Training the Sharpest Tools in the Shed
It's almost harvest season in Indiana. That means business -- quite literally. It's the beginning of a new quarter, and there is plenty of fresh clientele to pick from the prospective fields. But harvesting the right clients means setting the groundwork with the sharpest tools in the shed. Yes, that was one huge gardening metaphor for recruiting and training great people -- but a good...
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Why Machine Learning Is a Job Seeker's Best Friend
Jobandtalent is a job-matching platform based in London and Madrid. Given the company's recently announced plans to expand into the U.S., we thought now would be a good time to talk to cofounder and CEO Juan Urdiales about what his company does and why he believes job matching, rather than job searching, will soon be the new normal. When we talk about the passive vs. active candidate...
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What Millennials Want Employers to Know About Social Media
It's the age of millennials. As of Q1 of 2015, this generation has surpassed Gen. X as the largest group in the U.S. labor force, according to Pew Research Center. There's no doubt they're changing the shape of the modern workplace, so companies have to make sure they can keep up. One of the most radical differences between today's workplace and that of previous generations is the...
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Social Needs to Get Personal
Ed. Note: This begins a series of posts from Richard Weaver of My Expert People on the world of social recruiting. Be on the lookout for parts two and three, coming soon! Social recruiting has been one of the big stories in hiring over the past few years. Led by LinkedIn, social networks are routinely used to increase reach, spread news of jobs, and/or actively identify potential...
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4 Cold Email Formulas That You Need to Know About
First cold calls, now cold emails. For HR-tech companies trying to expand their professional networks and gain exposure for their products or services, cold emailing is essential to branching out. Unfortunately, no one really likes being bombarded with unsolicited emails. In fact, according to MailChimp's July 2015 Email Marketing Benchmarks, companies within the business and finance...
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How Slack Improved Our Company Culture
My company, a commercial real estate brokerage with 15 people, uses Slack, and we have found it to be an integral part of not only our community culture, but also our day-to-day functioning and productivity. At TheSquareFoot, we opted for an open floor plan. We love how this layout fosters a strong sense of community and openness for our team. It encourages daily check-ins, collaboration, and...
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Building a Better Employee Engagement Tool
"Employee engagement, at the moment, is in a weird situation," says Marcus Buckingham, a researcher, author, speaker, and head of the Marcus Buckingham Company (TMBC). You're likely already aware of the dismal state of employee engagement in the U.S. and abroad, but the "weird" situation of which Buckingham speaks goes much further beyond that. In his opinion, we have more than just an employee...
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5 Ways to Use Big Data to Get Scientific About Recruiting
As a discipline, recruiting has always been on the front lines of competitive strategy for any business: finding the talent to execute the vision while providing valuable insight back to the business on how factors influencing hiring and ongoing cultivation of talent might impact company development. Recruiters are key to finding the people who will execute their company's vision, and are...
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What Employees Want From Your Learning Management System
Once associated with compliance training and the somewhat dreary task of onboarding new employees, learning management systems (LMS) are currently being reinvented as employee engagement tools. And given how disengaged much of the global workforce is these days -- according to Gallup, only 31.5 percent of U.S. workers are engaged in their jobs -- some might say this reinvention is long...
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Why You Probably Shouldn't Handle Your Own Payroll
On the face of it, it seems like a great idea. If you're an entrepreneur or small-business owner, your young and/or comparatively tiny company may not be able to afford hiring a payroll specialist. Outsourcing your payroll operations may also be off the table, for the same reason. So, what's a business owner to do? Well, you could just handle the payroll yourself. You don't have that many...
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3 Ways to Decrease Your Company's Turnover Rate
The dreaded turnover rate. That's one of those percentages we don't like to see increase regularly. Losing employees and onboarding new ones is costly and exhausting. Here are a few ways to halt your growing turnover rate: 1. Offer Employees the Opportunity to Grow No employee wants to feel stuck. Have a conversation with your employees about their roles and goals during the...
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Will Algorithms Soon Make All the Big HR Decisions?
For a long time now, HR has enjoyed a relatively unchallenged position. It makes sense, of course: if you have questions about or issues regarding hiring, firing, employee engagement, or retention, who else would you go to but HR? But things are beginning to change: HR departments suddenly have competition, thanks to algorithms that can use big data to make decisions -- decisions that...
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Meet the Talent Acquisition Technology Ecosystem
The world of talent acquisition technology is a wide one. Applicant tracking systems; candidate relationship management tools; employee referral platforms; psychometric tools: the list of talent acquisition technologies seems ever-lengthening, winding through the industry like the sleek body of a never-ending python. And the landscape of this wide world is always shifting: new tools arise in...
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Teach Your Employees About Career-Boosting Email Habits
If there's one element of the workplace that is common to us all, it is email. From CEOs to interns, we are all email users. In fact, the recent "FewClix Email Time Suck Survey" conducted by Kelton Global found that the average American spends 90 minutes with email every day! Pew Research found that 61 percent of professionals view email as a "very important" workplace...
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Programmatic Advertising: a Better Way to Place Job Ads?
Over the past seven or eight years, programmatic advertising has become the marketer's best friend. Compared to other methods of buying ads, programmatic advertising delivers dramatically higher returns on investment, and it allows for a more targeted approach to placing ads in front of the right audiences. It should come as no surprise, then, that more and more marketers are turning to...
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Employers Are Crowdsourcing Coding: Here's Why
Companies lacking the skills or manpower to complete coding projects usually onboard a new employee or contract a freelancer. However, there's a third, more cost-effective option for one-off projects: crowdsourcing. The strategy seems risky, because it relies on complete strangers, but it works well for nonprofits and enterprises alike. In the context of coding work, crowdsourcing involves...
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Swipe Right to Recruit Your Next Candidate
Just as we share files through the virtual pipelines, we want (and need) recruitment software to be easy and efficient. Following wider trends in the consumerization of technology, members of the HR field now demand quick and simple platforms. Attention spans are shrinking, and recruiters, candidates, and HR professionals are not immune. As a result, many would rather adopt "plug and...
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Why Paperless Onboarding Rules
According to research from the Aberdeen Group, only 21 percent of companies said improving the candidate experience was a top priority for 2014. And yet, turnover and employe engagement are huge problems. Could great candidate experiences and proper onboarding help solve these problems? Every handshake, smile, paper signed, and mission statement read is part of the first impression a company...
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How to Use e-Learning to Boost Productivity
As the pace of change picks up for corporations worldwide, it becomes more and more important for employers to ensure that their employees are poised and ready to meet new challenges. A key way to do just that is by leveraging e-learning. On the Upside Learning blog, senior marketing communications manager Pranjalee Thanekar reports on the latest trends in bringing learners together...
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The Benefits of Modern Performance Management Software
Frustration. Anxiety. Boredom. Confusion. If any of these emotions describe the process your company uses to administer performance reviews, there's a good chance those same emotions are found in both the reviewer and the reviewee. Recent research from Globoforce found that 53 percent of employees say performance reviews don't motivate them to work harder, and 63 of employees felt their...
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Are HR Analytics Right for Your Organization?
Human resources analytics are being embraced by more and more organizations these days. HR analytics can be especially helpful in spotting trends in your company, influencing hiring decisions, and identifying career development (i.e. employee retention) and promotion opportunities. Writing at TechTarget.com, Margaret Rouse says there's a need for human resources analytics because companies...
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Mobile-Optimized Career Sites: More Important Than Ever
On April 21st, Google made an important change to its search algorithm: mobile-friendliness now plays a bigger role in mobile search results. Mobile-friendly sites will rank higher in the results of searches carried out on mobile devices, whereas sites that don't play well with mobile technology will suffer a significant hit in their rankings. This change shouldn't exactly come as a...
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Have You Called Your HR Vendor Lately?
I love a good comedy. In fact, I even enjoy not-so-good comedies. I find myself quoting my favorite lines on a daily basis in response to what life throws my way. One of my favorites comes from Will Ferrell's character in the movie Zoolander: "They're the same face! Doesn't anybody notice this? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!" What does this have to do with HR? With staffing? With...
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5 Ways Talent Analytics Can Help Spot the Right Candidate
Big data and talent analytics are transforming the hiring process as we know it. By definition, talent analytics is the practical application of big data techniques to human resources, taking into account the data of past, current, and potential employees to produce insight. With this insight on jobs data, businesses can more easily identify top employee qualities and use this valuable...
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The Evolution of China's Talent in the Technology Sector
In the early 1980s, China was a huge unexplored market for investment. Many well-known multinational technology companies such as HP, IBM, and Motorola entered as pioneers into the Chinese market to reap the benefits of China's exponential growth. At the time, these large multinational companies hired experienced leaders from the four "Asian Tigers" (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South...
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Our Careers Are No Longer Linear — and Our Hiring Processes Are Stuck in the Past
Greg Moran, CEO of candidate screening company Chequed.com, says that he and many of the members of his age group -- slightly older than the millennials -- tended to view the application process the same way one might view buying a house. "It was long, it was painful, and thankfully, you didn't have to do it a lot," Moran jokes. "When you were in that process, you knew it wasn't going to...
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Grassroots Recruiting: Leverage Technology, but Keep It Simple
Recruiting local hourly candidates is a lot like scouting for a college or professional sports team. Professional scouts build relationships with coaches, schools, and organizations. They spend a lot of time researching and visiting the places where they know they have a high likelihood of finding great talent. Grassroots recruiting is very similar to scouting. It takes feet on the...
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Growing Up Digital: Redesigning Workplace Training for 'Generation Connected'
By 2020, "Generation Connected" or Gen. C, comprised of both millennials and Generation Z, will constitute the largest single group of consumers worldwide. The pervasiveness of Gen. C will also extend to the workforce, with millennials representing 46 percent of the entire U.S. workforce by 2020. Over the next five years, Gen. C's need for digital connection, collaboration, and...
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4 Long-Tail Keyword Tools You Need to Know About
You've heard it before: the Internet is the best way to reach the largest audience possible. When you're a new or relatively new HR tech company, ranking higher in Google search results feels impossible because you're competing against companies that have been online for ages. In June 2013, Chitika found that the No. 1 search result in Google's search rankings earned 33 percent of...
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Is Social Learning Better Than Formal Training? [Infographic]
Employees want learning and development opportunities. In fact, 8 out of 10 employees will leave an organization "if they don't receive the right training to perform their job effectively," according to a new infographic compiled by enterprise peer-to-peer learning platform showd.me And while employees want learning and development opportunities, formal training programs may not be the...
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Drip Marketing Best Practices for Recruiters
How to Automate Ongoing Candidate Outreach to Create More Touch Points, Build Authentic Relationships, and Fill Up Your Recruiting Funnel With Top Talent (Without All the Work) More companies are coming to the realization that sales and recruiting have quite a bit in common. Outside of the obvious audience variation -- potential customers vs. prospective employees -- the two fields share a...
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5 Ways to Reduce Costs of Corporate Training
Corporations must now pile more and more pressure on their internal learning and development (LD) processes in order to train underqualified and under-skilled workers. Why? Because the hiring process is failing to bring fully qualified talent through the door, thanks to chronic global talent shortages. A CareerBuilder study found that 49 percent of employers are planning to hire...
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3 Reasons to Invest in Posting and Promoting Job Ads on Social Media
Posting job advertisements to social media channels has become increasingly popular as networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter make it easier to reach passive candidates in the job market. Active candidates look to job boards and career pages for available positions, but social media job posts attract a broader audience. Ninety-three percent of recruiters are already using or plan to use...
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The One Word Your ATS Can't Find: Potential
The skills gap, millennials, ill-preparedness: what other problems are you facing in today's talent-sourcing landscape? Seventy-five percent of business and HR leaders are struggling to attract and recruit the people they need -- but are those leaders overlooking a crucial candidate trait? Have recruiters and hiring managers forgotten about potential? According to Fast Company, "companies...
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Will Computer-Automated Hiring Ever Become the Norm?
Last week, during a networking group discussion about the rise of robot workers, I was introduced to the seemingly innocuous but strangely portentous phrase 'below the API'. It seems that, in this high-tech world, jobs are split into two classes: those above the API, and those below it. Above-the-API jobs are jobs related to writing software applications that perform tasks, and below-the-API...
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New Rules for Recruiting and HR: How Content Marketing and Video Are Transforming Talent Acquisition
Over the past year, HR thought leaders have embraced and adopted marketing techniques and strategies -- with good reason. The short supply of skilled laborers in many markets has forced organizations to aggressively identify and target both active and passive candidates, essentially promoting and differentiating their organizations and open positions from the competition. HR must now "act like...
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4 Great Hacks to Get Your Boss to Invest in HR Technology
We are in the midst of a technological boom, with new gadgets and tools constantly arriving to refine, improve, and elevate existing processes. While it's exciting to see all this progress, there are many frustrated HR professionals out there who struggle to get investment in HR technology initiatives. These pros are forced to sit and watch from the sidelines, working with a confusing mix of...
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Rise Above the Shortcomings of Your ATS
The ATS is the weapon of choice for many in the recruiting and hiring processes. And while it offers a lot of important functions -- cataloguing resumes, tracking candidate progress, measuring metrics like time-to-fill, etc. -- the ATS needs some supplemental help if recruiters are to compensate for its shortcomings, says Andrew Jacobson, founder and CEO of 360Candidate. According to Jacobson,...
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How Recruiting Analytics Takes Talent Acquisition From Gut to Great
The days of making recruiting decisions based on gut instincts alone are fading fast. An article published last year by the Harvard Business Review says that "humans are very good at specifying what's needed for a position and eliciting information from candidates -- but they're very bad at weighing the results." The authors found that simple computer algorithms outperform human...
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Big Data Points to Who Is Leaving and Who Is Staying
The use of data analytics could help you identify who might be prime for the picking for your recruitment efforts. The next time you cold call a prospect, consider asking them questions that could help them recognize the need to move onto greener pastures. A recent Wall Street Journal article entitled "The Algorithm That Tells the Boss Who Might Quit" focuses on how employers can spot which...
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4 Ways to Get Reluctant Staff to Adopt Your New HR Software
We live in an exciting world of business software, one in which it seems there is a new exciting piece of technology coming out every day. It's a world where consumers and journalists are constantly raving about the next big thing. As an HR professional, however, you may find yourself brought down to earth with a bang when you invest in and deploy some new HR technology only to find that...
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5 Ways to Sharpen Your Competitive Edge With Video Interviewing
You've just received a new job order, and you have the perfect candidate in mind. Unfortunately, after viewing the candidate's resume and looking over your notes, your client isn't convinced this person is right for the job. As the competition for top talent grows, recruiters and staffing pros must strive to set themselves apart in an effort to find quality talent and retain happy...
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Will Face-to-Face Interviewing Die Out?
Face-to-face interviewing is under attack from video interviewing -- just look at the statistics. Aberdeen Group has shown that while only 10 percent of companies used video interviewing in 2011, 42 percent were using it by 2012. As of January 2014, CNBC reports that roughly 63 percent of companies use video interviewing. Given the trends, it's likely the number is even higher today. As video...
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Knowledge Is Power: Tips on Data-Driven Decision-Making For Job Seekers and Employers
You'd be forgiven if you think of "data" as just another one of the recruiting industry's favorite buzzwords, meant to add a dignified sheen of "hard science" to processes that often rely on (unfairly maligned) softer skills. Think "big data," "data-driven," and similar, somewhat annoyingly overused phrases. You'd be forgiven, really -- but you'd also be making a terrible mistake. Data really...
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Harness the Power of Online Forms to Boost Your HR Efforts
It's hard to get excited about online forms, especially when your focus is on finding and retaining dynamic talent for your company. But by executing high-quality online forms, your HR department will become perhaps the single most indispensable asset to your company. And the great thing is that upping your form game will not only help you attract employees, but hang on to them as well....
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Choosing the Best Employee Training Software for Your Business
Often, when businesses implement training programs, they use tools like PowerPoint, shared binders, and spreadsheets, making it difficult to track and verify the results of training programs. Fortunately, creating a robust training program does not have to be an impossible, time-consuming task. There are three major considerations you should take when you begin to vet training-software...
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Improve Your Video Interview Technology; Understand Your Candidates Better
The candidate looked great on paper. The resume was stellar, and she had all the right qualifications. So, you arrange to have her flown in from halfway across the country. You're excited to finally meet with her – but when you do, you know within five minutes that she's not the right fit. What's more, the candidate has already met with four or five other people before sitting down with...
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How to Help Candidates Stand Out During Video Interviews
Standing out and showing off one's best traits during a prerecorded video interview can be difficult. There are few questions to answer, limited time frames, and no chance for a back-and-forth exchange with interviewers. HR departments know that video and prerecorded technology is crucial to sorting through thousands of job applications and finding the right candidates....
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