

While money may not be everything, Bieber believes that if they were able to offer hazard pay as additional support during the pandemic, ACCA would not have lost as many child care professionals. In a worker’s mind, she said, they could at least feel as if they were being compensated in some way for the exposure they were faced with and bringing to their homes.

“No matter how vested someone’s heart may be, if their ability to provide for their family is struggling and they are now facing exposure to a deadly virus each day, it can be very difficult to rationalize staying in that position.”

Employees move on for safety and pay

Good employees were forced to choose between staying with a profession they loved versus switching to a job with less exposure and often higher wages, she said. The added sanitation measures quadrupled workloads in an already labor-intensive environment. Interaction with children also changed dramatically due to social distancing guidelines.

“Children thrive off of closeness, hugs, smiles, high fives, pats on the back and interacting with each other,” Bieber said. “We lost that, literally overnight. We went from creating high quality learning experiences to supervising social distancing and implementing nonstop sanitation. Our staff began to question if they were doing more harm than good by having children play six feet apart and keep their distance from the children. They had a very difficult time adjusting to the new normal.”

Stagnant wages for caregivers

Though there is a greater appreciation for child care, Gill said many programs are restricted in their ability to boost wages since they are under-enrolled and recovering from months on end collecting little or no tuition.

“We haven’t seen a major shift in wages in the child care industry since the pandemic,” she said.

Gill added that as a sector, they need to think about how to make early childhood education a true career with all of the financial stability, respect and growth opportunities that other careers offer both in the wake of the pandemic and beyond.

“We should never make educators choose between their passion and a comfortable life,” she said. “It’s vital that they become synonymous.”

Entice candidates by prioritizing benefits

There are opportunities to bring stability to the child care industry and its professionals. Only 4 percent of employers offered subsidized child-care centers or programs, according to the Society for Human Resource Management’s 2019 employee benefits survey. There is a huge opportunity to move the needle, Gill said.

child care
Lauren Gill, head of people at child care provider Vivvi.

“Employer partnerships are a path to bringing high-quality care and early learning to more families” while helping employers recruit and retain top talent and increase productivity across the board, Gill said.

As a private employer that has partnered with organizations including the New York Presbyterian Hospital network, Gill said Vivvi built its business model with competitive wages for teachers at its core. “While we haven’t shifted our compensation strategy as a result of the pandemic, we continue to offer full-time, salaried roles and offer a full suite of benefits,” she said.

Some employers are looking at offering employee benefits that give employees options for access to affordable and quality child and elder care options, said Michelle Barrett Falconer, co-chair of the Leaves of Absence and Disability Accommodation Practice Group at Littler Mendelson.

“If an employee has access to affordable, quality child and elder care, the employee may not need to take time off from work using a paid family leave statute to address those caregiving obligations,” Barrett Falconer said. 

Higher wages are not yet a reality for early childhood, Bieber said, although with the Biden administration’s new American Rescue Plan, she sees hope that wages for early childhood workers could begin to increase and meet a living wage for early childhood educators.

“The child care industry desperately needs legislation in place to recognize early childhood education as a valued profession and the message from top to bottom in our society needs to place emphasis on the recognition and need for quality child care,” Bieber said.

Having spent most of her career in education, Gill said that supporting the educational development of future generations is a monumental and vitally important task. Affordable, quality child care can be transformative for working families and make for happier, more productive employees, she said.

“When parents have peace of mind, they can pursue their goals outside of the home and be better, happier parents as a result.”

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Jushi Holdings builds its workforce in the cannabis industry despite pandemic

marijuana, Jushi Holdings, cannabis industry

While many industries have suffered through massive cutbacks in 2020 and were forced to make large-scale layoffs, at least one sector has weathered the economic downturn as hiring trends have blossomed.

According to Marijuana Business Daily’s Annual Marijuana Business Factbook, U.S. medical and adult-use cannabis sales has climbed by nearly 40 percent this year to about $15 billion as industry employment in 2020 will jump by 50 percent over 2019 to almost 300,000 full-time jobs.

To lend perspective to that figure, a story in Forbes points out that the number of cannabis industry jobs is on par with the beverage industry and computer programming. And to add a bit more perspective, cannabis is a highly regulated industry requiring strict compliance measures. Just 11 states have fully legal adult-use markets with four more states adopting laws following the November election.

Evaluating safety and hiring

Despite the industry’s growth, cannabis operators had to take a breath to evaluate their operations as the pandemic swept across the economy. Jushi Holdings Inc. remained operational at the pandemic’s onset, said Executive Vice President of Human Resources Nichole Upshaw, but company leaders assessed what actions needed to be taken.

Being a vertical operation with 450 employees (335 are hourly) in retail, cultivation, processing and manufacturing, there were certain logistical issues they had to address.marijuana, Jushi Holdings, cannabis industry, hiring

As an essential employer, Jushi immediately focused on the safety of their employees, patients and customers.

“We worked together as a team to source cleaning supplies and PPE for all locations and employees,” said Upshaw. Currently Jushi has operations in seven states as well as offices in Denver and Boca Raton, Florida. “We were early to provide N95 masks for our employees and start taking employee temperatures upon arrival to work.”

Prompt communication became key

Communication was immediate and urgent for this frontline employer. They established daily calls and senior management received regular updates to influence important decisions, Upshaw said.

Retail, corporate, and cultivation/manufacturing teams each had their own calls, she added. They also spoke with industry peers and constantly tracked health and employment law guidelines. Jushi also launched “Blazing the Trail,” a quarterly all-hands call where senior executives updated employees on company performance and initiatives.

Upshaw emphasized the importance of both executive and companywide calls. “Members of the legal and HR team each attended weekly industry calls to discuss how we were all addressing the safety of our businesses,” she said. “We attended webinars and read countless published articles to ensure we had the most up-to-date information and response measures in place. We reviewed the CDC website daily and communicated out each update that impacted our locations.”

Communication also was key to balancing employee safety and customer needs, she said.

 Also read: Managing people in the growing cannabis industry

“The best thing you can do in the case of differing perspectives is communicate,” Upshaw said. “Changes that supported the safety of our employees created an environment of understanding. Reminding our employees of the responsibility we have to keep cannabis accessible to our patients and customers during these turbulent times also created an environment of understanding. These are the times when being a great listener is the best service you can provide to customers and your employees.”

Seeking talent from outside the industry

Jushi temporarily tapped the brakes on hiring at the outset of the pandemic, but it’s clear that has changed. A glance at Jushi’s careers site lists dozens of positions, from dispensary store manager and shift supervisor to HR generalist.

Upshaw said that Jushi enlists cannabis executive search and staffing company FlowerHire to assist its hiring. With its burgeoning employment numbers, the cannabis industry presents an opportunity for those who were laid off or looking for a career change to redeploy their skills. Cannabis could greatly benefit from leading professionals outside of the market, according to a release from FlowerHire.

“While we did have about a month when recruiting halted, that period of time didn’t last long,” Upshaw said. “FlowerHire was ready to jump in like a member of the Jushi and (retail locations) BEYOND/HELLO team and be our talent scouts while we focused on keeping our employees safe.” 

Initially there was a lot of instruction to remind employees how important it was to follow safety protocols, she said.

“After months of adjusting to the pandemic, I believe that human behaviors have been forever changed,” she said. “People will continue to join the organization ready to work and adhere to safety standards because they have been doing so since March of 2020.”

Upgrading the onboarding experience

With the influx of new employees lacking a background in the cannabis industry, HR is responsible for onboarding employees with knowledge of what to expect before and after their first day, Upshaw said.

“My desire is to build out a mature pre-boarding, onboarding and training experience that equips every employee for their role at Jushi and BEYOND/HELLO,” she said. “Although we have all adjusted to the new work order, there are many initiatives and projects that have taken a back seat to the main priority of keeping employees safe.”

Jushi has implemented pulse surveys to gather feedback on various topics, she said. During a time when health care is on everyone’s mind, Jushi also increased the level of company contributions to benefit plans.

Adhering to compliance measures

Following governmental guidelines is nothing new to cannabis companies, Upshaw said. At the federal level, marijuana remains classified as a Schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act, while states and local agencies have layers of regulations and policies.

“We are accustomed to operating in highly regulated environments and we have a culture of doing what we can to elevate the reputation of our industry,” Upshaw said. “This opportunity has brought us together and allowed us to continue to reach our unified mission. I am proud of the way we have worked together, have had a bias for action, and have complied with all local, state and federal guidelines.”

Dump manual tracking and avoid costly labor-law penalties. Ensure simplified and automated compliance to federal, state and local labor regulations with Workforce.com’s powerful compliance platform.

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Regulating recruiting amid constant technological innovations

recruiting, hiring, interviewing a candidate

As recruiters adopt advanced technologies in their quest to identify, court and hire candidates, attorneys are looking into the legal and regulatory issues those new tools may bring into play.

Lawyers, recruiting experts and technology vendors say legal teams are examining compliance concerns even as their colleagues in HR and IT evaluate products that leverage artificial intelligence, machine learning and other innovative approaches. Not only are they exploring the ramifications of privacy requirements such as Europe’s GDPR, they’re considering the possible impact of biases that may be inherent in a data set or unwittingly applied by algorithms.

recruiting, hiring, talent acquisition “I think we’re at the beginning of sorting out what all this means, but I think it’s definitely something people are thinking about,” said Jeffrey Bosley, San Francisco-based partner in the labor and employment practice of law firm Davis Wright Tremaine. “It’s a new technology and it’s evolving. Whenever you have a new technology, you do have growing pains and you do have these issues that come up,” he said.

Advanced technologies have gotten much attention recently, particularly as people inside and outside the business world consider the impact AI may have on jobs and livelihoods. At the same time, some well-intentioned efforts have generated media coverage for results that were diametrically opposed to what their developers set out to do.

In 2018, for example, Amazon abandoned an effort to build a machine-learning tool for recruiters after the system proved to be favoring men over women. According to Reuters, the tool downgraded resumes that included the word “women’s” as well as the graduates of two all-women’s colleges.

Also read: Is there room for an ethics code for tech companies?

Sources inside Amazon said the system, which had been under development since 2014, was meant to review resumes so recruiters could spend more time building candidate relationships and actually hiring people. It worked by comparing applicants against patterns found among resumes the company had received over a 10-year period. However, it didn’t account for the dominance of men in the technology workforce. As a result, the system machine-taught itself that male candidates were stronger than females.

Advanced technology “is at an awkward stage where it’s not really intelligent,” said William Tincup, president of the industry website RecruitingDaily.com. While he sees great potential for AI and other tools to streamline the work of recruiters and even address bias in the hiring process, he believes systems are limited in how much they can accomplish.

Why? In a word, people. “What are machines learning from their learning from humans?” Tincup asked. Hiring managers can’t help but operate with a number of possible preconceptions in their minds, from unconscious bias about race or gender to a preference for the candidate they most recently interviewed or who seems the most like themselves. Such biases, Tincup observed, live on in the makeup of a company’s existing workforce. And that leads to the troubles Amazon faced, where the data set reflects decisions made in the past more than it positions a process to understand needs of the future.

Technology Races Ahead

The situation is complicated by the idea that technology has outpaced legal and business practices. While they believe that will eventually change, analysts and technology vendors don’t see it changing quickly. 

“Right now, technology’s moving super-fast,” said Ankit Somani, co-founder of the talent acquisition and management platform AllyO, headquartered in Palo Alto, California. “Generally, regulators and the folks who control compliance standards don’t move so quickly. But, honestly, we’re like three lawsuits away from somebody taking it very seriously.”

Also read: Artificial intelligence is a double-edged sword. Here’s how HR leaders can properly wield it

 “Therein lies a real big rub,” Tincup said of regulation’s lag behind talent acquisition and HR practices. Nearly all of the processes involved with turning candidates into employees touch some kind of employment law or EEOC-related issues, but “all of those rules are outdated,” he said. “We’ve been working outside of the rules for 15 or 20 years. I would argue that there isn’t a company in the United States that’s 100 percent compliant from sourcing to outplacement.”

Talent acquisition teams, and HR in general, understand that and are beginning to adopt, said Brian Delle Donne, president of Talent Tech Labs, an industry analyst and consulting firm based in New York. However, he believes determining exactly how and where compliance fits in with the use of new technologies has been complicated by the way “artificial intelligence” has been “grossly generalized” in industry conversations.

“Most of the time they’re talking about machine learning, or sometimes just automated workflow processing,” Delle Donne said. “When you get into true artificial intelligence, where the machine is making decisions, it’s a higher threshold that’s required for our concern about the accuracy of [its] recommendations and predictions.” The distinction between true AI and what might be called “advanced technology” is important, he believes, because people assume that the machine is prescient when it’s usually not. “In most cases, it will be quite a while until machines are actually making decisions on their own,” Delle Donne observed.

Even in today’s state, the use of advanced technology has become widespread enough to raise concerns about whether it might, inadvertently, nudge an employer out of compliance. For example, AI-driven tools may use personal information in unplanned ways that a candidate hasn’t given permission for. That would raise privacy concerns. Or, tools might present results that, intentionally or not, run afoul of fair-employment legislation. “On both fronts, you’re talking about compliance statutory norms,” said Delle Donne.

AI’s Behavior

Such concerns, along with widespread speculation about AI’s impact, has made advanced technology “front of mind for many people,” said Bosley. In response, governments at all levels have begun generating “a patchwork” of laws that sometimes conflict with one another.

For example, Illinois’s Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act went into effect Jan. 1, 2020. The law sets out transparency and consent requirements for video interviews, as well as limits on who can view the interviews and how long they can be stored. However, Bosley said, the law’s mandate to destroy videos within 30 days may conflict with the preservation requirements of other state and federal laws, including in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Also read: How Will Staney continues to change the talent acquisition game

“It puts employers in a position where they’re really going to need to assess risk,” Bosley said. “They’re going to need to come up with creative solutions to try and work around some of this risk.” 

Not all employers may feel exposed in the near term, Tincup suggested. He estimates that each year only a handful of legal actions are taken because of a candidate’s unhappiness with the recruiting process. People practices, technology practices and civil and social discourse are “way ahead of employment law,” he explained. “So is this something that’s going to create an immense amount of risk? No.” Employers today, he believes, put themselves at more risk by hiring a salesperson with a history of sexual harassment. In that regard, “you could spend more money in risk mitigation … than in recruitment technology,” he said.

At the same time, an organization’s risk may be based on activities that aren’t related to recruiting or the workforce, Bosley points out. “This isn’t just a human resources issue anymore. It’s not only an employment law issue anymore. It’s much broader than that,” he said. “You have data protection, data compliance, privacy and the potential for disparate impact claims as opposed to disparate treatment claims.”

Bosley anticipates more claims will be filed that look into a database’s contents, what data’s being looked at, how it’s being processed and whether algorithms are static or refined over time. Essentially, these claims will examine how advanced technology is making its decisions. “It’s going to be something where human resources leaders are looking to involve others in the organization and make sure that they’re both issue-spotting and getting ahead of some of these compliance issues,” he said.

 Indeed, Somani believes this notion of “explainability” — laying out what a system does and how it’s doing it — will become more important in the realms of recruiting technology and compliance. “There should, in my mind, be more compliance standards around that,” he said.

Evolving Standards

Even at a basic level, compliance standards for using technology in recruiting “don’t exist,” Somani said. For example, does texting about a job opportunity constitute a form of marketing? Is such a text permissible if it’s personalized? Because the answer’s not clear, he believes many companies are putting stricter guidelines in place.

Somani also said legal departments are becoming more involved in the purchase and implementation of recruiting technology. For tools handling communications, such as those that facilitate SMS messaging between recruiters and candidates, they’re trying to anticipate issues by creating policies that cover not only privacy, but data collection and permissions. “It’s an explicit ask in almost every deal we go into: ‘If a consumer doesn’t want to interact with your system, how do you follow that?’ ” he said. When it comes to issues related to AI’s under-the-hood work, vendors focus on transparency and disclosure by presenting disclaimers on their product or within their privacy policies.  

 For enterprises, compliance issues “can be a deal-breaker,” said Megan Gimbar, the Holmdel, New Jersey-based product marketing manager for iCIMS Hiring Suite, at least at the corporate level. While compliance and consistency are important components of her product, she said, talent acquisition teams often shy away from the topic.

In the past, employers tried to ensure compliance through training. Their approach, said Delle Donne, was to make hiring managers aware of interview questions that shouldn’t be asked (such as inquiring whether a woman intended to have children) or information that shouldn’t be considered (the candidate’s age or ZIP code). “That’s a fairly low bar,” he observed.

The bar began getting higher “once we started saying algorithms are going to make that determination for us,” Delle Donne continued. “Algorithms might actually do a better job, [or] may actually be set up in a way that they might do a better job, than humans do at avoiding compliance issues through bias.” However, he said, that requires planning and a focus on non-discrimination features when algorithms are designed.

Also read: The ethics of AI in the workplace

Compliance Further Afield

The compliance issues raised by using AI in recruiting aren’t limited to talent acquisition alone. For one thing, Somandi notes, recruiters today leverage a variety of tools that were introduced into other functions. 

Think of how candidate management systems and customer management systems align. When using those technologies, compliance may involve adapting the standards used by marketing or sales so they can be applied to talent acquisition and HR.

That road goes both ways. Even solutions designed for recruiters raise issues that aren’t unique to hiring, Delle Donne said. “As HR tries to digitize, there are many, many places where technology can streamline processes and save time and perhaps be more beneficial to the employee or the party,” he said. Many, if not all, of those will lead to some kind of compliance question. For example, a bot used in benefits administration may build a profile of confidential medical information. Or, a learning program might enter performance scores into an employee record without informing the employee. That could be a problem if those scores impact a person’s future promotions or career path.

As it digitizes, the tools implemented by HR “will bring in these technologies and there’s going to have to be some focus or some attention given to not inadvertently creating bias or discrimination, or revealing private information,” Delle Donne said. “If you take a step back, it just could be like whack-a-mole. I mean, ‘Hey, we see it over here in talent acquisition. Let’s go chase that down and… Oh, wait. We just saw this going on over there.’”

Scheduling employees is one major HR task for which technology can help. Make more accurate, data-driven scheduling decisions in just a few clicks with Workforce.com’s comprehensive scheduling software.

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The future of recruiting technology

Sector-Report-RPOs-Do-More-Than-You-Think-8b38574

There are more open jobs than talent to fill them and companies are willing to try anything to win this war. That’s great news for recruiting technology firms that promise companies innovative solutions to find, engage and hire quality candidates.

Venture capitalists continue to court the recruiting tech sector, delivering yet another record-breaking year of investment. By the end of the third quarter of 2019, VCs had invested more than $4 billion in recruiting technology firms, and the industry was expected to cross $5 billion by the year’s end. Many of those investments went to recruiting platforms, including Jobvite, which received $200 million in February to acquire three new recruiting platforms for its portfolio; SmartRecruiter, which raised $50 million in May; and Fountain, a platform to hire gig and hourly workers that landed $23 million in October.

“The war for talent is not going away,” said Denise Moulton, vice president of HR and talent research at Bersin, Deloitte Consulting in Boston. However, companies are getting smarter about how they select and validate the impact of their recruiting technology.

“There are new solutions coming to market all the time,” she said. That is putting pressure on vendors to demonstrate value if they want clients to stick around.

Some companies need tools that will help them more effectively uncover passive candidates, figure out how to mine the former applicant pool and identify internal talent who might be perfect for a current opening. Others are more focused on automation tools to help them engage with candidates, conduct video recording or improve and track the candidate journey.

AI Is Finally Paying Off

Many of these tools now feature artificial intelligence to add to the value proposition. And that’s finally a good thing.

The industry has been talking about AI in recruiting for years, but the current generation of tools are actually making an impact, Moulton said. “AI is boosting productivity, helping to analyze candidate pools, and making it easier to keep track of people who you want to keep in your funnel,” she said.

The use of AI and automation is freeing recruiters to become advisers, focusing on building relationships and capturing data to track outcomes, said Jared Goralnick, group product manager for LinkedIn in San Francisco. “Analytics are helping them set realistic expectations about the size of the talent pool, and the ability to reach new talent.”

AI driven analytics are also reducing the time to fill key roles, and helping companies address diversity and inclusion goals. “These tools can be game changers,” Moulton said. Though as always they only work if you have the expertise to ask the right questions and enough data to generate meaningful unbiased analysis. “The more data you can feed (a system) the smarter it gets over time,” she said.

Skills Versus Experience

The other big trend in recruiting tech is the rising use of assessments, as companies look for ways to vet candidates’ skills and attitude, along with their qualifications and experience. “Assessments are critical if you want to build a funnel of candidates that will be relevant today and for the long term,” Moulton said.

Several vendors have acquired assessments companies, including SHL’s November purchase of Aspiring Minds, an AI-driven talent assessment and interviewing platform; Hired’s February acquisition of Py, an app that assesses candidates coding skills; and Mercer’s 2018 acquisition of Mettl, an India-based talent assessment firm.

And other firms are building their own assessments. Most notably, late last year LinkedIn launched its Skills Assessment feature, which lets users complete dozens of free skills assessments that they can add to their profiles. The early assessments focus primarily on technical skills, but the company plans to introduce soft skills and personality assessments over time.

“It will make it easier for candidates to highlight their skills, and for recruiters to filter their searches,” said Goralnick. It will also make the search process more relevant for candidates and companies. He noted that LinkedIn research shows 69 percent of professionals think their skills are more important than their college education, and 76 percent would like to be able to verify their skills as a way to stand out in a candidate pool. The assessments will help them do that, he said.

Moulton urged companies to be thoughtful about the technology they choose and to be sure it will add measurable value to the talent acquisition process.

“You can’t pick up every shiny new penny,” she said. “You have to figure out what your team will really use and how it will integrate into the workflow.”

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So, who says Generation Z and millennials are anti-leadership job-hoppers?

millennials Generation Z

There are several stereotypes that have been placed on millennials and Generation Z that are just not true, according to new research.

Bellevue University’s Human Capital Lab partnered with Human Capital Media’s research and advisory group to conduct a study of more than 2,000 employees over a range of five generations to observe how their views vary regarding leadership in the workplace.

Generation Z millennials

“With five generations in the workforce and a diverse range of perceived wisdom about what each generation expects from leaders and how they view their own prospects for leadership, this research set out to put some solid data behind how generational behavior and expectations related to leadership vary,” said Michelle Eppler, director of Human Capital Lab and dean of the College of Continuing and Professional Studies at Bellevue University, located in Bellevue, Nebraska.

When it comes to why companies are so obsessed with generational behavior variances, there are many potential contributing factors.

“One may be that it appears to be a convenient way to sort populations — and there is some evidence that experience, although not the same thing, does have a slight impact in how one views leadership,” Eppler said in an email statement. “In the current climate of nearly full employment, retention has become even more vital and companies are constantly searching for ways to enhance employee engagement, reduce costs and increase efficiencies by lowering their attrition rates.”

The leadership preferences survey was delivered online to 2,009 respondents through Survata, a brand intelligence research company. The sample was balanced by age, gender and educational attainment.

“We made sure that we had equal numbers of respondents from different age groups, and also that we had representation from respondents without a college degree, with a college degree and in addition, 20 percent of respondents had a master’s degree or higher,” said Sarah Kimmel, vice president of research at Human Capital Media. Some 60 percent of the respondents were women and 40 percent were men. All of the respondents were from North America, ranging in between 18 and 65 in age, Kimmel said.

Organizations have heavily focused on benefits and different generations with the assumption that generations have different requirements when it comes to benefits. The common stereotypical traits that millennials and Generation Z have been labeled with have been driving policy for some to prepare for future workforce needs. “The two big key takeaways were that, in terms of generational preferences, age is not actually as determining as you might think,” Kimmel said.

According to the study, the majority of employees — regardless of which generation — are actually driven by compensation, have leadership ambitions and want to stay and build or retain their careers with one organization. Eppler said that the study’s findings may serve as exciting consequences for employers.

“If millennials and Generation Z want to stay, but also want a career path that transitions to a leadership role, then adequate compensation, coupled with learning and development in the skills and behaviors they associate with good leaders should improve retention,” Eppler said. “Companies that invest in these areas are more likely to be more confident in the long-term benefits of adequate compensation and leadership development.

Every age group within the study all preferred the same top three qualities in a leader; they must be a good communicator, honest and respectful. “Communication is integral, according to the study,” said Kimmel.

It is often thought that younger generations aren’t as interested in leadership positions, but the study suggests the opposite. 45- to 54-year-olds are twice as likely (36 percent) to say that they are not interested in leadership positions than 25- to 34-year-olds are (13 percent). A total of 85 percent say that they would prefer to stay with their current organization for their entire career, and half of those say they are willing to stay under the right conditions. The only group that showed the most interest in leaving were those between the ages of 18-24 years old. “If you think about it, those are the people just out of school or just starting out in their career, so of course they might be leaving their organization — they’re kind of in their starter job,” Kimmel said. “Over the age of 24, its almost identical across every single age group. People want to stay.”

One thing that stuck out to Eppler about this study’s results was how women are less likely to currently be in a leadership position or ready for leadership (47 percent) than are men (60 percent). Eppler said that this could possibly be due to women being more likely to wait until they have the required skill sets for leadership positions or due to the amount of non-work responsibilities that function as career obstacles. Women were also 10 percent less likely to say that they expect a promotion at their current employer.

According to the study, 42 percent of men say that their employer provides on the job development times for them compared to women (35 percent). Women are more likely to say they are given stretch assignments (23 percent) than men (19 percent). However, they are equally likely to be given leadership training, coaching and mentoring and tuition reimbursement.

“That’s great news, as it points to there not being a lot of structural bias in leadership development programs,” Kimmel said.

Said Eppler, “The one thing the study tells us, is we need to do more to understand what is behind this lack of trust data point women have and examine what are effective approaches within the workplace that successfully address it.”

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When You Tell a Job Candidate, ‘You’re Probably Not Going to Like This Job’

When hiring is brisk, it’s easy to rush the process and end up with mismatched employees. So it’s important to know what motivates them — not just how they behave, but why they do what they do. With today’s labor market, finding the best match for performance and retention pays for itself in retention alone.

A majority of Fortune 500 companies use assessments for selection and companies of all sizes can benefit from emulating the practice. To ensure the best talent selection and long-term match, HR should go deeper than personality types and behavior.

With assessments that determine what motivates candidates, HR can be more assured in choosing — or passing on — any individual.

“Selection is very different than just hiring,” said Brett Wells, chief science and consulting officer at Talent Plus Inc. “Selection means you’re making a sound judgement based on validity and science, based on what’s the very best in a role or an industry and how they will respond versus what you think your gut reaction should be. It’s predictive.”

It’s a Good Time to Be Choosy

“People can answer interview questions very well,” said Alison Nolan. “People are fantastic at answering interview questions, but it doesn’t always tell you the truth.”

Nolan is HR partner for the public health NGO, FHI 360. Previously, she did the same job with Volvo Group Trucks. With her 18 years of talent acquisition experience, she recommends an assessment-based hiring process.

“With an assessment, if they’re trying to fake it, it shows up,” said Nolan. “It’s very clear if they’re trying to skew the answers. If you’re honest it just gives you so much more insight. It saves the employer and the employee.”

In Nolan’s experience, only about 25 percent of employees who are put on a performance improvement process end up keeping their jobs. So why not make it a goal to avoid performance improvement interventions?

Right now, two competitive factors make it more important than ever to assess and understand employee motivation in hiring so great performance is the norm:

  • Near full employment. With full employment, talent acquisition is more about who you don’t hire than who you do hire, because you want to be selective and find people who will thrive in your organization. And once they’re hired, retaining those employees also becomes a competitive necessity in a tight labor market.
  • Career trends. People have become more selective about what jobs they take. Once upon a time, job seekers considered just getting a job a societal responsibility. Today, they are more attracted by intrinsic factors — in other words, corporate culture and corporate responsibility — than the need to simply find a steady income or a job for life.

Personality assessments that identify motivation can make all the difference in matching candidates with the jobs in your organization.

For Wells, who researches and builds assessments, carefully matched talent has never been more important for retention.

“With a tight labor market for candidates, the world is their oyster right now and ‘fit’ is key for retention,” said Wells. “If they don’t have that fit for the role or the organizational culture, they will leave. If they’re in a role where they’re not getting that intrinsic satisfaction they’re at risk for being disengaged and, again, at greater risk for leaving.”

Finding a Motivational Match

When you’ve done the work to accurately assess candidates, you can honestly say to those who aren’t a match, “You’re probably not going to like this job.”

How come?

You can answer, “Well, you’ve got the work ethic and the skills to do the job, but after a year, you’ll be exhausted because this job is all about engaging with clients daily in a strictly established corporate structure and you’re more motivated by thinking outside the box and coming up with new ways to accomplish tasks.”

On the other hand, for the candidate who assesses as a good fit, you can offer the job with assurance and negotiate as necessary to get them on board: “I really think you would love working here.”

Nolan has seen how this can be a positive experience for people who are not hired as well as the company.

“They get to hear why they didn’t get selected and they get that review,” said Nolan. “They have something tangible to walk away with. And sometimes, we say, ‘Hey we have this other position where you’d be a great fit.’ ”

You’ll know this because you’ve used a scientifically valid instrument that goes deeper than simple behavioral traits to find out things like:

  • Do they like to develop their own way of working or do they prefer to have it laid out for them in a prescribed manner?
  • Would they rather help others succeed or do they prefer monetary incentives?
  • Can they focus on their job with no environmental distractions or do workspace aesthetics energize them?

There are no right or wrong motivations. It’s all about congruency between what your organization needs and what it can offer the candidate.

When you assess a person’s motivation, you gain a deeper understanding of them so you can either lead them into a fulfilling and satisfying position or honestly wave them off, so they don’t take a job that will ultimately frustrate them and send them looking elsewhere.

“This is where that motivational piece comes in,” said Wells. “We often see potential wasted because they’re in roles spending time just doing things that they’re excellent at, but they don’t necessarily enjoy it.”

For Wells, it’s about talents versus strengths.

“A strength is something I’m good at, but I might not enjoy doing it, e.g., balancing a checkbook,” said Wells. “A talent is something I have the potential to do with excellence and is something I’m going to enjoy doing.”

The Perils of Using Gut Instinct

Outside of HR, not all managers are believers. Or maybe they’re just not aware.

“With some hiring managers, it can be them saying, ‘Okay, I want this person’ even when it didn’t make sense from the assessment to take that person,” said Nolan. “And nine times out of 10 they would end up on a performance improvement plan since they could not do the job, because they were not motivated by what it took to do the job.”

The best way to bring hip-shooting hiring managers into the fold of scientific talent selection is to give them the assessment that’s being used, including the feedback session. They’ll see how in-depth and revealing it is, firsthand, and they’ll be inspired by what can be achieved with a more careful hiring discipline.

Nolan has worked with managers who have a certain feeling and until they’re proven wrong — and it could be a hiring mistake that ends badly and could be costly — the task becomes how do you convince a hiring manager.

“I gave my hiring mangers the assessment and told them to take it,” said Nolan. “With them taking it, it was an eye-opener. Like someone peeking inside of you. They do it themselves and see how accurate it is.”

 Why Touchy-Feely Matters

Assessments differ, but terms like “harmonious” and “altruistic” are common. This may strike old school hiring managers as a little too soft-skill or “touchy-feely” to be practical.

What does it matter if a worker cares about the number of windows and art installations in the office? Or if they’re indifferent to status and recognition?

Plenty, according to most science on the subject, but it’s also basic psychology. People function at their best when they’re at ease. If an organizational structure or a particular job aligns with motivational preferences, the employee will be more comfortable and more able to do work in a way that gives them fulfillment.

People need to be able to be themselves at work. You can fake it for a few months in a mismatched position, but not for long.

And outside-the-box thinker isn’t going to be happy if they have to support the status quo. A person who puts himself first, will burn out in a customer service job where altruistic motivation is more valued. An employee who is highly receptive to new ideas won’t fare well in a position that demands adherence to a standard process.

A motivational assessment gives you a reliable picture of what situations are best for any job candidate.

Behavior is easy to assess. If you’ve been in talent management or training for a while, you’re probably pretty good at determining a person’s way of doing things without an assessment and through good interview questions.

Motivation, however, is deeper and you’ll need a sophisticated assessment instrument to divine it.

Motivation as a metric goes back to the work of Eduard Spranger who identified six types of motivation: theoretical, utilitarian, aesthetic, social, individualistic and traditional. Today’s motivational assessments adapt this taxonomy with more workplace-specific terms.

First Step: Assess the Job

Knowing a person’s motivational make-up won’t help if you don’t know the motivational realities of your organization and the specific jobs. So, it’s important to document the chemistry of your company first.

What is the work environment like? What are the workday demands — strict office hours, telecommute, work from the field? What are the job categories? People focused? Process focused? Creative driven or analytical?

Doing this homework will allow assessments to work as talent matchmakers.

“At Volvo, we interviewed a lot of senior buyers in our purchasing group and we benchmarked what our needs are for this job,” said Nolan.

This included requirements such as working independently, working with vendors all day long, negotiating pricing, giving presentations, and being driven by metrics in working with other people.

“Once we did the interviews, we would give the assessment and it would show us how good of a match are they for the position,” said Nolan.

Wells says it’s absolutely vital to baseline the culture before assessing talent.

“In any organization there are likely pockets of success or teams that are very successful and also pockets or teams that are struggling. With a validated assessment and research process you can discern those reliable patterns, thoughts, feelings, behaviors that drive success vs. failure in those roles,” said Wells. “So, bringing those to the forefront and making them part of your selection process will help replicate that success, selection after selection, and mitigate future failures.”

Wells recommends starting with the company’s mission statement, vision statement or a competency model, then mapping out what behaviors the company rewards, ignores and punishes. And ultimately, who gets promoted.

It’s a process of defining the culture and identifying what it takes to thrive within it. Once this is known, any number of scientifically valid assessments can be used by talent professionals to dial in the optimum profile of the candidates to hire.

Finding the Right Assessment

Once an organization knows “who it is” the process of choosing an assessment can begin.

Fortunately, the assessment industry has evolved to a point where there are many accurate, reliable and powerful instruments from which to choose.

Across the board, Wells advises that there are three basic factors to always evaluate:

1) Reliability: How consistent are scores over time and across situations. If I test you today, if I test you five years from now, am I going to get roughly equivalent results?

2) Validity: How strong is this assessment result in predicting something I care about that’s going to impact my business?

3) Fairness: To what extent do individuals from protected classes perform on the assessment compared to their majority group counterparts?

Nolan has a couple of preferred assessments and both have multiscience features that include what metrics of what drives the candidate, along with a DiSC component, and have been proven over time.

It’s always been important to match employees with positions that suit their personalities. However, now it’s more of a competitive advantage than just an employee satisfaction exercise.

In the current talent market you can afford to be more selective, which will pay off in worker retention.

As younger generations redefine why we work, there’s a little more care and feeding of talent we have to accept as employers.

Matching talent with positions by motivation helps assure success on both fronts. 

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How to Hire Your First HR Leader

So, business is good, growth is strong and you’re ready to hire your first HR leader. That’s great news. Congrats!

Now comes the hard part.

This column is not meant to help those looking for their first HR hire, which is generally an individual added by small to medium-sized business when transactional items like payroll and compliance overwhelm an office manager or similar administrative employee with another job to do.

That was your first HR hire. You’ve likely made that hire at least a year or so ago. You thought that person was going to shore up your recruiting issues and get to needed projects in performance, training and other areas. You were wrong.

So here we are. You just posted an opening for an HR manager/director — your first HR leader. If you’re going to invest the money, you need the person to innovate and deliver the return in all your areas of need related to talent.

Finding the right hire in this situation is hard, and misses occur often. Here are ideas to assist in your search:

Experience matters, so prepare to dig. If you’re looking for someone to come in and build your next-level HR platform, you’re going to need to make sure they’ve done it before. The biggest lie the devil ever told the world about HR is that titles equate to ability. That’s not only false in the world of HR, it’s dangerous.

There’s a high degree of variability across HR manager/director candidates. To ensure you end up with what you need, pick your top three HR areas of need, then prepare to interview candidates purposefully on how they have built strong programs in those areas.

Ask candidates to bring a portfolio of examples of their work in each domain. Make sure the experience is real, not hypothetical or you’re going to be less than satisfied in under a year.

Company size of current and past employers is important. As a growing company, you’re going to be naturally attracted to HR leaders in small companies. While that’s one path to success, you shouldn’t discount HR pros who want to downshift from a mega-company existence to the SMB life.

There’s a high degree of variability across HR Manager/director candidates. Pick your Top Three areas of need, then interview purposefully.

Big company HR pros have the benefit of growing up with great tools and resources in the areas important to you. The best ones (who are a motivational fit for life in a smaller company) can use that experience to build your HR platform in a meaningful, progressive way.

Consider recruiting backgrounds as an alternative. Most growing businesses seek to add their first HR leader at around the 100-employee mark. You’re likely adding this leadership team member due to growth, which means recruiting is almost always a pain point. For best results, look to add candidates to your hiring process that have been pure recruiters in their past in addition to holding pure HR positions. Interview to understand their success and satisfaction in the former recruiting role. If your first HR leader has past success as a recruiter and enjoyed that life, you’ll be set up for success.

Of course, all of those tips are related to candidate backgrounds and what you’ll see on résumés. To truly win with your first HR leader hire, you’re also going to have to be brutally honest with yourself related to your company environment and the behavioral DNA you need in a candidate that provides the best match.

My new book, “The 9 Faces of HR,” digs deep into the behavioral DNA of HR pros. Here’s the must-haves I’d recommend for anyone seeking to hire their first HR leader:

Quick on the draw. Taking in large amounts of data/feedback and making quick, accurate decisions is key. Things move pretty fast at a high-growth company, and the right candidate for you will need to match the speed.

Fearless. Your new HR leader needs to be naturally inclined to deal with challenges head on. The right candidate for you will have a bias toward action.

Loves chaos. Let’s face it, you have a cool company but it’s a freak show, as all high-growth organizations are. The right candidate is going to view chaos as a ladder, not a barrier.

Successfully hiring your first HR leader is about finding a candidate in the sweet spot — the intersection of hustle, hard work, innovation and the ability to create product and services others will use to move your company forward.

The right one is out there, but only if you go into the search with a clear plan of what you are looking for. Don’t settle!

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Reports of the Death of the Job Board Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

The old-school job board model, where employers pay a website to post open positions and hope that qualified candidates will find and apply for them, may not be as flashy or talked about as some of today’s bright, shiny Generation Z gig-worker marketplace products. But since the dawning of the job board as we know it some 30 years ago they appear to remain a viable business model with plenty of life.

In 2018, online job advertising companies earned a total of $22 billion, according to Staffing Industry Analysts, an increase of 15 percent. And while many companies offer advanced services such as programmatic job advertising or social media tools, the leader in many markets “is a traditional job board that makes 70 to 80 percent of its revenue from job postings,” said Jeff Dickey-Chasins, principal of the industry consulting firm JobBoardDoctor LLC.

That doesn’t mean the industry has been complacent. Especially in markets like the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union, job boards have been exploring new revenue models, new technology and new features. They have little choice, observers say. Recruiting practices are changing, the use of data has become more sophisticated and the demands of job seekers are continually evolving. 

Also, the very culture of “being online” has changed. It’s now anytime, anywhere and includes multiple channels such as websites, email, social media and chat. That dynamic can work either for or against the job boards, said NelsonHall Principal Research Analyst Nikki Edwards. Those job boards that have mobilized their platform, integrated with social media, and incorporated other channels “will have greater audience reach, and are more likely to survive, than those who do nothing to adapt or who rest on their laurels.” 

It seems like a far cry from the industry’s early days, when job boards were essentially “the old newspaper classifieds,” said Gerry Crispin, founder of CareerXroads, a recruiting-technology consulting practice. “Certainly, a lot of changes have gone on, but the fact of the matter is job boards are essentially the 21st century extension of classified advertising.”

Technology Draws a Circle

Initially, online job searching was relatively simple: Candidates searched, clicked on a job and applied to it — all without ever leaving the job board. Because applicant tracking systems were just gaining traction, companies around the turn of the 21st century relied on job boards to attract candidates while job seekers used them to deliver their applications to employers. Then, as ATS technology gained traction and more organizations built their own candidate databases, job boards began serving as gateways to corporate career sites.

However, “we’ve come full circle,” said Chad Sowash, a talent acquisition consultant and host of the recruiting-focused “Chad & Cheese Podcast.” Today’s corporate career sites, he said, are often clunky and not particularly attractive.

That encourages job boards to work harder to retain traffic. Rather than charge for how long a post remains online, pay-per-click plays a larger role in their business models. That, too, incites job boards to create simple, effective user experiences.

On another level, the evolution of the ATS changed many job boards from hunter-gatherers to sourcers. “There’s always been that component where if a company wants to source candidates instead of advertise jobs, they could go and look through a résumé database,” said Dickey-Chasins. “There are now job boards whose primary focus is sourcing candidates.”

As an example, he cites Hired. Founded in 2012, Hired offers seekers free profiles designed to match them with employers looking for a particular set of skills and experiences. It then screens those profiles to match a company in, say, Chicago with developers who’ve known the programming language Ruby for 10 years and previously worked at a video game studio. “They’re essentially doing what recruiters used to do, but they do it at a lower price point and in a more automated fashion,” Dickey-Chasins said. 

Hired also illustrates how creating the right experience for recruiters is as important as attracting the right candidates. “We have to make sure that we have a seamless experience for the recruiter because they can’t be going to 12 different websites to look at stuff,” Sowash said. “What we need to do is integrate those platforms into whatever your core system is — if it’s an applicant tracking system like iCIMS or a CRM like SmashFly.”

Given the sophistication of today’s data-management systems and application programming interfaces, or APIs, “there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to funnel all of these vendors into one core piece of technology,” Sowash said.

The term “job board” has become a bit of a misnomer. For instance, Indeed describes itself as an aggregator that compiles jobs from a number of sources. BioSpace, which focuses on the life sciences industry, says it’s  “a digital hub for news and careers.” LinkedIn is “an online professional network.”

These and other companies offer services designed to streamline their customers’ talent acquisition process, or at least portions of it. Such features include diversity products, job-advertising packages, employer-branding packages and other features that get folded into annual subscriptions, Dickey-Chasins said. LinkedIn Group Product Manager Kevin Chuang said his company is testing a short-form skills assessment to help it uncover more accurate matches.

Rise of the Lifestyle Platforms

Among the most fundamental drivers impacting the job boards’ landscape is the ever-changing dynamics of technology products, experts say. When sites like Monster.com first appeared in the mid-1990s, not only did the ATS not exist but the mobile phone was still a large plastic brick and the internet had yet to squash America Online.

Today’s world looks a lot different: Smartphones are ubiquitous, Amazon’s Alexa looks up recipes on command and Google’s Nest manages temperatures and monitors for smoke in homes around the world. Because of this, features like convenience, ease of use, speed and mobility count toward a job board’s success more than they ever have before. In particular, improved usability has become critical as candidates — who are essentially consumers — have come to expect simpler, slicker user experiences, Sowash said.

Advancing technology also spurred the rise of what Sowash calls “lifestyle platforms” — sites like Google and Facebook that fundamentally changed the way consumers regard online communications. “As soon as we roll over in the morning, we jump into them,” he said. Job boards can’t make the same claim because consumers “aren’t looking for a job every single day of their life.”

Job boards, then, must look for ways to leverage both consumer technology and lifestyle platforms.

“If you’re a job board today, you have to realize that people aren’t waking up in the morning thinking, ‘I’ve got to go to Indeed or I have to go to whatever your brand name is,’ ” Sowash said.  “They’re thinking, ‘I have to go to Google, I have to go to LinkedIn.’ ” As a result, job boards “really have to think much smarter than they ever, ever had to before.”

For the industry’s big names — like Indeed, LinkedIn and IT-focused Dice — that’s meant building suites of talent acquisition tools, facilitating messaging between candidates and recruiters and aggressively developing AI-based search mechanisms and data-visualization features. At the same time, a number of startups are at work trying to solve different talent-acquisition pain points of specific industries.

Not only that, said Chuang, but the process of job searching has become more social and thus more personal. Social networks, for example, allow candidates to connect with workers at prospective employers or ask for referrals. “The job post itself has become one step in the overarching process of the job search,” he said. 

“Job boards that are still exclusively focused on job postings and a singular product versus a [fuller] solution are the ones that are really struggling right now,” said BioSpace CEO Joshua Goodwin. “They’re not experiencing the uplift that we’re seeing from this labor market because of a very simple business principle: It’s about really understanding your customer’s pain point and their end goals. Our customers are about trying to hire the right candidates and not about trying to post an individual job posting.”

The Beauty of the Niche

With that thought in mind, niche job boards like BioSpace often focus their product development efforts to align with the behaviors and habits of their audience. Sites that serve truck drivers or skilled tradespeople tend to lean heavily on mobile-first approaches along with texting and universal application models, Dickey-Chasins said. “They try to do things like text-based assessments, to fit the way these people work,” he explained. “In certain sectors it’s super hard to find people, so you basically do whatever it takes to pull those people out.”

Goodwin agrees. “We tell clients that job postings are foundational,” he said. Besides posting open positions and publicizing them, he believes effective job boards provide solutions suites that help companies proactively identify and contact candidates on platforms they might frequent.

That’s particularly important in a job market like today’s, where the candidate pool is small and the most desirable workers are often “passive,” open to opportunities but only the right opportunities. Because those candidates don’t, to paraphrase Sowash, wake up and surf to a job board, sites must think of themselves more as what Goodwin calls “recruitment web sites” that offer “a lot more than job postings.”

On his site, that “a lot more” is content. BioSpace was founded in the late 1980s as a life-sciences media firm. Today, around 700,000 unique visitors access the site each month, mostly to read domain-related content. “They want to know about what’s happening in the industry. They may not necessarily be looking at jobs,” Goodwin said. However, BioSpace’s specialized information provides employers with a launching pad from which to reach candidates.

Successful niche boards, adds John Sumser, principal analyst for HRExaminer, succeed not because of better technology but “because they understand the niche that they’re operating in and they don’t go outside of it.” The moment they attempt to expand beyond their core market, “things fall apart because their expertise is narrow.”

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Think Differently: 3 Ways to Build Cognitive Diversity in the Workplace

cognitive diversity

The ability to leverage diversity in experiences, culture and background is a strong driver of innovation and global success, according to a Forbes survey of executives. But there is one key element that can be overlooked as companies seek to become more diverse: cognitive diversity, or the differences in how people think and process information.

Teams that reflect cognitive diversity solve complex problems faster than teams composed of individuals who approach problem-solving in the same way, two researchers have discovered. When faced with new and uncertain situations, teams composed of cognitively diverse individuals deploy different modes of thinking to tackle the challenge at hand. The result is accelerated learning and performance. Meanwhile, teams composed of people who address complex problems in the same way are hampered by a lack of versatility. The findings held true irrespective of differences in gender, age or ethnicity.

Promoting greater cognitive diversity in teams can be challenging when the natural inclination of leaders is often to select people who have a similar approach either to themselves or to whoever filled a role previously. But a culture of innovation depends on diverse thinking and learning styles, and work is changing rapidly. What has worked in the past may not be what will work in the present the future.

Here are a few ways companies can effectively promote cognitive diversity.

Recruit for Cognitive Diversity

Be intentional in seeking team members with diverse thinking styles and approaches. There are very few organizations that aren’t looking to strengthen their workforce skill mix, and that means hiring differently. Challenging assumptions on the criteria for success in a given role is a good place to start.

Often, organizations seek to hire new talent based on their “pedigree” for a specific role, such as the number of years of experience in a similar position, where they went to college or the degree(s) they have obtained. But this hiring style limits an organization’s ability to gain the cognitive diversity needed to solve business challenges in a rapidly changing environment. Instead, leaders should ask, “What are the challenges we need to solve, and what are the capabilities, experiences and backgrounds we must possess to address these challenges in new ways?” While not every role lends itself to this process, applying this technique wherever possible is worth the risk.

It’s also important to look outside your industry sector for talent who could elevate your performance by introducing new ideas cultivated in different fields or work environments. For example, Magellan Health [Editor’s note: the author’s company] has hired tech start-up professionals, digital app developers and hospitality specialists to revamp its approach to patient engagement, improving outreach and outcomes. The higher levels of cognitive diversity gained through these efforts help companies keep pace with changing needs and better position themselves for long-term survival.

Also read: The 4 Myths of Health Care Cost Reduction

Break the Mold for Partnership

The ability to respond nimbly to change is a critical characteristic for innovation and long-term success. Strategic partnerships are one way to leverage the level of cognitive diversity needed to adapt and evolve in a transformative environment. Ecosystems are more fluid now than ever, and that will continue to hold true.

Look for opportunities to collaborate with non-traditional people, groups and companies to explore new ways of addressing the complex challenges your industry faces. Taking a “no lines” approach to solving complex issues strengthens cognitive diversity and better positions companies to both create and survive disruptive innovation in their areas of expertise.

In health care alone, partnerships between care providers, technology and software companies, retail firms and more are bringing new concepts to market that are disrupting traditional approaches to care delivery. The accounting firm PwC suggests the skills needed to respond to evolving business models in health care include proficiency in artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics

And this trend is not limited to just health care. As companies across the world navigate the fourth industrial revolution, the ability to draw from non-traditional areas of expertise — such as artificial intelligence, digital engagement and predictive analytics — and develop new skills in existing talent will differentiate organizations that control their destiny in a transformative environment from those that allow the environment to determine their fate.

Create Space to Innovate

Leaders have to set the tone for an innovative work environment — virtual or physical. At a time when 43 percent of employees spend at least some time working remotely, many of the historic social contracts between employees and employers are changing. Given this, now is a great time to be deliberate about building innovative muscle. Work is being redefined, focus on results is being strengthened, and entirely new ways of collaborating and connecting are emerging.

Also read: The New Employer-Employee Social Contract

Small steps can yield big results. Working with teams to gain clarity on a problem to be solved, for example, can be enough to start a new and different conversation about an old problem. Simply creating time for teams to think together about a shared need or issue without having to force a solution right away can yield a different outcome.

Rethinking what behavior gets rewarded is also important in reshaping a culture of innovation. Celebrating “tries” vs. successes takes courage, but it can be transformative in building innovative capability and attracting cognitively diverse talent.

A Renewed Approach to Breakthrough Performance

Cognitive diversity is an essential ingredient in creating a culture of innovation in any organization, and vice versa. Supporting a cognitively diverse workplace requires strong leadership that’s willing to truly rethink everything — not on their own, but with their teams, their customers and across organizational lines. The power of learning together and cultivating cognitive diversity in designing the work of tomorrow is a strong play for any company competing in today’s fast-changing world.