One of the primary reasons for this hiring difficulty is the ongoing talent shortage and historically low unemployment levels. The demand for qualified candidates has far exceeded the available supply, making it challenging for companies to find candidates with the essential knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to fill open positions.

Many companies rely on outdated recruitment strategies that don’t effectively meet candidates where they are. The hiring process has evolved significantly over the years and companies that don’t adopt new strategies, technologies, and processes risk being left behind. To overcome these challenges, it is essential to have a modern recruitment approach complemented by effective recruiting technology that can help make hiring more predictable.

Where to Start Optimizing Recruiting Strategies

With employers working harder than ever to find and connect with qualified candidates, it’s important to evaluate wins and lessons learned to make recruiting more effective this year.  One way to optimize your recruiting strategies is to take inventory of where you can improve and streamline your hiring programs. 

That’s where the 2024 Recruiting Effectiveness Planning Kit comes in. This comprehensive toolkit provides talent professionals with the guidance and step-by-step approach they need to improve recruiting strategies, audit current programs, and make data-driven plans to drive recruiting success.

Within the Planning Kit, you’ll find nine practical worksheets covering a range of topics, from developing data-driven recruiting strategies to expanding talent networks through targeted audience planning. You’ll also discover how to improve return on recruiting investment, how to leverage existing employees as a primary source for new hires, and how to develop comprehensive candidate personas for better role matching.

And when it comes to analytics and reporting, we’ve got you covered with a best practices worksheet to help you dive deep into the data and draw insights to improve your decision-making.

The 2024 Kit also features the latest insights and data from the Employ Recruiter Nation Report. With insights from across the hiring landscape, this data helps you stay informed on the latest trends in recruitment, talent acquisition, and hiring.

Finally, you’ll receive a 2024 HR events calendar, which sets out all the key dates and most popular events in recruitment and HR. Plan ahead for everything from key conferences to critical tax deadlines.

As a talent acquisition professional looking for a way to optimize your recruiting strategies and achieve results, the 2024 Recruiting Effectiveness Planning Kit is exactly what you need. Download it today and start planning for recruitment success in 2024 and beyond.

Ready to optimize your talent acquisition technology? Learn how Jobvite’s enterprise recruitment solution can help you attract, engage, and convert top talent at scale. Schedule a demo of our Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite today.

The post How Forward-Thinking Talent Pros Optimize Recruiting Strategies first appeared on Jobvite.

Learning from experts on how to make hiring more effective and efficient is essential within the current labor market. During the recent From the Experts: Making Recruiting More Effective in 2024 webinar, a panel of three talent practitioners discussed how to optimize recruiting strategies for this year. These panelists included:

• Michelle Stone, Director, Enterprise Customer Success, Jobvite, an Employ Solution
• Rachel Perry, Manager, Customer Enablement​, JazzHR, an Employ Solution​
• Josh Jones, Manager, Talent Acquisition, Employ Inc.

During this insightful session, each practitioner shared insights and innovative recruitment strategies to tackle the challenges encountered by recruiting professionals today.

Watch the full webinar on demand here.

How to Tackle Recruitment Challenges

The conversation centered on the difficulties facing talent acquisition professionals right now — focusing primarily on the scarcity of qualified candidates and the intense competition for talent. 

Each panelist advocated for the need for faster, more efficient hiring processes, noting that recruiters must adapt to the evolving recruitment landscape and employ strategies to enhance and optimize their recruiting strategies. 

To enhance efficiency, the role of technology and innovation is more important than ever. Recruitment technology, analytics, AI integration, and data-driven decision-making are not just buzzwords — they are principles that should be embraced by recruiting teams.

Strategies for Effective Recruiting

The driving force behind effective recruitment is efficient data-driven strategies. Panelists focused on two major strategies, including stakeholder feedback and developing candidate personas.

Michelle Stone highlighted the importance of aligning talent acquisition goals with the executive team and investing in existing employees for high-quality hires that already are dedicated to your organization. 

Josh Jones provided valuable insights on creating candidate personas using feedback from candidates and recent hires. He recommended creating at least two candidate personas for each role and tailoring job descriptions accordingly, enhancing their appeal to potential candidates. 

By segmenting candidate pools and tailoring engagement strategies to fit each audience, recruiting teams can build a framework and greatly improve their overall quality of hire. Rachel Perry further suggested researching competitors’ job descriptions to broaden understanding and improve approachability.

The Human Side of Hiring

The conversation also highlighted the personalized nature of experiences within recruitment. Michelle Stone emphasized the significance of texts and emails as a more efficient candidate communication method. She also proposed segmenting candidates into key talent, strategic, and relationship audiences for effective audience engagement.

Josh Jones emphasized treating active and passive candidates differently, and indicated the importance of uniformity within interview teams, while Rachel Perry noted the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in recruitment.

Harnessing the Right Recruitment Technology 

The discussion concluded with the importance of recruiting analytics and metrics, harnessing purpose-built technology in recruiting, and providing a top-notch onboarding experience.

By highlighting strategies that can help companies adapt in the current hiring environment, the panelists provided actionable takeaways that companies can use to streamline and optimize their recruiting process. 

Find out how to improve your hiring efforts — no matter what kind of roadblocks you face — and drive efficiencies in your recruiting function by optimizing strategies for the coming year. Watch the on-demand webinar now.

The post ICYMI: Expert Insights and Strategies for Effective Recruiting first appeared on Jobvite.

Your recruitment strategy must adapt to changing conditions — from new business goals and headcount needs to economic uncertainty and competition for qualified candidates. The good news is there is a blueprint your enterprise talent acquisition team can use to navigate these shifts and hire top talent quickly and at scale.

Building a more effective recruitment strategy: 8 ways to improve your hiring process

Here are eight tips to strengthen your recruitment strategies and boost hiring performance.

1) Audit your recruiting people, processes, and technology

Your people, processes, and technology impact the success of your enterprise.

Human resources expert Josh Bersin indicates investing in the right hiring solutions is the first step to improve your people, processes, and technology. However, you shouldn’t empower your talent acquisition function with just any tools.

Training recruiters to use your applicant tracking system and recruitment marketing platform to source, nurture, engage, and analyze candidates will set them up for success.

Consider Holland America Group Director of Talent Acquisition Jim D’Amico, who recently told SHRM he wants to enable his TA team to build stronger connections with potential candidates.

“That means development training for my leaders, technology training for my recruiters, and conferences for my team, to take them to that next level [with our recruitment strategy],” said Jim.

2) Modernize your enterprise talent acquisition tech stack

Can your recruiters and hiring managers easily access candidate profiles in your ATS? Do you have artificial intelligence and automation capabilities that eliminate manual labor? Do your current TA tools support your high-volume hiring? Is your recruiting data centralized and easily accessible?

If the answer is no to these questions, your technology stack requires attention.

The best way to address these issues is to invest in a single solution, like the Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite from Jobvite, so your hiring team can collaborate across the entire recruiting lifecycle and streamline hiring tasks.

For example, Apex Group improved hiring team collaboration by investing in Jobvite recruiting technology. The Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite enables talent specialists and hiring managers at Apex to work from a centralized platform that provides real-time recruiting funnel insights and hiring performance data.

“Jobvite is a true single source of truth … and helps us easily track performance over time,” said Apex Group Global Talent Acquisition Projects and Programme Lead Teodora Rebic. “Connecting with hiring managers right in the system to show our pipeline efforts is invaluable.”

3) Refresh your employer branding and recruitment marketing

These two parts of your recruitment strategy go hand in hand.

First, add your employer brand messaging in job postings, your career page, on social media profiles, and other owned and external digital properties where potential candidates may find you.

By doing so, you ensure consistency with how you present your employer brand externally. And you can better compel job seekers to apply because they learn what it’s like to work in your company.

Given its importance to your recruitment strategy, employer branding deserves your attention.

Next, ensure your targeted recruitment marketing campaigns reach the right passive candidates.

Test different advertising filters, like those for experience and professional interests, in your LinkedIn job ads to connect with passive candidates whose skills and expertise align with open roles.

Send personalized messages to candidates on other career communities whose expertise matches the job role. Gauge their interest in your company and the position with recruitment messaging that features your employer brand.

4) Assess and improve your candidate sourcing and nurturing

Employ CEO Pete Lamson notes that in addition to driving a high volume of candidates, you must also focus on attracting and engaging qualified candidates.

While there may be “more candidate flow than there was previously, having the right volume of candidate quality remains mission critical for recruiters,” Pete recently told SHRM.

With Jobvite candidate relationship management system, you can use AI-powered candidate matching to get recommendations for top talent already in your database to engage for open roles. From here, you can send personalized messages to individual candidates or groups of candidates.

Over time, you can see which types of email subject lines, SMS communications, and other engagement-related elements help you move more qualified candidates into your pipeline.

5) Build an employee referral program to get bonus candidates

The Employ Recruiter Nation Report found employee referrals are the fourth-most-valuable sourcing avenue for employers, with 13% of HR decision makers citing the channel as the best place to find high-quality candidates.

Your sourcers and recruitment marketers may add the most candidates to your talent tool, but an employee referral program can provide your talent acquisition team with premium candidates too.

Samtec recruiters are notified the moment a new referral comes in, and dedicated profiles are created for referred candidates. Meanwhile, employees who refer job seekers are updated as their referrals advance in the interview process. And all without the need for any manual work.

“From employees being able to seamlessly share application invitations within the platform to integrations with LinkedIn and Indeed, Jobvite allows us to enhance and support the work we already do and focus on growing our team through the networks of our employees,” said Samtec Compliance Coordinator and ATS Systems Administrator Michael Townsend.

6) Streamline the interview process and eliminate bottlenecks

When candidate encounter inconsistent communication and bottlenecks in the interview process, they may exit the hiring process altogether. That means your enterprise may miss out on high performers, simply because of interviewing challenges.

You can prevent future candidate drop-off by keeping active candidates apprised of their status and your decision-making timeline throughout the process.

“After investing time and effort into crafting tailored resumes and cover letters, preparing for interviews, and building hope, being met with sudden silence from a recruiter can be deeply discouraging,” HR professional Scott Sparks recently wrote.

A quick email or call is all it takes to keep top talent informed and interested in joining your business.

As for bottlenecks, analyze your interviewing data to identify any stages that take longer than average. See what differentiates those stages, and pare down the complexity of those stages or eliminate them altogether to speed up your hiring.

7) Analyze recent recruiting efforts and make data-backed changes

There are two main facets of your recruitment strategy your talent team should analyze frequently:  

1. Speed: Commonly tracked speed-related metrics include average time to hire by role, team, and location, and how long it takes the hiring team to provide feedback.
2. Quality: Tracking the effectiveness of sourcing and nurturing based on application rates, engagement rates, hiring manager satisfaction, and employee retention is critical for measuring candidate quality.

The more you assess and act on these metrics, the more easily you can improve in both areas. And the best technology that enables in-depth hiring analysis is a talent acquisition suite like Jobvite.

Former GroupM Talent Manager Jennifer Gabrielle-Chapman said the company used the native reporting and analytics in Jobvite to gain greater visibility into their recruiting speed and hiring quality.

“[We would] pull weekly data reports [in Jobvite] showing the activity across our operating companies, resource management within our talent team, be ahead of the curve for seasonal peaks and troughs, placement data and hires closed off in each week — the list goes on,” said Jennifer.

Actionable analytics are invaluable to the success of your recruitment strategy. All you need is a data-driven mindset and accessible insights into core metrics to elevate your hiring performance.

8) Think globally, not locally, to address critical hiring needs

When it comes to your candidate pool, you must look beyond your office locations to fill open roles. You will miss out on a large pool of qualified candidates by ignoring international job seekers.

“If you want to go after the best talent, then you have to go for a global recruiting strategy and not just a local one,” Robert Kelley, Professor of Management at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, recently told HR Executive.

Jobvite ensures that workforces spread across different countries and locales can streamline their hiring and tailor processes required to hire talent — no matter where they are.

Building more effective recruitment strategies to attract top talent requires the right enterprise recruiting technology. Book a Jobvite Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite demo today.

The post 8 Tips to Turbocharge Your Recruitment Strategy first appeared on Jobvite.

Closely monitoring hiring trends is a shared task for C-level executives, including human resources and talent acquisition leaders, as well as hiring managers and recruiters.

Regularly analyzing labor market data and tracking TA and workplace changes made by other employers helps hiring stakeholders develop and refine annual workforce plans, revamp their hiring processes, and prepare their recruiters to fill future roles more effectively.

Here, you will find hiring trends and recruiting insights that can help inform your company’s talent planning strategy for 2024, as you gear up your recruiting function for next year.

5 hiring trends to know in 2024

Gartner noted human resources leaders will empower their employees in 2024 by:

• Offering leadership and management training
• Upgrading their organizational culture
• Implementing new change management processes
• Making internal mobility a bigger priority

To improve their approach to talent acquisition, CHROs are also closely tracking these five hiring trends and factoring them into their companies’ headcount planning for the year ahead.

1) Artificial intelligence will play a bigger role in recruiting and hiring

Driving better recruiting and hiring outcomes with AI was a top priority for employers in 2023.

Moving forward, companies will explore even more AI use cases to automate administrative tasks, more quickly review resumes, and better engage job applicants and passive candidates.

Recruiters and hiring managers will use advanced AI recruiting technology to more quickly review resumes, mitigate hiring bias, and engage job applicants and passive candidates.

“Allowing AI to do the behind-the-scenes work frees recruiters to focus on the relationship-driven aspects of the hiring process to ensure the match is suitable for both the candidate and the company,” talent acquisition expert Jack Kelly recently wrote for Forbes.

Many enterprises continue to invest in applicant tracking systems (ATS) to streamline their hiring process and complement their talent acquisition teams’ recruitment marketing, employer branding, candidate sourcing, and pipeline management.

Expect more of these large-scale businesses to look for powerful, yet intuitive recruiting software that offers artificial intelligence capabilities as well in 2024.

While adoption is increasingly important for enterprises, Employ CEO Pete Lamson cautioned executives will need to put guardrails in place around their use of AI for recruiting.

“As technology advances … new [AI recruiting] use cases may arise,” Pete wrote for Forbes. “Leaders should implement a regular review of best practices to ensure that they are keeping up with …new safeguards that software developers integrate into their products.”

2) Improving productivity will be a primary focus for talent teams

Investing in AI is just one way talent leaders plan to boost recruiters’ performance in 2024. Many TA leaders also intended to use data more often to elevate their teams’ output.

The Employ 2023 Recruiter Nation Report found 24% of employers will invest more in reporting and analytics technology to enhance their data-driven recruiting and hiring processes.

“For talent acquisition professionals, getting a handle on their [recruiting and hiring] analytics, creating visibility, and shining a light on the most vital aspects of their performance is critically important,” Employ’s Data-Driven Recruiting Handbook stated.

Look for more enterprises to use analytics to improve key recruitment metrics, including their:

• Sourcing and nurturing effectiveness
• Application completion rates
• Hiring manager and candidate satisfaction
• Structured interviewing speed
• Recruiting quality and efficiency
• Talent pipeline and hiring diversity

Addressing these facets of their full-cycle recruiting will help TA teams fill job openings with high-quality job seekers more effectively. Just as important, it will also increase their hiring productivity and better contribute to business growth goals.

3) Leaders will adjust talent planning amid ongoing job market shifts

The labor market has experienced a lot of volatility in recent years:

• Employers adapted to a candidate-centric market during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• The hiring landscape shifted again in 2022. Some of those individuals who quit during The Great Resignation began looking for work again.
• In 2023, some sectors saw frequent layoffs, which provided employers who continued to hire with more qualified candidates to consider.

More market changes are likely to come in 2024. It remains to be seen who these changes will favor — employers or candidates — or whether companies will restart their hiring initiatives.

TalentLab VP of Talent Operations Sarah Doughty told SHRM that recruiters must ensure clear communication with hiring managers as new requisitions open in 2024.

“Just as the hiring manager will be able to provide helpful feedback on the job scope, the recruiter is there to provide equally useful feedback about the market,” said Sarah.

Communicating daily regarding open roles will help both parties ease back into hiring processes they may not have executed consistently together in some time.

4) Employers will adjust work models to better attract candidates

Recruiters pull a lot of levers to get qualified candidates into the recruiting funnel, including writing inclusive job descriptions, posting job ads to proven sourcing channels, and proactively reaching out to individuals with relevant skills and backgrounds.

And yet, this isn’t enough to convince some job seekers to apply and passive candidates to agree to join a screening call. A common reason these candidates don’t convert is the lack of flexible work options for employees offered by the employers in question.

More employers will carry out RTO plans in 2024. However, others will assess whether the move is right for their organizations, based on candidate feedback data that reveals job seekers’ sentiment about in-office, work-from-home, and hybrid work models.

“There’s a growing divide,” Gartner Jamie Kohn Senior Research Director recently explained to SHRM. “As companies have shifted their policies around RTO and shifted productivity expectations, we’re seeing employees feeling less loyal to remain.”

5) DEI will remain critical to culture and retention improvements

Some companies appear willing to scale back on diversity, equity, and inclusion and employee experience initiatives in 2024. Many employers, though, remain committed to making further progress with their DEI programs, including those tied to hiring.

The return on investment from this DEI focus can pay big dividends with hiring.

That figure rises to 63% for Millennial candidates and 77% for Gen Z prospects.

Coordinated DEI programs don’t just positively impact recruiting. Boston University School of Public Health Associate Professor Monica Wang noted it also bolster employee retention.

“Thinking about recruitment and retention and the overall health of an organization, creating inclusive and equitable work environments can actually facilitate success in those outcomes,” said Monica.

Given this, and the fact 50% of HR decision-makers intend to spend more on DEI technology to drive related programs, according to the Employ Recruiter Nation Report, expect more employers to reconsider slashing their DEI budgets and, instead, double down on initiatives.

Accelerate your enterprise recruiting process and scale your hiring strategy with the Jobvite Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite. Schedule a demo of our TA technology today.

The post Hiring Trends That Will Impact Your TA Approach in 2024 first appeared on Jobvite.

It’s obviously no secret the tight labor market continues to impact organizations in the United States and internationally. The Great Resignation is in the rearview mirror. However, the job market in North America and many other places worldwide hasn’t yet returned to pre-pandemic conditions.

Sure, there are far more employed workers than unemployed workers in several job sectors today — meaning the labor force participation rate remains fairly stout. (Particularly in the U.S.)

However, the Federal Reserve’s raising of interest rates has led many organizations — from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies — to hold off on filling job openings (and even pull them from their career sites and job boards) until lingering economic uncertainty clears up.

As Red Branch Media Founder and CEO Maren Hogan and Employ SVP People & Talent Corey Berkey shared on our recent webinar, C-suites and TA/HR leaders should simply continue to keep a close eye on industry trends — specifically, data that reveals how other employers are navigating this period of disruption so they can get ideas and inspiration for their own recruiting and hiring efforts.

Recruiters “feeling the pinch” — and burning out — in the ongoing tight labor market

As we enter 2024, labor demand is high (and growing), while labor supply varies from one industry to the next. Early retirements continue to hit executive teams at large-scale businesses. And the unemployment rate in the U.S. remains near lows seen prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In short, there are a lot of mixed signals in the continually tight labor market and economy.

“There’s now this added stress of not only ‘I’ve got a lot of reqs, my skills are in demand, and my business needs me to be able to perform,’ but also that performance pressure gets accelerated in the world we’re living in today because … there’s less people to manage those reqs,” said Corey.

Layer on top of that what recruiting professionals are seeing in the tight labor market today (high employee turnover rates, worker displacement due to ever-changing business dynamics and needs), and there’s clearly a palpable volatility inside the recruiting space, Corey added.

“All that really compounds that stress [for talent acquisition teams],” according to Corey.

Increasing salary bands one way employers better compete for talent in tight labor market

On top of dealing with mounting pressure, Corey relayed how recruiters also have to deal with budgetary constraints decided on by their leadership as it relates to both their talent team budget (i.e., getting the tech tools and recruitment marketing dollars they need to succeed) and the salary levels they’re able to offer candidates of interest toward the end of each hiring cycle.

“[Budget cuts] play out across the entire business,” said Corey. “But, TA feels that burden, because they’re trying to negotiate to these accepted offers. They’re trying to drive the business forward. But, they’re trying to do with less and less resources and less salary dollars.”

Despite getting seemingly not-as-competitive salary bands for many open roles, some recruiters are working more closely with their C-suites to secure more money to offer top candidates.

“Candidates are kind of used to getting what they want,” said Maren. “They got a good, solid 18 months there [of having a candidate-centric market]. And now, they’re kind of not backing down from some of those needs, desires, and demands.” This, in turn, makes it much harder for recruiting orgs to fill vacant roles with high-quality candidates at all, let alone in a timely and efficient manner.

To prevent their recruiters from having to be the “intermediaries” regarding salary discussions with prospective hires, Maren said it’s vital for C-suites to ask themselves how they can “strike a balance between sort of rigid corporate budgets and the salary expectations of candidates.”

“Strategic leaning” toward RPOs growing rapidly, as employers combat labor market tightness

Aside from discussing the emotional impact the tight labor market has had on recruiters personally and professionally, Corey and Maren touched on what employers at large are doing to compete for talent and ensure they keep their talent pools filled with many relevant, qualified candidates.

One way a number of companies are doing this? Turning to recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) service providers that can tackle numerous talent acquisition tasks and address niche hiring needs businesses’ in-house recruiting orgs simply don’t have the time or expertise to tackle.

Investment in RPOs is “a recognition that TA has matured into a distinct specialty, and orgs are harvesting specialized fields from external providers” to fill key roles, said Maren.

There are certainly other ways in which employers are coping with the tight labor market and ensuring they can realize their desired level of headcount growth, our research found. For instance:

• 42% of businesses are optimizing their recruiting processes to accelerate hiring
• 34% are using AI tools to augment their day-to-day talent acquisition tasks
• 30% are onboarding more advanced and scalable TA tech — like ATS software

The combination of these hiring strategy adjustments and factoring in the distinct needs of their own businesses is what will set talent teams up for success in 2024 and beyond, per Corey.

“Leaders across the globe are going to get handed a req list on January 1 and say, ‘Hey, the budgets approved — go get ’em,” said Corey. “And we’ve got to make sure that we’re able to be scalable with hiring and leverage all these [recruiting] modes as we navigate the labor market.”

Discover how our enterprise applicant tracking system can help you execute and optimize your talent acquisition strategy and enhance your hiring efforts amid tight market conditions.

The post Evolving Your Hiring Approach in a Tight Labor Market first appeared on Jobvite.

Your company’s success hinges on the ability to attract and hire the best talent. And your annual recruitment plan is the linchpin of your talent acquisition strategy. But, you can’t just develop a recruiting plan. You also have to revisit it frequently. (That is, at least quarterly, but ideally monthly).

Why? Because while said plan may lead to the engagement and hiring of many high-potential candidates in the initial weeks and months after producing it, your org’s business objectives will invariably change over time. And with those changes often come new headcount needs.

Put another way?

But, you and your executive staff can’t forget that every prosperous recruitment plan should include check-ins to see if it’s leading to the desired ROI. (That is, a high volume of net-new prospects added to one’s talent pool and many new high-quality hires for each business unit and location.)

Why revamping your recruitment plan regularly is critical to your hiring success

It’s impossible to overstate the significance of a strong (read: scalable and sustainable) hiring plan.

Specifically, one that leads to a streamlined and easily repeatable hiring process, thanks to the use of advanced recruitment tools and technologies by the entire hiring team. (More on this shortly.)

By regularly reviewing and updating your recruitment methods and solutions and reviewing the state of your recruiting budgets and metrics (from cost per hire to recruiting funnel speed), you can not only boost your new-hire conversion rate, but also set a solid foundation for future business growth.

Simply put, the pros of recruitment plan “refreshes” are many for your talent team and org at large.

You can increase the quality and quantity of your candidate pool

Innovative sourcing methods can greatly enhance your recruitment process. Social media platforms, online job boards, and employee referral programs can all contribute to a more effective sourcing strategy. By fostering connections in the industry and staying up-to-date on relevant communities and online groups, you can ensure that your enterprise taps into the best talent pools available.

You can better attract top talent with enhanced employer branding

The collective power of each employer brand element (e.g., your job description copy, career site layout, social media presence) impacts your ability to attract the most qualified candidates today.

A strong brand boosts the public perception of your business. As it relates to recruiting, though, it also fosters trust with job seekers and can convinces these folks your org is the right fit for them.

By investing in your org’s reputation and ensuring a consistent message through your job postings, website, and social channels, you can greatly enhance your pool of potential candidates.

You can augment interview and candidate evaluation techniques

A key part of revitalizing your recruitment plan is refining your interview and assessment techniques.

By incorporating behavioral interview questions, simulation exercises, and case studies into your hiring strategy, you can better assess each job candidate’s abilities, potential, and work style.

In turn, this can help you make more informed, confident hiring decisions.

Your can work with HR to make your new-hire onboarding seamless

Your work doesn’t end once you’ve made a job offer. A strong employee onboarding process is essential to ensure that your new hires feel welcomed and well-integrated into the company culture.

By providing the necessary resources and support to your HR colleagues from day one with onboarding a new staff member, you can contribute to the never-ending process of realizing a positive and productive work environment that encourages employee retention and engagement.

How to assess and improve your recruitment plan

Those are the pros of routinely revamping your recruitment plan. But, what are some actual tactics and activities you should look to update? We can think of a handful of focus areas for your TA team.

Clearly define the job opening and specifications

Ensure your team understands the position you are looking to fill and the required qualifications.

Begin by revisiting your job specifications to establish whether they accurately detail the qualifications, skills, and experience required for each role. In so doing, you’ll avoid wasting time on ill-suited applicants and better target qualified candidates who align with your specific needs.

Streamline your talent screening and interviewing

A well-structured and efficient interview process is pivotal to your organization’s hiring success.

By enhancing the quality of your interviews via updating interview questions, streamlining the interview process (i.e., removing unnecessary stages), and training hiring managers to conduct effective interviews, you’ll be better able to identify top “contenders” for open positions.

Don’t forget about silver-medalist candidates

A core part of any successful recruitment plan is making the effort to revisit and engage with candidates you have previously considered for other roles. By keeping a line of communication open with formerly engaged prospects, you reduce the need to source net-new candidates for roles.

Ensure you have the right ATS software

This is arguably the biggest facet of your talent strategy to regularly evaluate and improve.

Technological advancements have come to the forefront in recent years, making it easier than ever to find and manage potential candidates. Implementing an applicant tracking system (ATS) to help streamline and manage your recruitment strategy effectively is a no-brainer for your org.

“For those [talent teams] not using purpose-built technology, now could be the time, or risk losing out on top-tier candidates,” Employ SVP People & Talent Corey Berkey recently wrote for Forbes.

Find out how you and your talent team can execute your recruiting strategies more effectively and efficiently with Jobvite’s powerful enterprise applicant tracking system.

The post How to Refresh Your Recruitment Plan (and Hire Smarter) first appeared on Jobvite.

In today’s increasingly multicultural and global workforce, employers know the importance of implementing dedicated diversity recruiting strategies. (Not to mention regularly refining them.)

That is, execs at large-scale orgs like yours know improving diversity company-wide can lead to increased creativity, better decision-making, and a more vibrant company culture.

As Employ SVP Customer Success Jessica Green told StrategicCHRO360, though, that’s not the case. Rather, your diversity recruiting strategies and DEI initiatives must be a true team effort among your DEI committee, C-suite, TA team, CHRO, and people managers.

Only when that’s the case can you make real, lasting progress.

“The challenge for many [orgs] today is moving away from a single owner and making diversity, equity and inclusion the responsibility of every leader and individual in the company,” said Jessica.

“When the … mindset shifts from a single owner to everyone participating, the DEI progress can be more stable, consistent, and pervasive throughout the organization.”

So, that begs the question: How can you and your company develop new (or alter existing) diversity recruiting strategies to better attract, engage, and convert more diverse talent?

5 diversity recruiting strategies to implement

Diversity and inclusion are critical within the workplace. A concerted focus on improving both leads to increasingly diverse teams and better productivity. (Facts you certainly already know.)

Employing individuals from historically marginalized groups; making these folks feel seen, heard, and welcome from day one; and setting each new hire up for success in their respective roles fosters greater innovation, creates a positive work environment, and improves employee engagement.

Put another way? Hire people of different ethnicities, genders, gender identities, ages, and sexual orientations, and this broad representation at your org will have dual benefits:

• Your workforce will experience greater satisfaction and stick around your company longer.
• Your org will see bottom-line growth, due largely to direct contributions from these workers.

But, what exact diversity recruiting strategies should you try? We’ve got some we think can help. Here are five DEI hiring approaches we’ve seen Jobvite customers put into place in recent years.

Strategy #1: Reevaluating job descriptions

This is more of a tactical change than a strategy. That said, making this a top priority will pay long-term dividends for your employer brand and ability to attract qualified diverse talent.

The language used in job descriptions plays a significant role in attracting diverse candidates. Update your approach to writing postings to include solely inclusive terms and avoid gender-biased words (e.g., “hacker,” “rockstar”), and you’ll better appeal to candidates from underrepresented groups. 

Additionally, include an equal opportunity employer statement in your listings. This will reiterate your company’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion for potential job leads.

Strategy #2: Expanding sourcing channels

Often, the key to finding diverse talent is to tap into networks and communities where diverse candidates already engage. Broaden your usual sourcing avenues to reach talent of different backgrounds (i.e., job boards for Black, Hispanic, and Asian developers and tech talent).

Forward-thinking talent teams collaborate with local orgs and educational institutions to access broader candidate pools and invite potential applicants from underrepresented demographics. They also take part in diversity hiring fairs to find fresh talent who are ideal fits for open roles.

“Expanding the talent pool should also include widening the geographic focus,” McKinsey and Co. partners recently wrote. They noted that, while it’s tempting to look solely at places like San Francisco and Austin to source high-quality tech talent, employers should also look at other metro areas not widely known for their tech talent, but nonetheless have burgeoning tech communities.

Strategy #3: Cultivating a strong culture

One of the most effective diversity recruiting strategies is gradually addressing issues with and improving the quality of your company culture to ensure it fully embraces diversity.

Consider personal testimonials from current employees. For instance, those who run or are simply part of employee resources groups (ERGs) who come from diverse backgrounds can speak to your org’s commitment to DEI progress, including as it pertains to hiring a wide array of diverse talent

You can then share these stories on social media, in blog posts, and via your brand website.

Just remember: Establishing a diverse workforce begins with fostering an inclusive and hospitable work environment. This involves developing company-wide DEI policies, organizing employee diversity training sessions, and offering resources to underrepresented groups within your org.

Strategy #4: Hosting bias reduction training

Unconscious biases can creep up during the hiring process even for DEI “leaders.” When it does, it can negatively impact the hiring process and hinder one’s ability to attract and hire diverse talent.

The easiest way to address unconscious bias is to train your TA team, hiring managers, and others who may partake in interview panels on how to recognize and mitigate their own unconscious bias.

“By establishing a culture of continuous improvement, companies can put in place regular review mechanisms … for their hiring processes to identify areas where biases may be present, and then take action to address them,” HumanLearn CEO Andre Shojaie recently wrote for Forbes.

Strategy #5: Enhancing the interview process

Ensuring diversity in your interview panel members can lead to a more balanced decision-making process. When candidates see a diverse interview panel, they understand that your org values diversity, helping to create a positive impression. Moreover, diverse panels can help to reduce bias during the interview process, ultimately leading to more diverse hiring outcomes.

Implementing a structured interview process can also help reduce potential variances resulting from implicit biases. If every candidate has the same questions to answer, it’s far easier to consider them on an equal playing field compared to having a different convo in every interview.

Using the right enterprise ATS to execute your diversity recruiting strategies

In today’s digital age, tech plays a big role in shaping the recruiting and hiring landscape.

At Jobvite, we understand the power of leveraging tech to improve diversity recruiting strategies. Our best-in-class platform is designed to provide employers with the tools they need to create an efficient and equitable recruitment process that promotes inclusivity for all candidates.

“In today’s challenging labor market, those who prioritize [DEI] will find more qualified candidates, which can turn into new hires,” Employ SVP People & Talent Corey Berkey recently wrote for The Undercover Recruiter. “Talent teams can improve the diversity of their candidate slates by taking charge and applying the right strategies throughout the hiring process.”

And the “right” strategies entail using a leading ATS with candidate relationship management and analytics capabilities that makes it easy to identify, engage, analyze, and employ top diverse talent.

Learn how Jobvite can strengthen your diversity recruiting. Book a demo to learn how our powerful enterprise ATS can help you thrive in today’s — and tomorrow’s — hiring landscape.

The post What Today’s Top Diversity Recruiting Strategies Entail first appeared on Jobvite.

• New product and service offerings they plan to release
• The eventual attrition of certain existing employees
• Positions that, at the time of planning, require backfills
• Desired sales initiatives and marketing campaigns
• The bandwidth of their in-house talent acquisition teams

The truth is creating a strategic hiring plan is just “Phase One” of preparations for the year ahead.

Why? Because things change (a lot and often) at every large-scale org today — internally (e.g., adoption of new or altered business model) and externally (e.g., dealing with poor economic conditions).

And the same is undoubtedly true for your business.

How talent leaders can help their teams “switch gears” amid strategic hiring plan changes

As a talent acquisition leader, it’s your responsibility to ensure you and your recruiters keep up with the fast-paced changes within the job market and your organization at large adjust on the fly if/as needed.

From labor market shifts and tech advancements, to new laws and industry demands, what may have held true at the beginning of the year may no longer be applicable or sufficient months down the line.

Here are specific facets of your recruiting and hiring efforts that must be evaluated monthly to ensure your team can make the requisite changes based on hiring plan modifications made by your C-suite.

Learn about emerging positional needs at your org

In an age of rapid digitalization and technological advancements, it’s no surprise that new job roles, skills, and competencies are emerging regularly. Revisiting your company’s hiring plan quarterly with other hiring stakeholders allows you to identify and fill any new skill gaps that may have emerged.

This regular reassessment of your recruiting insights and hiring needs ensures your company can compete for and convert top talent to fill critical roles and adjust its talent acquisition efforts on the fly.

“It’s important not to make drastic changes considering short-term economic headwinds,” Employ SVP People & Talent Corey Berkey recently wrote for Forbes.

“Instead, ensure all plans not only help overcome a potential economic downturn but also complement long-term recruiting strategies once the economy bounces back.”

Many C-suites abide by this wise approach by baking budget into their annual plans for talent acquisition to find the right individuals for future TBD positions. This way, when new headcount needs invariably arise down the line, TA has the flexibility and agility to act quickly on those reqs.

Adjust TA activities based on budget and goal changes

Reviewing your hiring budget and goals every quarter to ensures business leaders are on track and can make any necessary adjustments to stay ahead of the game.

Not to mention, in a volatile economic climate, your initial hiring budget and goals might change due to unforeseen circumstances or opportunities. Or, shifts in financial circumstances might require companies to adjust their hiring budget or redirect resources to different areas of the org.

A quarterly review allows you to make informed decisions and reallocate resources as needed, ultimately paving the way to meeting your long-term objectives.

Redefine the “perfect” candidate for each team and role

What the optimal candidate looks like for certain positions and business units will change over time, given the needs of your org and specific departments will change over time.

Revisiting the ideal candidate profile for each role and team at your company and ensuring recruiters know what to look for in leads will help you hire only the most applicable individuals.

You need to ensure the “purple-squirrel” candidates you deem ideal for your business can come from a variety of backgrounds so as to engage a diverse array of talent for openings.

Creating a hiring plan template for your ICPs is one thing. But, don’t forget to regularly revisit the core elements of your TA strategy: everything from writing job descriptions, to developing targeted recruitment marketing campaigns, to working with HR on the onboarding process.

Fine-tune your hiring process with your ops manager

Conducting a quarterly evaluation of your recruitment processes — often overseen by talent operations — enables you to identify and rectify any inefficiencies or weaknesses in your hiring strategy.

This can range from optimizing job postings on social media and job boards for better visibility and engagement to tweaking your structured interview process to improve the candidate experience.

Drawing on this data tied to your TA efforts, you can glean valuable insights into ever-evolving candidate expectations and the changing job market landscape to optimize your hiring approach.

Discover how you can execute on and adapt your hiring plan with ease using Evolve, our award-winning Talent Acquisition Suite for enterprise organizations like yours.

The post How to Adjust to Strategic Hiring Plan Changes first appeared on Jobvite.

By Zac Amos, Features Editor at ReHack

Zac Amos serves as the Features Editor at ReHack, where he covers AI, big data, and automation. He is especially interested in how technological advancements can be applied to the HR sector.

For more of his work, follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can streamline the hiring process, making it easier for recruiting teams to acquire new talent. While AI can support better decision making and reduced hiring bias, it actually comes equipped with the same discriminations as the people who created it. So how can companies overcome this challenge?

What is AI bias?

There are numerous biases in the hiring, management and firing processes. Many are unconscious or subtle — for example, hiring slightly fewer women overall or letting go of older employees too soon.

About 50% of people think their race, gender or ethnicity has made it harder to land a job. Some companies have implemented AI in their TA functions to help make decisions without factoring in these protected classes.

The issue is that AI doesn’t work that way. It’s only as good as the data set programmers use to train it, and any errors or inherent biases will be reflected in the AI’s output. These aren’t emotional biases, but programming errors that lead to unwanted outcomes. Several common problems create biases in AI.

Why AI bias is a challenge in hiring

Talent teams are committed to treating candidates fairly in the hiring process. But, with significant workloads, many teams have turned to AI and automation software to help them sort through resumes or job applications.

Before COVID-19, the average job opening received 250 applications. Yet applicant flow for many roles has increased. For example, some entry-level jobs have received thousands of candidates, with one receiving an overwhelming 4,228 applications.

Many hiring teams use AI programs, but this software must be unbiased. It can mean the difference between automatically discarding an application and hiring the most qualified candidate.

The AI recruitment industry is worth over $500 million, and recruiting teams use it for everything from predicting job performance to assessing facial expressions during a video interview.

However, many applicants report these types of software rejecting them based on having foreign-sounding names or including certain words in their resumes. People’s names and word choices aren’t a protected class, but often indicate race, gender or age.

In 2018, Amazon scrapped a recruiting tool that automatically penalized resumes that included the word “women’s,” as in “women’s studies” or “women’s university.” That’s despite the fact that orgs in the top quartile for gender diversity are 25% more likely to make above-average profits than those in the lowest.

Reducing the effects of AI bias in hiring

How can well-meaning recruiting teams avoid these types of bias when using AI in their hiring process?

Look to create balance with AI in recruiting

AI is simply a tool that does what it was designed to do. Training it with biased data leads to skewed results.

Recruiting teams must scrutinize any software for hiring new employees. Above all, it’s always best to have a real person make the final decisions — because if a company wants to hire human beings, it should treat them as such.

Download our Automation and AI in Recruiting report today to learn more about the risks and rewards of leveraging artificial intelligence and automated workflows for talent acquisition.

The post How to Reduce the Effects of AI Bias in Hiring first appeared on Jobvite.

Help brands flag suitable candidates

We could leverage ChatGPT to assist with the initial screening and assessment of job candidates. ChatGPT can analyze large volumes of text data, provide insights, and make intelligent recommendations based on that analysis. This is particularly useful in the early stages of recruiting when companies are typically inundated with many resumes and applications.

By integrating ChatGPT into their hiring process, you can leverage its natural language processing capabilities to quickly and efficiently screen job candidates based on their resumes, cover letters, and other application materials.

ChatGPT can also help identify critical skills, experiences, and qualifications required for a particular job and flag candidates that meet those criteria.

Zach Goldstein, CEO and Founder, Public Rec

Create AI-written cover letters

One of the most time-consuming parts of a job application is writing a cover letter. Prospective employees may choose to use ChatGPT to help them create these letters faster, so they can apply for more jobs in a day.

A recruiter’s job is then to discern those applicants who have put genuine thought and time into their cover letter — or, perhaps, who have leaned on AI for support, but brought their own ideas and voice to the process as well. You want your employees to work smart, after all. But you also want to hire people, not bots.

Matthew Stibbe, CEO, Articulate Marketing

Set up interactive chatbots to guide job seekers

ChatGPT’s natural language processing capabilities could create interactive chatbots or virtual assistants that help guide job seekers through the application process, providing personalized support and help every step of the way.

For example, a chatbot could ask candidates questions about their qualifications, experience, and interests in order to recommend jobs that are a good fit for their skills and career goals. It could also provide information about the company culture, benefits, and other aspects of the job that might interest candidates.

During the application process, the chatbot could help candidates complete each step, providing guidance on how to fill out forms, upload documents, and answer specific questions.

It could also provide real-time feedback on the status of their application, letting candidates know when their application has been received when they’re being considered for the job, and when a decision has been made.

Luciano Colos, Founder and CEO, PitchGrade

Normalize video introductions

As a recruiter, I’m already seeing the effects of ChatGPT in the industry. The biggest change?

ChatGPT is reducing the value of cover letters. As more and more candidates are using AI to put together an introduction, I’m having to find better ways to get to know applicants beyond their skill set and education.

For me, this means a renewed focus on things like emotional intelligence tests and personality evaluations. Video meet-and-greets are another great alternative.

It’s a welcome change on both sides of the hiring process; candidates have long told me that cover letters are the worst part of job hunting, and personally, I’ve never found them particularly illuminating.

Rob Reeves, CEO and President, Redfish Technology

Hasten the onboarding process

While there are some concerning ways that ChatGPT could impact hiring negatively — such as increasing biases and restricting access to minority candidates — there are also some positive applications of ChatGPT that we can expect, too.

One application that I am very much looking forward to is a chatbot that can help new hires get onboarded more quickly. If the tool is trained on the entire company’s policies, communications, processes, and values, it can be a perfect sounding board for new employees who want to get their questions answered and get up to speed faster without bothering their busy colleagues too much.

Brett Ungashick, CEO and CHRO, OutSail

Reduce human bias in hiring

ChatGPT has the potential to greatly impact the recruiting and hiring process by helping to reduce bias. One way it can achieve this is by identifying biased language in job postings and other recruitment materials.

By analyzing the language used, ChatGPT can flag gender-specific language or other potentially biased phrasing that may deter certain groups of candidates from applying. Additionally, ChatGPT can provide suggestions for more inclusive language to replace biased language in job postings and resumes, thus making them more appealing to a wider pool of candidates.

Another way ChatGPT can reduce bias is by conducting blind resume screening, which involves removing personal information from resumes to reduce the potential for unconscious bias based on factors such as name, age, or gender. Using AI language models like ChatGPT in the recruiting and hiring process has the potential to greatly improve diversity and inclusivity in the workforce.

Kimberley Tyler-Smith, VP, Strategy and Growth, Resume Worded

Generate sourcing, nurturing, and interviewing ideas

In my experience with ChatGPT, it is still at times inaccurate, or rather it depends on how you phrase queries for it to be at its most effective. I currently use it for coming up with ideas on interview questions and for coming up with the framework for job postings. It’s a great tool for brainstorming a set of interview questions for a specific job posting.

In the future, I think ChatGPT might provide generated interview questions, job postings, and help with the onboarding process, provided the accuracy continues to improve. Generating interview questions isn’t something it can’t do now, but with the job postings, I find myself having to double-check its content for accuracy, as several times it has either not understood the query or returned inaccurate info about a certain job.

As it stands now, it is great for helping a recruiter or HR person develop ideas and get the creative juices flowing. I expect this to continue to get better soon.

Brian Clark, CEO and Marketing Director, United Medical Education

Deliver company information

AI is already a major part of the recruitment process. There are applicant tracking systems and chatbots being used to speed up resume screening and initial candidate engagement. One way that ChatGPT can make an impact here is by taking over the initial screening interviews.

The initial screening interviews, which can be pretty boring, can now turn into something fun and can be a two-way street as well. Candidates can learn more about the company culture and job responsibilities, and the answers won’t sound copy-pasted from the brochure.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT can also analyze and interpret their responses to figure out whether they meet the requirements to go to the next step of the interview.

I wasn’t very happy with how the applicant tracking systems were taking over the recruitment process. Sometimes, they can reject a candidate just because of unconventional formatting or design. With ChatGPT in the playground, all the previous AI recruitment tools being used can be more polished.

Andreas Grant, Founder, Networks Hardware

Shift towards gamified pre-employment assessments

In the age of ChatGPT, text is cheap. Historically, pre-employment assessments have been largely text-based, relying on multiple-choice questions and rich text information. ChatGPT has already shown itself able to answer these questions with frightening accuracy, making traditional pre-employment tests terminally vulnerable to cheating.

Gamified assessments, however, employ game mechanics that are substantially more complex. They use these mechanics to assess spatial reasoning, processing speed, 3D rotation, prioritization, and decision-making, rendering ChatGPT useless.

Consequently, I foresee a massive shift toward ChatGPT-proof gamified assessments in the pre-employment testing space, along with a rapid discontinuation of text-based assessments soon.

Ben Schwencke, Business Psychologist, Test Partnership

May replicate inherent bias

Using ChatGPT in hiring/recruitment can hurt minorities, if the data used to train the algorithm has inherent biases against certain demographics. In such instances, the algorithm may replicate these biases in its decision-making process, resulting in minority candidates being overlooked or unfairly eliminated from the hiring process.

Moreover, ChatGPT algorithms may not recognize and account for the nuances of language and cultural differences that can be relevant in hiring decisions, leading to misinterpretation or misunderstanding of a candidate’s qualifications, experience, and communication style, and thus unfairly disqualifying minority candidates.

Organizations should ensure that their ChatGPT algorithms are ethically designed and validated to ensure fair and unbiased hiring practices. Human interaction is also essential to account for the nuances that algorithms may not be able to detect or assess.

Lilia Koss, Community Manager, Facialteam

Rewrite company pitches with the candidate in mind

ChatGPT can rewrite company pitches in candidate-friendly language. When you’re recruiting, you’re pitching your company. Many times, these pitches come across as either too vague or too complex.

To really grab a potential candidate’s attention, it needs to be written clearly and concisely. It should emphasize your company culture, explain the role well, and detail what you’re looking for in a candidate. ChatGPT can even consider what candidates want to read when they’re researching open positions to write a pitch tailored to them.

Andrew Meyer, CEO, Arbor

Enhance the candidate experience

ChatGPT can have a significant impact on recruiting and hiring by improving the candidate experience. ChatGPT can communicate with prospects in a timely and tailored manner throughout the employment process, from initial outreach through a job offer.

I think this can assist in keeping candidates motivated and informed, lowering the risk of losing top talent to other opportunities.

ChatGPT may also answer applicant inquiries and provide feedback on their application status in a faster and more effective manner, which can contribute to a better candidate experience. Companies can also strengthen their employer brand to attract more top talent.

Jeff Romero, Founder, Octiv Digital

Check out our Automation and AI in Recruiting eBook today to discover how you can leverage artificial intelligence and automated workflows to improve your hiring efforts.

The post How Will ChatGPT Impact Recruiting and Hiring Today? first appeared on Jobvite.