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Call centers face many unique challenges in terms of employment. The humble call center is an essential part of many businesses as a customer service and support channel. It’s also largely a thankless department, with many workers burning out quickly. They’re often unsupported and unloved by their parent companies, ignored or hampered by the companies that contract them, and abused by angry customers nearly all the time. This leads to astonishingly high turnover rates. A standard company doing reasonably well can expect a turnover rate of around 10%; a call center will be lucky to have under 40%. Many call centers experience over 100% turnover rate in a year , as employees hired to replace the ones who quit are themselves burned out and quit in under a year. That means that call centers have to hire a lot of people, often quite quickly, to maintain staff numbers and distribute the volumes of work they have from their various clients. On top of that, a sudden surge in demand – caused by taking on a new client, a new issue from an existing client, or a scaling up of operations – means volume hiring is an absolute necessity. How can you work to ensure proper hiring for a call center? A lot goes into it that you have to keep in mind. Learn About High Volume Recruiting Strategies Understand What Makes a Good Call Center Employee Call center employees are asked to do more now than ever before . For example: They must be able to answer phones and solve problems customers have. They must be able to deescalate situations and appease angry customers. They must be able to respond appropriately to live chat support requests. They must have a great listening ability for callers and reading comprehension for chat. They must be flexible in solving problems and potentially thinking outside the box. They must be able to build a relationship with the customers who call in, especially repeat callers. They must be mindful of privacy and information protection regulations, policies, and laws. They must be able to keep response and solution times low without leaving customers dissatisfied. They must be able to solve issues they can and escalate the ones they can’t. They must be able to close out support conversations effectively and with mutual satisfaction. All of this goes above and beyond “just answering phones.” So much goes into modern customer service, especially front-line, tier-one customer service, that it’s no longer the kind of role you can pick up anyone off the street and train them in a few days to handle. Understand True Volume Numbers Call centers, especially independent call centers that contract other businesses as their front-line support (as opposed to an in-house customer service team), need high volume in their hiring. Keeping in mind the average turnover numbers, call centers often need to recruit thousands, or tens of thousands, of hire hires every year. Volume hiring and volume work considerations exist at every level of a call center. Employees often feel as though their time spent with a call center is not valued, that they are treated as cogs in a machine, utterly replaceable. The unfortunate truth is that, in many cases, that’s how the call center must handle its employees. There’s no room for personalization and job growth when the average tenure for an employee is less than a year. Understand Volume Hiring Volume hiring differs from traditional hiring in many different ways. To name a few: It is perpetual . Call center hiring never really stops outside of catastrophe, and even then, it only pauses temporarily. It requires automated and data-driven sourcing for a constant stream of optimized candidates entering the candidate pool . It tends to lack the personal touch because volume means there’s no time or room for that level of customization . Instead, it relies on a robust but ultimately templated experience. It makes heavy use of mostly-automated skills and personality assessments , which are tailored to the role and tightly optimized to filter the best possible candidates for the roles in question. It uses automated data analysis to make hiring recommendations . Machine learning, AI filtering, and data flag processing all combine to allow for near-instant decisions in hiring, often with little or no human intervention. It minimizes the interview process and uses it more as a spot-check and confirmation of the algorithmic hiring process rather than a human review to make a hiring decision . Ideally, software handles the volume hiring process almost entirely, with humans checking to ensure it hasn’t gone off the rails. It uses onboarding via software to likewise automate as much training as possible , to again minimize the need for extraneous human employees simply setting up other employees. It is less focused on retaining, promoting, and encouraging employee growth and instead emphasizes preventing attrition and focusing on job performance . If all of this sounds antithetical to what you know as a traditional hiring process, that’s because it is. Volume hiring, and the pressures of filling hundreds or thousands of positions each month, bring unique challenges that largely require removing slower, variable human intervention. Above all, volume hiring needs to be scalable. Having a human HR representative oversee the process and personally contact each candidate can become untenable when you need to fill a few hundred roles, let alone thousands. Volume Hiring Isn’t Cheap Losing an employee in a traditional business can hurt. The lost time, productivity, and institutional knowledge all have value that is lost. Moreover, the cost of hiring a replacement clocks in at anywhere from 45% to 200% of the lost employee’s salary . Entry-level employees are less expensive to replace, but the costs add up when you have to hire thousands of them. Data shows that it may cost anywhere between $750 to $3,500+ per employee . It can easily cost in the high six figures, or even the low seven figures, for a mid-sized call center. Neither is it inexpensive in terms of time. Even with automation, volume hiring is unavoidably lengthy, which causes further issues with candidates turning down roles because they were approached with an offer elsewhere more quickly. Managing Attrition is Paramount As much as volume hiring and a vast workforce necessitate certain sacrifices, some of those sacrifices are themselves the cause of many problems in call center hiring. Call center employees feel impersonal, disrespected, under-compensated, and under-appreciated. When they burn out, they leave. How can your call center reduce attrition? Raise pay rates . Adequate compensation is often the #1 driving factor in retention, especially for entry-level employees. Call centers are already very low on the overall scale of employee pay rates. Even a relatively minor increase ($25,000 to $30,000, an increase of $5,000 per year) is enough to reduce attrition rates significantly . Optimize roadblocks and drop-offs in the hiring process . One advantage that volume hiring for a call center has over other hiring processes is a wealth of aggregate data. The sheer volume of data that a call center can process about the hiring flow allows for statistically relevant information. You can map data and monitor the flow of candidates from application to hiring. Each step of the way, you can identify flaws in the process that lead to good candidates dropping off or poor candidates making it through. You can map changes to outcomes in volume and make more changes to optimize the process. Measuring the right metrics is also critical to this process. Cost per hire Time to hire Hire quality and performance Attrition and turnover rates Duration of employment on average Overall satisfaction and/or conversion rates Measuring relevant metrics allows you to make relevant decisions. Adapt to modern pressures . The COVID-19 pandemic immediately made a call center environment – often open-plan, interchangeable, hot-swap, or otherwise crowded – a much more dangerous place. Though some call center systems have operated as a remote and distributed system for some time, many others have had to adapt. Moreover, the pressure to return to a central facility is mounting, but causing high attrition levels from employees who either don’t feel safe doing so or who have come to recognize the value of working from home. Thus, you can cut attrition by continuing to offer remote work as much as possible. Other such changes exist as well and depend on your call center environment. Either way, a crucial part of successful volume hiring is increasing retention/reducing attrition to reduce the need for hiring in the first place.  Be realistic and honest with your candidates . Call center work is often tedious, repetitive, and thankless. Call center employees burn out when they are consistently abused by the people they’re trying to help. When they balance the mental and emotional abuse against the pay and benefits they receive, and determine it’s no longer worth it, they leave. Of course, you can strive to provide a safer environment, empower employees to handle angry customers more effectively, and offer benefits (such as therapy and mental healthcare) to help mitigate these issues. This can be excellent in the long term but may require an up-front investment. Know When Volume Hiring Isn’t Valuable Volume hiring is critical for entry-level call center employees, but a call center is more than just the people who answer the phones. A good call center has supervisors, tier-2 support agents, people empowered to make decisions, people to contact clients and escalate problems, and more. Many of these roles are higher than entry-level and, as such, require a more traditional hiring process. These roles are where attrition becomes much more expensive and where hiring with the human touch is much more important. Attempting to use volume hiring strategies for higher-level roles will result in worse outcomes at every level in an organization, as no continuing, no culture, and no humanity can survive. At this level, you need a traditional hiring process that is just as optimized but differently. Pre-Employment Assessments are Critical A key aspect of an automated, effective volume hiring process is using skills and ability assessments. Often, your hiring process will need more than one to assess different aspects of your candidates: A personality assessment can be valuable to build a candidate persona that ensures hiring the most skilled candidates in terms of their ability to provide support, deescalate situations, and close calls effectively. A skills assessment can give you a picture of what skills and abilities your candidates need to be successful in their role without a significant investment in training. Though entry-level, call centers still may require a baseline level of skills inherent in the candidates. A situational assessment can pose hypothetical scenarios to potential candidates and ask for their responses, allowing you to watch for red flags that would disqualify a candidate from long-term employment. Of course, assessments aren’t always practical. Cognitive ability and IQ assessments are often off-target and tend to test more cultural knowledge than inherent intelligence, for example. In extreme cases, this can even lead to unintentional bias in hiring. Keep Trying, Optimize, and Succeed Volume hiring for a call center is never going to be easy. It’s a constant process of optimization, data analysis, and improvement. Additionally, cultural shifts and the evolution of technology combine to require your call center to keep on top of the cutting edge. Otherwise, you fall behind, and it becomes more and more challenging to maintain adequate hiring. Strive to continually improve in all parts of your call center business, from hiring to retention to performance. Remember that many seemingly-important call center metrics can disincentivize positive behavior. Remember that minimizing costs doesn’t always balance out with higher attrition rates. Remember that technology is continually improving, and it’s well worth reviewing for any new options to pursue. It doesn’t have to be an endless, impossible task to staff a call center. Success is possible; it just requires ongoing effort and continual improvement. Do you have any questions or concerns about recruiting for a call center? Are you wondering how you can potentially reduce attrition in your call center? Was there anything we mentioned in today’s article that you would like more clarification on? If so, please leave a comment down below, and we’ll get a conversation started! Recruiting for your call center can be a significant challenge, but it doesn’t have to be, so we’d love to assist you however we can!

LinkedIn has quietly become one of the most significant social networks globally. When Microsoft acquired it in 2016, few people thought it would amount to much. More likely, it would go the way of Google+ and slowly die off. Or, it would go the way of Skype and be supplanted by a Microsoft-based offering. Instead, it has stayed more or less the same platform it was before, just powered with more money, better technology, and more dedicated development. While other social networks have chased trends and tried to set themselves apart (and some have failed because of it), LinkedIn is quietly chugging along as one of the best hubs for career development online. Virtually any company that wants to hire employees – particularly tech, business, and other STEM employees – checks LinkedIn first. Whether they’re actively looking for a job or are just passively open to the idea , any potential employee has a LinkedIn profile. The site has been growing, pruning off features no one used and adding more practical options for everyone, year after year. Now you’re here. You’re a business owner looking to hire employees, and you know that LinkedIn is one of the best ways to do it. So, how can you stand out from the rest of the pack? 1: Build a Strong Foundation The first thing you need to do for success on LinkedIn is to make sure your presence is polished to a mirror shine. When you reach out to a prospective candidate, you’re asking them to look into you. If they do, and they see a profile with ancient data, poor writing, and little attention to detail, are they going to apply? Probably not, unless they’re desperate. What can you do to improve your LinkedIn presence? Update your company profile. Start with your company profile. Make sure all of the details are accurate. If necessary, upload a new profile image and banner. Update your business name if needed. Specify your brand headquarters and any other relevant locations. Same with business size. You can also consider using the blog feature of LinkedIn to keep your profile up to date. This option is tricky, though, because it looks worse than having never used it at all if you stop down the line. However, you can use LinkedIn to syndicate content from your website on a delay, so it shouldn’t be that difficult to keep running. Update your personal profile. Remember that candidates will likely be concerned about cultural fit with your organization. One way they can check that without digging into your company through other sites is to check into the people who work for you. Do they keep their LinkedIn profiles up to date? What do they tend to post about? Where have they worked in the past? You might not be able to mandate that your employees keep their profiles updated, but you can at least keep yours up to date. Write or buff up your About section using keywords. Your company About Us section on LinkedIn is one of the most prominent opportunities you have to work in career-oriented SEO keywords into your profile. While these won’t be as relevant for the people you identify and reach out to directly, it can help them see what you’re about when they read it. More importantly, it can make you more visible in LinkedIn’s search engine and can get more people coming to you in the first place. Specify your business page URL if you haven’t. When you first register for LinkedIn, they give you a long URL made out of numbers and ask you to change it. You may have changed it in the past, but it may not fully reflect your brand today or may be ambiguous. Just give it a look and make sure it’s accurate and relevant. This page has guidelines on what your primary URL can look like and what it should contain. Collect (and give out) endorsements. Endorsements are the lifeblood of LinkedIn. For individuals, they’re verification of the skills and abilities the person has earned and demonstrated, as presented by their peers and bosses. For companies, they’re similar to testimonials, but for the employer rather than the company or product. Get endorsements from employees, and leave positive endorsements in return . Even if your endorsement helps the employee leave later, it’s better than not having the endorsements now. Get endorsements from partners and associates . B2B companies especially can benefit from endorsements from clients and business partners. Get endorsements from customers . A testimonial praising the company rather than the product can be hard to come by, but they can be pretty helpful when you get them. Wherever you get them, make sure they’re high quality, that you’re returning the favor when possible, and that they’re not faked for the sake of boosting your profile. 2: Make Use of LinkedIn Groups The second tip we can give you is to use LinkedIn groups. As far as small social communities go, they can be very powerful when used appropriately. The trick here is to join and contribute to these groups as an individual, not as a company. Make sure you’re participating all the time, not just when you need something. People in these groups will be a lot less skeptical about you if they recognize you from spending time in their group. Plus, it helps you gain a better and more nuanced appreciation for the behaviors of the people you’re networking and engaging with in the group. Different groups have different sets of rules, expected behaviors, and norms. Spend some time getting to know them before you start trying to hire people from those groups. 3: Make Your Messages Personalized LinkedIn gets heavily used by recruiters, especially recruiters who don’t put much time or effort into recruiting people. Time and again, we hear stories like: “A recruiter approached me about a job that was so far under my pay grade I couldn’t help but laugh.” “I was promoted out of my job, and a recruiter approached me about the job I just left.” “I’ve received the same template message from six different recruiters for different companies.” People on LinkedIn are very used to just ignoring messages from recruiters if they don’t have something special about them. Your messages need to be personalized to the individual, and care needs to be taken to make sure they’re not someone who has previously been removed from the candidate pool (or employee list) for one reason or another. It helps to mention something specific about the individual’s history and skills, but, make sure it’s relevant. All too often, templates advise picking a skill and mentioning it, which leads to situations with messages like “We think your experience as [CFO of Big Company] would make you a great fit for [Entry level help desk role].” It just doesn’t work. 4: Look at Existing Employees and Search for Lookalikes One advanced technique comes from Perry Monaco via LinkedIn itself . His tip is to encourage all employees to have robust, well-rounded LinkedIn profiles. Do whatever you can to encourage participation. Then, when you need to hire someone, take a look at the employee you have who most closely matches the role you’re hiring for. Maybe it’s the employee who left, and you’re replacing. Maybe it’s someone you’re promoting to a higher position, and you’re looking to fill their spot. Maybe it’s someone else on the same team with roughly the same duties. Whatever the case is, look at their LinkedIn profile. It’s going to have skills, abilities, and keywords that fit what you’re looking for. LinkedIn even has a feature called the “Similar Profiles” feature. When you run a search for potential employees, you can plug in your standard keywords for job titles, skills, and so on, and add the profile of the target employee to the advanced search. That way, the profiles you get in your search results will be algorithmically similar to what the target employee represents. 5: Avoid the Common Mistakes Perhaps the biggest tip we can give for LinkedIn recruiting is not something you should do, but rather, things you shouldn’t. There are a lot of mistakes that, if you make them, will relegate your InMail directly to the trash, possibly even unread. LinkedIn users, particularly those in middle and upper-level positions and whose skills are in high demand, will be bombarded with attempts to recruit them. You have to do a lot to stand out, and avoid the mistakes that get you dumped in the old circular file.  Avoid ambiguous messaging. Communicating online can sometimes feel like a game of “telephone”; your words, direct messages, and even the job description can be interpreted much differently than you intended. Unlike a phone call, which is more dynamic and where you’re able to clear up any confusion quickly, messages are more permanent and are often read literally. It’s sometimes difficult to convey tone when reading emails and direct messages. Try to keep your message as clear, concise, and easy to understand as possible to eliminate any possibilities of misinterpretations. If you’re interested in a candidate, start your messaging off by saying something that will grab their attention and immediately let them know that there is an opportunity to consider. If there’s a limited timeframe, or if there’s a preferred way to contact you, share that information with them as well. There is also a lot of spam on LinkedIn, so there is more than one reason why you’ll want to cut through the ice as quickly as possible.  Don’t focus entirely on yourself and your company. This one is a subtle language tip, but it’s noteworthy in that it has a more significant effect than you might guess. Consider these two statements: “We have a top-tier marketing department.” “It’s marketing skills like yours that make you the perfect fit.” One of these is all about you and your company. The other is all about the candidate and their skills. Which one do you think the candidate will respond to better when they read it? Make things about “you,” as in, using “you,” “your,” and “yours” in your messaging. Don’t use templates for your messages. We mentioned this one above. Templates can be a fine place to start if you have no idea what you’re doing, but they will not get you the best candidates. Consider: when you search to find templates for hiring InMails, the content that comes up will be the same content other people see when they look. Every one of those templates is already used by dozens, hundreds, or thousands of recruiters. You might think you’ve customized it, but candidates receiving dozens of recruiter messages will be seeing the same framework over and over and will still recognize it. If you absolutely must use a template, make it as bare-bones as possible, and write it on your own. Don’t take templates from other sites. Don’t leave a response open-ended. Making the candidate come up with a response is unlikely to work. Instead, lead them towards an answer you want. For example, instead of asking, “when would be a good time to schedule a call with you?” ask, “would Friday at 3:15 p.m. be a good time for a call?” On the one hand, the candidate could say yes, and you’re in the money. If they say no, they might have the opportunity to provide a better time.  Don’t restrict yourself to just what’s on LinkedIn. One of the best techniques you can use is to research your candidate deeper than just skimming their LinkedIn profile. Doing so can show you mean it when you say you’re reaching out specifically to them. For example: Check if they’re active on Git and comment on a recent project. Check if they’ve published on Medium and mention a recent article. Look for a personal blog they may have, and bring it up. Not only does this help you filter for candidates with ambition and personal projects, but it also shows the candidate that you’re invested enough to dig into them. Just make sure you’re not being creepy about it. No commentary on a recent unrelated Reddit post they made, for example. If you can nail these do’s and don’ts of LinkedIn recruiting, you’ll start to stand out from the pack, and that gives you a significant advantage on the social network.

It often seems as if recruiting in colleges and universities is an impossible task. Many different pressures are pushing organizations away. University enrollment is down. The proliferation of online, open-source, and accessible channels for learning suppresses enrollment further. Demographics in higher education have been changing rapidly. Traditional methods of reaching university students have less and less impact. And all of this says nothing of the global pandemic that essentially erased one school year and is poised to suppress a second. “Updated figures from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC) show that overall college enrollment fell to 16.9 million students this spring, down more than 600,000 students from a year ago. That one-year decline of 3.5% is the largest spring semester enrollment decrease since 2011” – Forbes.com. In this blog post, I explain how a company can create a booming campus recruitment strategy.  Pick Specific, Targeted Schools Many employers attend job fairs and top-tier schools and wonder why they don’t seem to recruit very many talented graduates. The truth is, there’s so much competition for those graduates that it can be difficult to stand out from other employers in your sector to get any attention. It’s often much better to pick more local or more focused schools to target your recruitment efforts. ConveyIQ recommends : “Depending on your budget, start by creating a list of five to 10 schools that offer some of the key majors you’re targeting. Then, divide that list into two tiers. The first tier should be your primary schools—the ones where you think you’re most likely to find your top talent—while the second tier can consist of “dream schools” and schools that are outside of your geographical area. Once you’ve identified your target schools, you can start creating your strategy.” Rather than targeting big-name schools, target schools with dedicated programs training students in the exact areas of expertise you need. Local schools can also provide potential candidates who already have familiarity with your company, a family history with you, or some other tie that makes them more likely to work out. Use Every Channel Available to You Modern recruiting requires more than your stereotypical flyers on campus, radio ads, and booth at the occasional career fair. You need to take advantage of every channel available to you, especially the ones most frequently used by your target generation and cohort. These might include, but are not limited to: Create a branded, responsive careers website with copy that speaks to student interests and concerns. Launch a blog that provides relevant information to graduates and candidates. Build a social media presence that is active, responsive, and relevant to recruitment. Email marketing, with lead generation and nurturing. Brand ambassadors who spend plenty of time on campus, working with students directly, potentially working with guidance counselors and other student outreach systems as well. Influencer outreach. Identify influential individuals to your audience, including parents and authority figures at the school, and network with them. Visit campus more often than just during career days, and make yourself available for student questions at any time. Early outreach, including high school outreach, to guide prospective candidates to school programs that benefit you when they graduate. Scholarship funding to help train students in exactly the programs you want to recruit. Don’t forget, as well, that a growing portion of the student body at your target organization is likely to be international students. Make sure that your company is set up to recruit a diverse team , including varied personal demographics, ethnicities, national origins, and intersectionality. Establish and Sustain a Long-Term Relationship We’ve already mentioned establishing a relationship with schools and guidance counselors, but you need to build and sustain another relationship with students. Consider that the best asset in recruiting is a candidate who will stay with your company for many years, growing in their role, building institutional knowledge, and rising through the ranks. Show them the same loyalty. A modern recruitment channel may begin in high school, gauging interest with students and encouraging them to investigate programs that benefit your company. It could be IT to help manage your computer systems ; it could be business, finance, supply chain management, logistics, or any of a thousand other roles. Identifying potential career paths is the first step, and matching them with interested students allows you to help guide those students towards university programs that funnel them directly to your campus recruitment process. Throughout the university experience, maintain a relationship with the school, with individual counselors, administrators, and professors in your target areas. Help by providing funding, information, and accessibility. Encourage interested students to talk to your recruiters, learn more about your company, and consider their place in your organization. Every resource you can provide, any assistance you can offer, any relationship you can build helps you establish yourself as a beneficial connection for a student to have. When many students find their independence and are reaching out for any support they can find, you can provide that foundation. Offer Paid Internships The days of the unpaid internship are over. Modern students cannot afford the time without compensation, no matter how valuable the experience may be – and often, that experience is not practical. Unpaid internships are, more and more frequently, being considered nothing but scams. The Harvard Business Review discusses the systemic issues with unpaid internships in greater detail. Among their observations: “The survey made one other startling observation: Students who had never had an internship received the same number of job offers as unpaid interns.” Along with imbalanced racial and ethnic distribution, the truth is that unpaid internships are not valuable to either students or companies looking for real candidates. If you’re going to offer an internship at all, make it paid. Track and Monitor Key Performance Indicators No effort in business should be left without oversight. Your sales numbers, your website performance, your employee productivity; everything is laced with key performance indicators that you monitor, looking for ways to remove roadblocks, streamline processes, and improve outcomes. Recruitment should be no different. Campus recruitment has a range of its own key performance indicators that are worth monitoring. Different metrics can be paired with specific goals and adjusted to achieve particular outcomes. For example: If your goal is to source more candidates, you can measure the size of your candidate pool, the events you attend, the source of your most effective hires, and the completion rate for applications. Suppose your goal is to improve candidate quality. In that case, you can measure the number of candidates in your pool per hire, the number of new candidates per recruiting event, and the number per organization or university. Yello offers a robust guide on identifying and establishing these key performance indicators . It’s worth reviewing to determine what data you should monitor, how you should monitor it, and how it should inform your decision-making. Employ the Right Recruiters While much of your recruitment will go on through digital advertising, passive advertising in flyers, print ads, posters, and sponsorships, as well as information campaigns, the true stars of the show will always be your in-person recruiters. These recruiters must meet the necessary qualifications to relate to and engage with students and prospective candidates. “Some of the greatest recruiters I have seen on my team have been people who truly care about the people that they’re helping. One of the most important things in someone’s life is what their career is going to be, and the best recruiters know how to talk to [candidates], treat them like people, and then essentially get them the job they’ve always dreamed of.” – Yello Good recruiters must have certain qualities that allow them to engage with students in the right way. These qualities include: Students are nervous, particularly as graduation nears. The job market is in constant flux, there’s massive uncertainty about the world, and the expenses of university weigh heavily upon the shoulders of the current graduating cohorts. Being able to empathize and convey that you truly want to help is a critical skill for a recruiter. With the aversion to unpaid internships but the relative scarcity of paid work experience, many graduates enter the job market with no experience in their chosen field. Thus, rather than requiring expertise to filter out candidates, talented recruiters look deeper and learn to spot potential. Modern recruitment strategies don’t work with the youngest generations, who are often jaded and cynical about the traditions and habits of those who came before them. A recruiter today needs to be able to engage with these students on their own terms, reaching out to them in innovative, unique ways and engaging them in their comfort zones. There is no perfect recruiter; the culture of each graduating class, of each different school or geographic region, can vary wildly. Adapting to a specific area, a particular group, and a certain niche is critical for success in modern college recruitment. Create Student Personas Just as your marketing department creates buyer personas for different types of people who might make a purchase from your company, so too should your hiring department create student personas for your campus recruitment efforts. Student personas help ensure that your marketing is targeted towards the right groups of people, reaching them where they look with the messaging they’re interested in. These personas should be based on archetypes you see from your top past hires, though you shouldn’t look too far in the past; someone you hired ten years ago is likely not relevant to today’s student body. You can further identify and refine your student personas using real-world data. For example, conduct surveys with the student body to see if people have heard of you, and if so, how. Analyze enrollment data from the university to examine their demographics, particularly among their best-performing students. And, of course, include as much data as is relevant, such as GPA, major, minors, interests, and more. Just make sure not to exclude specific protected classes to avoid violating compliance regulations and laws . Further, don’t limit yourself to one or two personas. Create as many personas as there are archetypes of students who can succeed within your organization. Remember, too, that student personas are not static; they are evolving pictures that reflect current trends. They can change and adapt as the student body changes, and they can split off into variations as necessary. Moreover, it’s critical that you use these personas. Each persona represents a different group of people who can be reached in different locations, both geographically and technologically. Use other channels, target them with additional messages, and reflect their interests. Some are concerned about money; some are concerned about humanitarian fulfillment; some are concerned about workplace safety and ethics.  Be aware of what your prospective candidates are most concerned about, and provide them the information they need to see to apply. Never Stay Static Every graduating class is unique in different ways. Recruitment strategies that worked as recently as a couple of years ago may not reflect current trends and concerns. Thus, one of the most important lessons any company can take to heart is that things change. Recruitment strategies need to change with the times, or they will fall behind. Constantly monitor results, and adjust your data based on what they tell you. Adjust student personas, adjust marketing messages and techniques, adjust channels, adjust budgets. A company that remains static is a company that will lose interest and attention on campus and will fail to pick up the best potential candidates from the student body. Above all else, students want empathy, value, and support from their work environments. It’s no longer just about a paycheck or a benefits package. It’s about ethics, it’s about diversity, and it’s about loyalty. When you can portray your company as a place with attention to these concerns, you can attract the most engaged, talented, and valuable candidates. Take this moment to reflect on your current recruitment strategies. Are they flexible, adaptive, and contemporary? If you want to remain at the forefront of talent acquisition, there’s no time for complacency. Dive deep, evolve, and ensure you’re always in alignment with the next generation’s desires. Ready to revolutionize your recruitment game? Let’s connect and shape your future together. Reach out to us for bespoke solutions and insights tailored to your needs .

One of the greatest challenges facing every business is recruitment. You need to recruit good, loyal, skilled, and effective employees, but so does every other business out there. You’re competing not just with businesses in your niche, but with businesses that have the same roles in their organizational chart. A talented IT developer, a skilled salesperson, or an effective manager will have their pick of organizations. How can you make your business the one they want to work for? It comes down in part to your compensation and benefits, in part to your brand reputation and the work you do, and in part to how effective your recruiting strategies are. Recruiting strategies are plans of action, methods you can use to attract top-quality candidates, filter out the cream of the crop, and hire the best possible candidate to fill that role. These strategies can range from the simple to the complex, so we’re going to cover as many as we can here today. Let’s get started! Establish Metrics and Monitoring Whatever system you use for recruitment, whether it’s an ad hoc combination of spreadsheets and documents or an advanced applicant tracking system, you need to monitor key performance metrics. Metrics and data are important for making good decisions. Understand what is currently working, what isn’t working, and what can be improved. A good ATS will have metric monitoring built-in to their system, but you may need to configure it, and you certainly need to make sure you’re reading the reports it generates. For more manual systems, you’ll need to determine which metrics are important, how to monitor them objectively, and how to improve upon them. Invest in Tools to Expand Possibilities There is a wide range of tools available to you as part of a recruitment campaign. Consider investing in any of these: A solid applicant tracking platform to oversee your entire recruitment process. A video interview platform for more personalized interview processes. A skills testing platform to analyze candidate skills objectively. An onboarding program to reduce turnover by assisting new employees. The HR and hiring ecosystem abounds with services, tools, and platforms available to any company with the budget to implement them. Determine which sorts of tools would have the biggest impact on your existing processes, and find the best tool to fit the bill. Optimize a Careers Page Interested candidates will check your website for career information. Creating a compelling careers page, even if you tend to process your applications through a third-party service, is essential. As BuiltIn says: “Whether or not you want to create one, candidates expect to find a careers page on your website. All of your competitors are doing it, and if you don’t, you’ll never be able to stand out from the herd.” Your careers page should provide, at minimum, information that reflects your employer’s brand. It can promote your company, your cultural and social impact, your company mission and goals, your culture, your benefits, and more. Consider your company from the perspective of a candidate. What matters to them? What do they consider important, and what information can you give them to help facilitate that decision? Consider details such as: Awards your company, your teams, your employees, or your products are winning. Percentages that reflect the diversity of your teams, such as % female employees, or % BIPOC employees. Benefits of working for your company, such as upward mobility. Tangible impact your company is making on the world around you, such as assisting with food scarcity, homelessness, green energy, or another social project of concern to your candidates. All of this reflects who your company is at its heart. Provide an FAQ Candidates will often have specific questions about your company, your open roles, or your culture. Questions like “do you have internships available”, “do you have remote work positions available”, and “what feedback can I expect upon submitting my application” are all common. Good companies have ready answers to these questions and more, but great companies provide those answers before the questions are asked. As part of your careers page, it can be worthwhile to create a Frequently Asked Questions page with those questions and their answers. It’s important to recognize that this is a living document. Answers can change from time to time, but more importantly, you should monitor candidate questions and identify common threads to summarize as entries in your FAQ. Your goal is not to eliminate candidate questions, but rather to drill down into more personalized concerns, as the general questions have already been answered. Implement an Employee Referral Program Some of the best candidates you’ll find are already connected to your company, even if you don’t know it. Indeed says it best: “Great people usually make a habit of surrounding themselves with other highly capable professionals. While many employees may already be sharing open roles with qualified contacts in their networks, a well-developed employee referral program can encourage even more of your employees to refer the best talent they know.” Incentivize your existing employees to recommend the skilled people they know. Not only does this get you easy access to high-quality candidates, but it also helps reduce turnover. New hires are less likely to leave when they have a connection inside the company. Social contact is important, as is the social pressure of not disappointing a friend by leaving an opportunity they reached out to offer. Incentives for an employee referral program can vary, but should always be something that rewards both the referrer and the candidate. Bonuses are a common choice, but they are not the only choice. Keep Old Candidates Fresh In many instances, you will have hundreds or thousands of applications for an open role, but only hire one or two people for the job. What happens to the rest of the candidates who ultimately aren’t hired? They seek positions elsewhere. A great source of potentially excellent new hires is this old candidate pool. The people who were in the running for the role, but who didn’t make it to the end of the hiring process , can still be excellent employees. When a role opens up that fits the candidate, reach out to them to see if they’re still interested. You can connect with high-quality passive candidates in this manner, and bring in highly engaged employees who may have had to settle for a second choice earlier and will be happy for the new opportunity. Find Niche Job Boards Everyone knows about the large job boards, such as Indeed, Monster, and CareerBuilder. What you should consider is looking into a roster of smaller niche job boards for specific kinds of roles. For example: Archinect is a board dedicated to architects. Energy Jobline is a network for jobs in the energy sector. FlexJobs exists for remote workers exclusively. K12JobSpot is an excellent board for education roles. Every industry and many specific roles have industry-specific job boards. Look for niche boards that you fit into, either because of the industry your company is in, or the specific roles you have open. You can often find excellent, dedicated candidates in these job boards who you wouldn’t find in the more generalized networks. Provide Internal Mobility We as a culture are slowly moving out of an era of low or no mobility internal to a company. For years now, employees have been jumping ship for career progress, so much so that many employee advice guides recommend it. When there’s no internal way to improve your career, you look elsewhere. Thus, a good employer should look for internal candidates before looking for external candidates. Upward mobility is a powerful motivator for both existing employees and potential new hires. People want to have long-lasting careers where they can grow, and offering them the opportunity is a powerful motivator. Note that some industries and roles have mandatory policies for listing jobs externally and internally, to find the best candidate. Make sure to follow regulations above and beyond the tips we give you. Digital HR Tech says this: “Hiring internally when and where possible is, naturally, a great way to save time and money. The hiring costs and risks are (a lot) lower, your ‘new’ hire already knows the company which means they’ll be operational and productive faster. Companies that hire internally are 32% more likely to be satisfied with the quality of their new hires.” Sometimes these individuals present themselves to you, and other times you’ll have to look a bit deeper into your team to spot opportunities for advancement. It’s something that should be handled delicately as well – if you have team members who have been with your company for longer and who also desire advancement, promoting somebody else could breed resentment within your company. Don’t Neglect Diversity Diversity isn’t just a buzzword to use in your ad copy, and it’s not there just to score “woke points” with certain demographics. A diverse team has tangible benefits, and studies repeatedly show that companies with diverse workforces have better financial outcomes, stronger ethics, better performance, greater productivity, and more innovative ideas. A lot goes into hiring for diversity. You need to audit your entire hiring process, from your employer brand to your job postings to your interview process, to remove biases and roadblocks, reach out to broader demographics, and encourage more diverse applications. This summary is a good place to start and get your company on the right track. Question Assumptions Every business process older than a few months ends up bogged down with assumptions. The hiring process is no different. Things are done the way they are because that’s how they’ve always been done, and whoever decided to do them that way must have had a good reason, right? The truth is, many institutional decisions are made on the fly, or out of convenience, and may not be the best option. Many of these decisions may have been made with data to back them up, but they could be old enough that the data has changed. For a prime example, look at the difference in recruiting strategies between Millennials and Gen Z candidates. Though closely related, they have different specialties, different concerns, and different focuses. Any assumption you’re making as part of your hiring process should be questioned, studied, and backed up with data. Make it an annual process to question and verify your process, audit with new data, and make adjustments as necessary. Attend Industry Events Though many events have been put on hold due to the pandemic, as the world opens back up, these events will return in full force. Trade shows, industry events, speaking engagements, hiring events; all of these should be considered opportunities to: Show off your brand, particularly with new adjustments made in response to the pandemic. Attract new candidates and connections with others in your industry and related industries. Network with potentially interested candidates or other opportunities. Explore new avenues and technologies in use by competitors in your field. Whether you’re attending with the explicit goal of attracting applicants, or you’re just looking to position your brand as a leader in your industry, these events are almost universally good to attend. Don’t Neglect Marketing Channels There are many channels that you can use in the modern day to advertising a job listing. While you may be focused on your in-house careers page, your social media outreach, and your marketing towards passive candidates, don’t neglect more traditional avenues. For example, using billboards, signage, and mailers can still be good ways to broaden a candidate pool. For every campaign you run on Snapchat or Whatsapp, consider a campaign on the radio or through print channels. New technology rarely replaces the old technology entirely; it simply gives you another channel that you can take advantage of. Wrapping Up There is an endless array of avenues you can use to broaden, deepen, optimize, and improve your recruitment process. Whether it means hiring a PEO service or a recruiter , expanding your horizons with new technologies, bolstering your data monitoring and reporting, or simply adopting new platforms to centralize your decision-making, every business can stand to improve. The key, above all else, is to set goals. Understand your current position and your current processes, audit them, and figure out how to improve. Set SMART goals and work to attain them. Only then can you truly see not just the flaws in your current processes, but the tangible effect of the changes you make. What strategies have worked best for your company? Did we miss anything? Please let us know in the comments section below! We respond to every constructive comment and would love to hear your thoughts.

Throughout the world of business, there are average teams, and then there are high-performance teams.  High-performance teams are a wonder to behold. They work well together, they’re unerringly efficient, on target, and highly effective. They’re the dream of every manager and every executive, and they’re capable of immensely benefitting the business that they work for. For anyone on the outside looking in, it may be an open question of how these teams are formed. Do these highly effective people happen to find one another and snap together like pieces of a puzzle? Did their management luck out on finding these hires? The answer is no.  These teams are built, and they aren’t an accident. You, too, can build a high-performance team within your organization – you just need to go about it the right way. We’ve put together some tips to help you achieve this goal for your own company. 1. Choose the Right People for the Job While it may look like a well-oiled machine from the outside, the truth is that high-performance teams are built from many different parts, and those parts are individuals with skills, knowledge, and experience. These teams often look like they are experts at anything they set their minds to, but the reality is that they only focus on the things they’re good at. Put them up against a task outside their wheelhouse and they’ll be just like any other team, though perhaps with a bit more experience in working through challenges together and relying on one another. The right people for the team need to share certain qualities: They must have the right skill sets to accomplish the tasks they’re set to do. They must have the right mindset to solve problems and face challenges as a group. They must have the willingness to work as part of a larger team or group, rather than a sole superstar. They must be open to change as the pressures of a challenge or a team guide them. Finding the right people can be a surprisingly challenging task, which is why so few teams truly achieve high-performance status. Your hiring process needs to be accurate, your assessments need to get an accurate picture of the skills – both hard and soft – your employees have, and your management needs to accurately discern what challenges an employee will be good at facing. By far the hardest of these to find is the growth mindset . Some people, when confronted with a challenge, try to work around it, avoid it, or simply ignore it. Others see it as an obstacle to be surmounted, a challenge that can lead to personal and professional growth.  As Carol Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford, says : “This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.” 2. Choose the Right Size Team for the Job If you’ve ever seen the movie Ocean’s Eleven (or any of the similar genre of heist movie), you know that a highly effective team has members who are unified in an overall goal but have defined purposes and roles within that group. A high-performance team in business operates the same way. Each individual has a unique set of skills and experiences, and they bring different perspectives, different opinions, and different ideas to the problems they face. A team needs to be the right size for it to work well. Ironically, the titular Eleven isn’t a good number for a high-performance team. According to studies from McKinsey , a team needs to be within the right range to be effective. The lowest number to make a team effective turns out to be about six people. Having fewer than six people in a team leaves little room for diversity of experiences, skills, and opinions. The dynamics of a team at a lower number than six results in power plays and unified ideas that can lack forethought and the unique perspectives that make a team truly high performance. The upper bound, as it turns out, is about ten people. This gives your team a diversity of ideas and skills that allows them to cover all the bases while allowing everyone to feel heard and to leverage their unique skills. A team larger than 10 runs into issues with team members who slip through the cracks and fail to pull their weight, who drag down the team, or who bias it in the wrong direction. Large teams are also less agile; it becomes more difficult to schedule their meetings, there’s more room for failure, and the debates on different approaches and ideas can grow out of hand. Of course, these numbers vary. Katherine Kline from Wharton University claims that the ideal team size is between 3-5 people while a report from Forbes shows a range of answers . The truth is, the size of the team depends heavily on the task needing to be accomplished. The larger, more important, or more complex the task, the larger the team that should be leveraged to handle it. 3. Give the Team a Leader Leadership is critical for a team, but it might not necessarily come from within the team. Giving the team someone to report to, who guides their overall mission and points them in the right direction, is critical. This allows each member of the team to work independently, while still working towards a common goal. Each member of the team should see the whole picture. Working blindly towards a goal without knowing where other members of the team are working leads to inefficiencies and overlap. This is one of the few benefits of regular team meetings – it gives your team a sense of what’s important and the greater goal. It’s also important that the team lack the power dynamics of having a central leader to make all determinations; a council or democratic arrangement tends to be more effective. To quote nTask : “The common purpose must be clear, organization-oriented, and adequately communicated to the team members.” 4. Give Your Team SMART Goals Creating a team and telling them to “improve my business” doesn’t do anything. Every member of the team may have unique ideas on what an improvement might look like, how to accomplish it, and what steps need to be taken in what timeframe. Worse, some of those ideas may conflict with one another. The solution to this is SMART goals. SMART goals, as you may know, are tangible goals that fit five attributes. SMART goals are precise and specific; there are no “grow the business” recommendations. Try “We’re going to increase conversion rates by 5.3% this quarter.” A SMART goal needs to be measurable in some way. After all, without the metrics in place, how can you tell whether or not your team’s actions were successful? Setting realistic goals is critical. “Double our profits this year” may be feasible for some startups with high funding, but the vast majority of companies need much more reasonable goals. A goal has to be relevant to the overall purpose of the business and the specific purpose of the team. Setting a high-performance sales team towards developing a new product doesn’t make use of their expertise. Give the team deadlines to achieve the goal, but make sure those timelines are reasonable. Don’t let them take too long and waste time, but make sure they aren’t pressed to achieve the impossible in weeks. The SMART goal methodology is time-honored and proven. 5. Assign Each Team Member a Suitable Role Part of assembling a powerful team is ensuring that each member of the team has a defined role. This role should suit their skills, their experiences, and their motivations. Roles should be assigned with logic and rationale behind them, rather than by intuition or by drawing straws. Assigned roles are important for creating a smooth flow of work towards achieving an objective. It helps streamline individual purpose, leverage individual skills, and build synergistically as a whole. For a general business example, applicable to almost every business, consider blogging. A high-performance blogging team might have: A content strategist. This person performs topic research, keyword research, and overall strategizing for the content created for the blog. A content creator. This person writes the content for the blog. An editor. The editor ensures that the content created is on target, free of errors, and well-composed. A graphic designer. This person creates the images that are necessary for every good blog post. A publisher. This person specializes in CMS management and does the detail-oriented task of publishing. A marketer. This person is responsible for promoting content through outreach, social media, and advertising as necessary. Different teams may have different distributions and different assignments. Some might combine writer and editor. Some might combine strategist and publisher. Some might divide labor further. A lot of it is contextual. The important part is that each person involved in the process has a defined role, knows what their role is, has the skills to best suit the role, and knows who in their team to turn to when an aspect outside of their wheelhouse needs doing. 6. Encourage Communication and Collaboration Communication through every part of every process is critical to the success of any high-performance team. Without it, collaboration is impossible. This includes: Communication from the leader to the team to guide the direction of the team and give feedback and updates as necessary. Communication from the team to the leader to update them on the process, performance, and ideas of the team. Communication within the team to discuss ideas, collaborate, and implement solutions. Communication between the team and external groups, to interface with others as necessary to achieve their goals. To quote Agi Marx from Thematic : “Not being clear on what needs to be done or when, or changing goal-posts without clearly documenting and sharing these means that employees miss important tasks and become increasingly frustrated. A clear flow of communication benefits everyone.” 7. Don’t Suppress Ideas The strongest part of a high-performance team, and the element that most other teams lack, is the encouragement of free speaking and ideas. When a team member has an idea, they should be encouraged to present that idea for discussion. No ideas are stupid. Even if an idea doesn’t work, it should be treated as valid and explained why it won’t work, not dismissed out of hand. This is critical for two reasons. First, it helps to educate everyone as to the entire scope of a problem. If one person has an idea and it won’t work, they should be taught why it won’t work, so they can use that information to further formulate future ideas. Second, it opens the door to lateral thinking and novel ideas. Someone might have a great idea, that looks obvious to them, but they never speak it because if it’s so obvious, there must be a reason no one else has presented it, so it must not be valid. Right? The truth is, many times those ideas are the best solutions to a problem, and no one else has the unique perspective necessary to come up with them or see them as obvious. What might seem obvious to one team member is brilliant to another. You would never know without encouraging the free presentation and discussion of ideas. 8. Address Conflicts ASAP Whenever two or more people are working on the same problem, there are going to be conflicts. Part of choosing people to be part of your team is picking people who address conflict as a healthy part of working on a problem. People who get heated , who get defensive, who get overly attached to their ideas; these people can be valuable team players, but conflict needs to be addressed properly when it arises to prevent hard feelings, disconnect, and even sabotage within a team. When you (as the leader of the team) notice conflict arising, set aside time to address it and clear the air. Make sure you take feedback into account; if a team is fighting because their time pressure is immense and their goals look unachievable, it’s not the team’s fault. Listen to them when they say a goal can’t be done, and return with more realistic goals. Sometimes, you may need to remove divisive elements from a team and replace them. Don’t be afraid to make changes to a team to keep that team functioning smoothly. Conclusion Building a high-performance team is very much a matter of knowledgeable decision-making, building a team of the right individuals, training them the right way, and encouraging communication.  High-performance teams aren’t a coincidence; they’re carefully engineered, iterated upon, and continually growing. You, too, can create such a team. Contact us today to learn how we can help you build the high-performance team you need.

A common piece of advice for job seekers is to make your resume stand out. So why shouldn’t the same be true of hiring managers? When you’re offering a new position, whether it’s to your careers portal, a job aggregator, through a recruiter, or anything in between, you want to stand out from the rest of the pack. You want to attract the best candidates for any role, and that means making sure your job posting is the one they see and apply to first. There’s a lot that goes into this, so strap in, we have a lot of ground to cover. Create an Internal Job Description Many people use “job description” and “job posting” as interchangeable terms. The truth is, they’re different documents. A job description is an internal document you use to explain the job. It’s a longer document than your job posting and is meant to ensure that everyone involved in your hiring process is on the same page about what they’re looking for. Creating an internal job description document serves two purposes. First, as mentioned, it ensures that everyone is on the same page. Second, it allows department heads and managers to add their input to a document. Your HR team might not know heads or tails about Windows server administration or corporate networking, but they need to hire someone who does, so having key requirements as part of an internal reference document can be a valuable resource. TalentLyft has a database of over 500 template job descriptions you can use as a starting point for many common roles. From there, discuss with your team leads and department managers to add specific information or knowledge to look for. Create a Candidate Persona Much like how sales teams and marketing teams create buyer personas, your hiring team should create a candidate persona. Your candidate persona should be a profile or overview of what the ideal person to fill your open role would look like. Ignore demographics here; you’re looking for experience levels, skills, desires, and other job-relevant attributes. Here’s a guide on how to create one . Your candidate persona informs how you write your job posting. Knowing something like whether you’re looking for a Type A or Type B person for a role can change how you’re writing the job posting, what benefits you’re promoting, and so on. Optimize Individual Elements of the Listing Each element of a job posting needs to be optimized to target the kinds of people you want applying for the job. Here are the primary elements that you’ll want to focus on: Job Title: Make sure to list a title that is reflective of the role. Remember to choose something candidates will search for, so your post will be found. No one thinks of themselves as a “sales ninja”, so no one will be searching for ninja positions. Avoid the buzzwords at all costs. They’re grating, no one thinks of themselves in those terms, and they can often be degrading for the very people you’re trying to hire. Location: There’s not a lot to optimize in terms of location, but make sure you mention it, as well as whether or not the position can be remote or partially work-from-home. Responsibilities: A good job post should have a short-yet-robust list of job responsibilities, that gives a candidate a realistic idea of what they’ll be doing today. More on this later. Qualifications: A good job post should have a short-yet-robust list of qualifications, those experiences, skill levels, certs, and attributes that a candidate needs to succeed in the role. More on this later as well. About the Company: Even if you’re a national or globally-recognized company, your job posts should include a simple About section that sells who you are, what you’re working on, and what an employee will be doing in the big picture. Benefits: List your basic benefits and any specific benefits you can offer to a role , such as flexible hours, family leave, work from home, and training. Every job post should finish up with instructions on how to apply, even if it may seem obvious. A dedicated call to action is always better than assuming your audience can read your mind. Pick the Right Job Responsibilities Every given role in a company is usually filled with day-to-day drudgery, with the occasional high-level project, a moment of crisis when something goes wrong, or a big debut moment such as a product launch or major conference presentation. Picking the right set of job responsibilities to sell the role is crucial. You need to walk a narrow line. On one hand, you need to accurately portray the job you’re hiring for. If you entice a candidate with tales of exciting and unique development challenges, and they spend 90% of their days managing password resets and rebooting routers, they’re going to be dissatisfied. On the other hand, you need to sell the job; highly talented developers want unique challenges and problems to solve, so if they get the opportunity to do that, let them know. Ilya Bodner has similar feelings on this: “Honesty is the way to go. I see so many companies make inflated promises – something that turns off the highly qualified candidates, especially in sales/biz dev jobs.” Your list of responsibilities should be realistic, relatively short, and exciting enough to sell the role. Remember; job seekers see hundreds of these lists, so you need to find unique selling points in your roles. Narrow the Job Qualifications The single biggest mistake companies make in writing job postings is writing down 100% of what the ideal candidate “needs” to succeed in the job. Realistically, only about 60% of that is necessary for a new hire. The rest is either above-and-beyond skills that don’t come into play very often or can be worked around or skills that can be learned or trained on the job. It’s true that many companies list extremely high qualifications and “settle” for the best of the most motivated applicants. Unfortunately, this practice can contribute to gender discrimination , as well as turning off candidates who would be better qualified but don’t feel like they can meet the full requirements list. Pare down your qualifications list to just what is necessary to begin. Remember that your existing team can help train your new employee to bring them up to speed. Oh, and those certifications or experiences that only come into play once a year? You can work on getting them those as well. Emphasize Job Perks Part of selling your job posting is selling your workplace as a place where employees can build relationships, careers, and experiences. You can attract more candidates (as well as better candidates) when you focus on the perks of working for your company. Now, keep in mind that this means real perks. Having a foosball table in the break room isn’t a perk. Who even really likes foosball, anyway? The same goes for having a restaurant on campus, or open nerf wars in the cube farm, or any of the other nonsense that tech companies so often promote. What kind of job perks attract the best candidates? Ongoing training funded by the company, including certs where relevant. The option to work partially or fully remote, or on a flexible schedule. Support for families with new children, including leave for fathers as well as mothers. You can also include elements that indicate your company culture and values, such as company facilities to assist with alternative transportation to work, annual retreats (on the company dime) to see your products in action, or humanitarian outreach. Make Your Posting Accessible A surprising number of otherwise minor details combine to make a job posting accessible – or not – for many job seekers. Consider formatting. A job posting should have short paragraphs, simple headings, bulleted lists, and formatting to make salient details stand out. Every extraneous word gets in the way of your candidate’s desire to apply, especially on mobile devices. This leads us to our next point: Consider the viewport. Over half of all web traffic is performed on mobile devices today, and that includes job hunting. According to AIHR Digital , over 90% of modern-day job seekers use mobile devices to look for new jobs. While you can’t always control the mobile display of a job posting, you can make sure your text and images are all readable and to the point, and that your own careers page is mobile-optimized. Consider language. Not actual language – though that can be important as well, especially for bilingual roles – your writing style. Avoid jargon and buzzwords that can turn off candidates who want something more grounded. Avoid acronyms that may not be well-understood outside of your office. Focus on what your candidates should know. Limit the amount of fluff in your posting  and cover the most important details of the position. Use Multimedia in Your Posting Some of the best and most compelling job postings on the modern job market are more than just a text document made out of a template and slapped on hundreds of job sites. These job postings are multimedia presentations; they have the core text, of course, but they also include images, videos, infographics, and other media elements that assist with selling the role. One thing to keep in mind is that, while multimedia is attractive to many people, it shouldn’t be crucial to the job listing. Make sure there are summaries, transcripts, and alt text for images to ensure accessibility for those who can’t properly consume multimedia. Multimedia can be excellent for portraying company culture, job responsibilities, and company values in a compact place. Make use of it. Keep Your Posting Updated Matthew Podolsky , from Florida Law Advisors, recommends keeping your job posting up to date. “I will update the job posting about once a week. Many employment advertising services will move the post to the top of their list and treat it as a new posting every time it is updated. This trick is very helpful but does not work with every employment service.” In addition to bumping your posting to the top of the field, updating minor details allows you to essentially split test your list. If a particular set of benefits isn’t attracting the right candidates, try changing it. You can also change the plain language description, company profile, and requirements as you go. Post a Salary Range This is a contentious subject, and we don’t usually recommend it , but other people do. Will Land from Accessory Export had a positive experience with it, saying: “I know it sounds taboo, but we recently put out an ad to hire a director of marketing. The first ad we launched said ‘salary based on experience’ or something standard like that. Our applications were mediocre at best. Two weeks later, we launched the ad with the salary range, and we have had the best resumes and applications come in. Now we are trying to narrow down our favorites.” Many companies today no longer list salary range, for some of the reasons we listed in our breakdown. That does mean, however, that listing salary is a way to make your job posting stand out. Whether it stands positively or negatively, well, that depends on the salary . You can also consider mentioning that you offer competitive pay without directly mentioning a range. Break Away from Templates There’s a temptation to use templates for just about everything in business. In some cases, it’s just fine, but many customer-facing or candidate-facing applications just fall flat when you’re using the same basic structure everyone else uses. You might not think anyone would notice, but the candidate who goes through hundreds of them will spot the patterns easily. Derek Flanzraich  says: “Describe your job posting differently, and you’ll end up with candidates who are looking for something different. That means have fun with it. Speaking honestly and humorously about what the job entails is the best structure to communicate.” Truly, the best advice you can follow for making a job posting stand out is not following all of the common advice. If you’re doing what everyone else is doing, you won’t stand out from the crowd.

Facebook is the worlds biggest social media platform. It literally has 3 billion people using it every month. To put it another way, that’s more than a third of the entire population of the world . Chances are pretty good that your applicants have Facebook profiles. That’s just Facebook. Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram; social media is mainstream. Virtually everyone has at least one social media profile, though how much they use it, how easy it is to find and identify as theirs, and how valuable it is will vary wildly. So, here’s a question: should you use the information on social media as part of your pre-employment screening? If so, when? If not, why not? We spoke about this briefly in our post about remotely screening candidates earlier this month, but today we’re going to dig a bit deeper into this strategy. Growing Trends Using social media to screen potential employees – and even to monitor existing employees for adherence to company policies – is a growing trend. According to a survey performed by The Manifest : “Most employers (90%) factor a job candidate’s social media accounts into their hiring decisions and 79% have rejected a candidate based on their social media content.” Social media is primarily public information. It often represents how a candidate acts in their personal life. Those actions and that attitude can inform how a candidate would perform in their job. Employers face a difficult task when they need to hire a candidate for a role, especially a high-level position within the company. Resumes, cover letters, and interviews only show part of a candidate, and it’s the part they’ve practiced and polished to impress you. We’ve all experienced times where a candidate who looked good on paper fell short of our expectations while on the job. Probationary periods exist for a reason, after all. If you can get an additional channel of insight into a candidate that can help you make an informed decision, shouldn’t you take advantage of it? After all, the cost of a bad hire can be devastating to a small business and harmful to a large one. Studies have estimated the financial cost of a bad hire can range from $25,000 to $190,000 . The Pros of Using Social Media Screening First, let’s talk about some of the benefits of screening candidates via their social media presence before making a hiring decision . Information is free and generally easy to access. Researching a candidate can be as simple as putting their name into Google or the Facebook search bar, then verifying that you have the right person using other pieces of information from their resumes, such as location or work history. Matt Erhard, from Summit Research Group, says, “The three main platforms that most employers check are LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.” Let’s look into how these three are compared: LinkedIn is generally the most curated and presentable because it is geared towards professional networking rather than casual use. As such, it tends to be the most valuable for employers looking for more in-depth information and insight into a candidate’s work history and skillset. Twitter can be very fickle. Some users use it as a microblogging platform, to retweet content that interests them or engages with content creators they like. Other people use it to post glorified nonsense that has little bearing on their quality as a job candidate. It’s generally the least useful platform in many cases. Facebook has the most personal, casual use. As such, it can be useful to get a picture of how a person acts when they’re not being judged for those actions. However, an increasing number of people are locking down their profiles to make it more difficult to “doxx” them . Other platforms may garner other kinds of information about a candidate. Instagram can bring insight into how a candidate acts on vacation, or what they do as a hobby, or it might be nothing more than pictures of their pets. The important thing to remember is that while a social media profile can be valuable information, it also might be irrelevant to their suitability as an employee. Information you find can weed out unsavory candidates. Facebook and Twitter are both often responsible for lost jobs and lost opportunities for candidates. Today’s political climate means that many people feel comfortable posting hate against specific people or groups, posting threats, or bad-mouthing their current employers. “Companies can hold employees accountable for their social media conduct,” says Katrina Grider, an attorney in Houston. [But] employees need to be educated about their responsibilities and the consequences of their social media conduct and activities.” A candidate who feels comfortable posting hate speech is a liability waiting to happen for workplace harassment, a hostile work environment, or escalation. You can get a better sense of a candidate’s personality and cultural fit through personal social media. A candidate who posts about football and bar-hopping will fit right in with an office that has a fantasy football pool and uses local tickets as incentives. A candidate who dislikes dogs might not be a great choice for an office with “take your dog to work day” events. There are a lot of minor contextual details you can learn about a candidate that might make them a poor fit for your company. That said, you have to use caution when using these kinds of details to reject a candidate, for reasons we’ll discuss later. The Cons of Using Social Media Screening While the ability to screen candidates based on their social media profiles has some merit, there are also drawbacks to the practice. It can take a lot of time if you perform screening too early in the hiring process . Researching a candidate, identifying them and making sure you have the right person, and researching their background through social media can take quite a bit of time. If you’re using it as part of your early screening, you may be digging into thousands of profiles, dramatically delaying your time to hire. If you’re going to use a social media background check, it should be on candidates who have made it through at least the first interview. A social media presence isn’t necessarily representative of the candidate’s work attitude. Cashiers and waitresses have a “customer service voice” that they turn off when they’re outside work. Many people maintain different personas for different realms of their personal lives. How they act on Facebook – so long as they aren’t violating social mores, posting about illegal drug use, or promoting hate speech – is not necessarily a good representation of how they’ll behave in your office. An increasing number of candidates hide their profiles or sculpt them to build a personal brand. At this point, one of the number one pieces of advice to job seekers is to build a personal brand. Dedicated job seekers hide most of their social media activity and curate a public persona that is just as polished as their resume and their interview persona. You won’t necessarily learn anything of value through your social media background check. There’s a risk here as well. Some employers attempt to add candidates as friends, follow protected accounts, or dig into less scrupulous methods to view social media content otherwise hidden. This taps into an ethical issue; if the information is hidden from public view, but can be accessed if the user accepts a friend request, is it ethical to use? Generally, no. You should avoid digging too deep, especially if you have to request access to the information implicitly. There’s a very real risk of unconscious bias in your decision making. Edna Nakamoto, the founder of The HR Manager, offers a scenario: “What about the woman who just applied? Maybe you see her terrific profile plus the fact that she’s just announced that she’s pregnant. You know you can’t discriminate based on pregnancy, but you may still have had a little nagging thought of “oh, she will go on maternity leave within the year if I hire her.” Unconscious bias can affect everyone from time to time.” Even if you consciously know you can’t discriminate based on specific information and characteristics you see, you may still do so unconsciously. The Legality of Social Media Screening Three relevant laws can apply to social media background checks. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act . These are protections against discrimination according to categories such as race, color, religion, gender, disability, and age. It’s difficult to perform a social media background check without discovering at least some of these qualities, leading to unconscious bias. If a candidate believes they may have been passed over for an opportunity because of such a quality, they can potentially bring a discrimination suit against you. The Fair Credit Reporting Act . This is the protection of privacy and private information primarily relating to credit reports, but can also apply to social media information. Among other things, this legislation requires you to be able to make background check reports available to candidates if they request it. Because social media screenings are often handled casually, this can be a source of liability. State laws . Several states have laws limiting what an employer can ask for or what they can screen as part of an employment decision. For example, many states prohibit companies from requiring that users disclose login information or log in to their accounts in an employer’s presence, which can reveal hidden information. In general, screening candidates by their social media presence is legal but is best performed by a trained HR professional or a third-party background check service, rather than a prospective boss or CEO. (Image credit: Software Advice) There’s also the issue of free speech. While the concept of free speech is widely misunderstood (the first amendment only protects against punishment by the government, not by private entities such as businesses), some forms of speech such as political affiliation are protected in many states. Even in states with those protections, Grider says: “Online speech attacking other persons’ immutable characteristics protected by law – such as age, race, ethnicity, sex, and religion – or that constitutes workplace harassment is not protected.” In other words, it’s perfectly legal and ethical to fire (or refuse to hire) someone whose social media posts reveal hate speech, illegal content, fraud, threats, and similar content. How to Ethically Perform a Social Media Background Check If you want to use social media information to screen candidates , here are some essential Dos and Don’ts. 🟩 Do: Consider using a third-party background check service. This has two important benefits: it generates a tangible report that can be provided if a candidate requests it, and it can appropriately remove protected information to avoid unconscious bias in your decision-making process. 🟩 Do: Limit your screening to relevant information. A candidate’s hobbies, political affiliation, preference for pets, or casual posting style are not relevant to their workplace performance and should be ignored. 🟩 Do: Use a consistent screening process for every candidate. Apply this process at the same point in the interview process, and apply it equally to all candidates. Applying it to some candidates and not all of them can show bias. 🟩 Do: Be up-front about screening candidates via social media, what you look for, and how you perform that research. 🟥 Don’t: Screen candidates too early in the process. As mentioned above, this can take far too much time and energy and has very little reward when other forms of screening are more effective. 🟥 Don’t: Take everything you see at face value. Social media profiles often have a lot of contexts that you miss as an outsider looking in. Posts can be ironic or misconstrued without such context, and basing a decision on them can leave you bereft of a quality candidate. 🟥 Don’t: Limit your research to just the big social media profiles. Some candidates may have established a broader presence on sites such as StackOverflow, Medium, or GitHub, which can be valuable for certain kinds of roles. Think about the context of the role and what sites a good candidate might use. Conclusion Overall, using social media to screen your candidates can be a valuable tool, particularly when judging an individual’s character. However, it’s not necessarily reliable and should not be a significant component of your decision making. Use it for context and to decide between two very similar candidates, not as a primary driving factor in your hiring. However, it’s crucial to approach this tool with caution and ethical considerations. While social media profiles can reveal aspects of a person’s personality and behavior, they are not always accurate representations of their professional capabilities or workplace demeanor. As such, these screenings should supplement, not replace, traditional hiring practices like interviews and reference checks.  Employers must also be aware of legal and ethical boundaries, ensuring that their social media screening practices do not lead to discrimination or violation of privacy rights. When used judiciously and ethically, social media screenings can be a helpful component of a comprehensive and fair hiring process, aiding in the selection of candidates who are not only skilled but also align well with your company’s values and culture.  Are you needing help hiring more teammates? Contact our team today to learn how we can help you!

Not too long ago, targeting a specific group of people might mean picking a neighborhood to mass mail from the post office. These days, location-based targeting on the internet is more powerful and is executed with far more precision. These techniques are useful for more than just your basic product advertising and service offers. It’s powerful for recruiting as well, allowing you to target specific neighborhoods, universities, companies, hospitals, and any other location that might be valuable for your talent search. Two such techniques are geofencing and geotargeting. Though the terms are similar, they function differently and serve different purposes. Let’s dig into the differences between these two, how they work, and how you might use them for recruiting. What is Geotargeting? Geotargeting uses the data from user’s computers and cell phones to find their approximate location from their IP address. This allows you to filter your search to individuals in a certain geographic area. Simple geotargeting is very similar to the example above; picking a neighborhood and mass-mailing everyone within that neighborhood. Replace mass mailing with web advertising, and you have the right idea. As an example, you are exposed to geotargeted ads every day, and just about every one of those ads is geotargeted (whether it’s targeted to specific countries, states, or cities). If you aren’t using geotargeting on your ads, then people that are of little value to you in other locations could potentially see your ads and click them which would drain your ad budget. Any time you see an ad for a local business, that ad is targeted to a specific area around that business; people within 20 miles, people within city limits, or another definition allowed by the ad network. Complex geotargeting adds additional advertising targeting options to the mix. You’re not just broad-spectrum targeting everyone within the geographic area; you’re targeting all the people who are in that area who also meet other criteria, such as demographics, income levels, education levels, or interests. Essentially, it’s a set of layered filters where your ads show to everyone in the city who is a young professional in IT with an interest in Windows administration – to use an example. Complex geotargeting is all about precision in reaching specific people within an area. There’s no outward indication to the recipient that they’re the target of geolocated ads, other than the reasonable expectation that a local business is probably not advertising to people who aren’t likely to stop in. It does little good for a restaurant in Kansas City to advertise to people in Los Angeles, after all. Geotargeting is nothing new. Even television and radio ads are geotargeted, to an extent. A local affiliate of a national station runs local ads and national programming, so everyone sees the same shows but different commercials between them. The internet simply makes advanced, complex geotargeting much more plausible and useful. A modern example is Hyundai, the automobile company. Hyundai was facing a sales problem and identified the geographic locations around Toyota and Mazda dealerships. Using those locations, they could identify people in the market for a vehicle by targeting people within those areas, drawing in an additional 41,000 leads . You can start to form a picture of how this might be useful to recruiters by targeting specific areas, companies, and universities that have candidates matching your requirements. What is Geofencing? Geofencing might seem like basically the same thing, but it’s different in a functional way. Geofencing essentially establishes a “fence” around a given geographic area. It identifies people within that area based on IP address, RFID, and sometimes their connection to cell service towers and other location-based data like social network check-ins and maps usage. The fenced-in area is your geofenced location. You then run ads targeting only people who pass through the boundary around your targeted area. This area can be as large as a city or as small as a neighborhood or even an individual business area of operation and can be used on a large scale to draw people to a major event, or a small scale to draw people to an individual business. Geofencing is very similar to simple geotargeting, except it’s more active. Ads trigger as soon as someone traveling enters the fence, though there’s no pop-up, push notification, or email to signify it. To the user, it’s simply a different set of ads they see while they’re inside the fence. Geotargeting’s additional complexity can make it a more specific tool for reaching a subset of people in an area. Geofencing, however, tends to record more data about the users entering and leaving the fence, with correlations of when and where to allow for habit tracking and other data you might find useful. Neither option is strictly better or worse than the other. One is just more temporal while the other allows for ongoing regional targeting. A recent example of geofencing in action is this healthcare provider , who used geofencing across a marathon’s pathway to target specifically athletes prone to running injuries so that they could offer their services. How to Use Geotargeting for Recruiting One of the biggest challenges of modern recruitment is the proportion of candidates who are mostly or entirely passive. They’re satisfied with the roles they have, so recruiting them requires finding them and reaching out to them. As Adam Godson of Cielo says : “There aren’t enough people looking for jobs, so you’ve got to use Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Google, ad networks – all the things that consumers are using – to be able to find the right candidates at the right time.” Seek out local passive candidates. Where active candidates may be primed and willing to relocate for a job, passive candidates are typically much more entrenched. Thus, it can be very useful to seek out passive candidates around your location, so you don’t need to convince them to overcome that additional hurdle of distance. To properly use geotargeting for recruiting, you need two things: an idea of the geographic zone where your candidates may live, and an idea of what the candidates look like in terms of demographics and interests. Build up a candidate profile . You want to put together a picture of the demographics, interests, existing income levels, and other bits of data that narrow down the group of “everyone in the area” to “the people suitable for the open role”. You want to specify as much data as possible, because you’ll be using different ad networks like Google and Facebook, and they don’t all offer the same range of user data. Facebook has a lot of interest and demographic targeting, while Google tends to have more location and activity data, though of course there’s a lot of overlap. While you’re developing this candidate profile, think about the value proposition you’re offering the potential candidates. The primary benefit of a geo-targeted ad campaign is being able to promote a short commute and proximity to amenities and local services in the area, though the candidates may already have access to many of them. Using income level targeting, you can also filter for candidates for whom your intended pay range is a raise, making the role more enticing. As in the Hyundai example above, you can also target the campuses and offices of specific entities. For example, if you want to reach impending college graduates, you can use geo-targeting to reach the area surrounding a university campus , including dorms and the student apartment regions nearby. Reach out to candidates currently employed by competitors. Alternatively, if you want to poach talent from your competitors, you could target their office location to see if anyone bites on targeted advertising. If one of those employees happens to be looking for a new employer, there’s a strong chance that they will reach out and apply to your open position. Enhance office and team diversity with geographic targeting. Geotargeting can also be useful for diversity hiring. Modern cities tend to be somewhat segregated, due to a variety of historic and modern pressures. While this isn’t ideal, it does form a great opportunity to use geotargeting explicitly to reach out to diverse neighborhoods. You can’t exactly filter applications by specific protected classes, but by advertising a job opportunity in a diverse neighborhood, you’re able to increase the proportion of minority applicants, giving you a broader and more diverse candidate pool . This kind of marketing is valuable, but must be used with caution to ensure that you’re not violating laws and regulations relating to equal opportunity and discriminatory hiring practices. Remember: use it to broaden your applicant base, not narrow it. How to Use Geofencing for Recruiting Where geotargeting reaches everyone who meets your criteria within a specified area, geofencing allows you to target people as they enter or leave a given area. Moreover, you can build a list of those people, as their device data usually lasts for 30 days before expiring and being removed from the target audience. So how can you take advantage of this fence and trigger setup for recruiting? There are a lot of possible options. Use geofencing as remote recruitment. For example, maybe you want to recruit college grads who attended Harvard, but you can’t send a recruiter directly to the university, and you don’t have a relationship with the administration so you can’t advertise on campus directly. Geofencing allows you to set up a virtual ad campaign around the campus to reach students and visitors with your messaging. Use geofencing to enhance a local event. While you can use geo-targeting to target people near a job fair or industry event passively, geofencing allows you to reach out and engage with the people who enter the immediate area of the event when they enter the area. Someone who might be interested, and who is entering the area for other reasons, will suddenly see your ads promoting the event happening now.  They may divert their attention and visit, allowing you to engage with them directly. Geofenced advertising can build an implicit list of people who attended an event, even if those people didn’t visit your booth. You can build up a contact list from people who missed you in person and still attract them. This is also a great way to make up for a poor position in a conference center; after all, not everyone can afford the prime real estate front and center. Capture active candidates from closing companies. Thousands of businesses are closing their doors, and people who formerly had stable work are being forced to look for new jobs suddenly while unprepared. If you can identify a competitor who is closing or laying off large parts of their staff, you can geofence their location to capture people in the area and pick them up when they’re desperate. Emphasize a “grass is greener” campaign. Identify a location that competes with your own, and geofence it. Employees of that area who may be disengaged, bored, or disappointed with their position, see your advertising, allowing you to attract them at a time when they’re at their most receptive. The state of Montana did this with their skiing tourism. They geofenced ski slopes in the Midwest, to reach skiers when they’re actively disappointed by their current experience. Advertising a better experience in their own resorts, they spent $25,000 and ended up with nearly $7 million in revenue . While recruitment isn’t quite the same value proposition , the principle is the same: reach people when they’re disappointed and give them a glimpse of greener grass (or better ski slopes) on the other side of the fence. Johns Hopkins did something similar to recruit neonatal nurses. They geofenced hospital systems that handled pediatrics and used targeted advertising to promote their own workplace for neonatal nurses. This took them from less than a single application per week to 3-4 per week from qualified nurses . Geofencing Tools and Services If you’re looking for tools and services to help you with your geofencing campaign, there are a few options available. Here are some of the most popular: LocalVox: LocalVox is a geofencing tool that helps businesses target potential customers in a specific area. It provides detailed analytics and insights, so you can understand how your campaigns are performing. GeoFli : GeoFli is a geofencing tool that helps businesses target potential customers in a specific area. It provides detailed analytics and insights, so you can understand how your campaigns are performing. xAd: xAd is a geofencing tool that helps businesses target potential customers in a specific area. It provides detailed analytics and insights, so you can understand how your campaigns are performing. PlaceIQ : PlaceIQ is a geofencing tool that helps businesses target potential customers in a specific area. It provides detailed analytics and insights, so you can understand how your campaigns are performing. Wrapping Up Geographically-based advertising is extremely useful for timely, targeted, and specific audience selection. While there is a wide range of possible uses, they can all help filter the applications you receive to allow you to reach highly qualified passive and active candidates in a given area. Make use of both geotargeting and geofencing in both local spaces and locations further afield. Has your company had a positive experience with using geotargeting or geofencing? Have you used either in a novel way and successfully recruited high-quality candidates?  Ready to revolutionize your recruiting strategy with cutting-edge location-based technology? Tap into the power of geofencing and geotargeting now – Contact us today to learn how our team can help you.

In an era where talent is recognized as the driving force behind successful businesses, recruitment services have become more significant than ever. These services help companies find the right fit, allowing them to optimize hiring by bridging the gap between potential employees and employers.  Continue reading to learn the critical aspects of recruitment services: what they are, their benefits, various types, how to choose the right provider, and how to make the most out of these services. What Are Recruitment Services? Recruitment services are specialized agencies or individuals that help businesses hire the best-suited candidates for their open positions. They differ from in-house hiring as they are externally managed, offering specialized expertise in sourcing, screening, and selecting the right talent. Recruitment services can be of various types, including staffing agencies, executive search firms, online job platforms, and hybrid models. Benefits of Recruitment Services Enlisting the help of recruitment services can streamline your hiring process for improved efficiency. These services provide access to a wider pool of qualified candidates, ensuring you find the best fit for your open positions. Recruitment services also offer expertise in the selection process, helping to save time and money compared to in-house recruitment.  Additionally, they can mitigate risks and ensure compliance with employment laws, providing an overall effective hiring solution. Types of Recruitment Services Different types of recruitment services cater to different hiring needs. Staffing agencies assist in all types of staffing services, such as temporary, contract, full-time, and more. Executive search firms specialize in sourcing high-caliber executive talent. Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) allows for the complete outsourcing of the recruitment function, providing end-to-end hiring solutions. Online job platforms leverage technology for broad and efficient candidate sourcing. Hybrid models combine different recruitment services for a tailored, optimal approach. Selecting the Right Recruitment Service Provider Selecting the right recruitment service provider is an integral step in optimizing your hiring process. This decision requires careful consideration, weighing several key factors to ensure the agency can meet your specific needs. Here’s an expanded guide on what to consider when making this crucial choice. First and foremost, evaluate the provider’s industry expertise and knowledge. A recruitment agency that understands your business’s industry will have a nuanced understanding of the technical skills, experience, and qualifications required for different roles. They will also have insight into industry trends and market salary rates, which can contribute to the effectiveness of your recruitment strategy. The provider’s network can often determine the quality of candidates they can access. An agency with a broad network across various job markets and industries will have a wider pool of potential candidates to choose from. Furthermore, it’s essential to assess their sourcing methods. Do they actively reach out to passive candidates, or do they rely solely on applicants who respond to job postings? An effective recruitment agency will employ a proactive approach, using a variety of tools and channels to source candidates. The quality of an agency’s screening and selection process can dramatically impact the caliber of candidates you receive. Understand their methods for screening applications and conducting initial interviews. Are they thorough, looking beyond just the candidate’s CV and into their soft skills, potential for growth, and fit within your company culture? The cost of a recruitment service provider should align with your budget and the value they deliver. While it might be tempting to opt for the cheapest option, remember that recruitment is an investment in your company’s future. Look at the agency’s value proposition – the services they provide, their reputation in the industry, their success rate, and the level of customization they offer to meet your specific needs. A more expensive service might offer a higher return on investment in the long run by providing higher-quality candidates or offering additional services like employer branding or onboarding support. The provider’s track record and feedback from past clients can give you insights into their reliability, professionalism, and success in finding the right candidates. Look at their placement success rate, the retention rate of their candidates, and feedback from their previous clients. You can often find this information through online reviews or by asking the provider for references. Choosing the right recruitment service provider is not a decision to be taken lightly. By evaluating their industry expertise, understanding their candidate sourcing and selection processes, assessing the cost and value proposition, and examining their track record and client feedback, you can find a recruitment partner that will effectively cater to your hiring needs. Maximizing the Benefits of Recruitment Services To get the most out of recruitment services, maintain clear communication and collaboration with your provider. Provide a detailed job description and candidate requirements to ensure they fully understand your needs. Regular feedback and updates during the recruitment process can help optimize the service. Building a strong employer brand can also attract top talent while establishing long-term partnerships with trusted providers ensures a smooth hiring process in the future. Conclusion The hiring process can be a complex and time-consuming endeavor. However, with the right recruitment services, it can become a smooth, efficient journey that lands you the top talent you need. These services offer a range of benefits from streamlining your hiring process to providing access to a wider talent pool. Remember to select the right provider carefully, and maximize their services for your benefit.  Don’t hesitate to contact us to discover how our unique recruiting style can bring you the best talent at a fraction of the cost.

It seems as though it’s every day that there’s a new story about employees in some industry or another committing fraud, either to benefit themselves or to bolster their company. Sometimes it’s as simple as a cashier stealing from the till, and sometimes it’s as nefarious as Wells Fargo employees opening bank accounts for people without their knowledge , to bolster their numbers and make the company look better. While there are certainly outside pressures in society that lead people to commit such unethical acts, you can minimize it happening in your company by focusing on hiring not just talented and experienced employees, but honest and ethical employees. The question is… how? We’re all familiar with the personality screening tests that are often part of a modern job application, used as an ethical screener for applicants. The trouble is, while ethical people answer honestly, unethical people simply learn the answers and tell you what you want to hear. No self-assessment is going to appropriately screen applicants. You need to do something more. Make Ethics Part of Your Core Brand Image Ethical people want to work for ethical companies. Honest employees burn out quickly when they’re faced with a career working with dishonest people, with no avenue to address those issues. A corporate or institutional policy of ignoring low-level dishonesty, or high-level unethical behavior, further exacerbates that behavior. In order to attract ethical applicants, you need to make ethics one of your core values. This goes above and beyond simply listing it on your website as a value. You need to make sure a culture of ethical and honest behavior is present at the core of your business. Don’t just tweet about ethical choices; put your money where your mouth is. Make sure your product is manufactured ethically. This can mean anything from making sure your factories are ethically run to making sure your software developers don’t experience “ crunch “. Make sure your messaging is free of bias, dishonesty, and institutional racism. Solicit feedback on company ethics and strive to make real changes when issues are brought up. Strive to make ethical behavior and honesty one of your core values . Support and give back to your community, particularly to the marginalized and disenfranchised segments of that community. It often feels as though modern companies care more about appearing ethical than actually being ethical, so by striving to make real changes, you can position your company as one of the best. Provide an Anonymous Means of Reporting Violations While establishing your company as visibly ethical is important, you also need to make sure you’re ethical within your ranks as well. It doesn’t matter how many charitable donations your company makes if all of your managers are known for casual embezzlement or dishonesty. If your employees feel like no one cares about ethical violations, or that there’s no way to report such violations, they won’t feel like your company is truly committed to the culture you espouse. One of the best things you can do to address this issue is to establish a process for reporting ethical violations and dishonesty within the company. Whether it’s a phone tip line, an anonymous email address, a document dropbox, or some other process, establish some way your employees can report ethical violations they witness in their workplace. Investigate Violations and Hold Everyone Accountable The corollary to the previous point is that you need to do more than just allow employees to report violations. You need to make it clear that all accusations are taken seriously and will be investigated. You do this not by saying as much, but by doing as much. Whenever a report of dishonesty or unethical behavior is reported, investigate that report. Dig as deeply as is necessary to determine the truth of the matter, and make sure the actual truth is what you unearth. It’s all too common for an organization to turn back an accusation on the accuser, which dissuades other employees from reporting what they see. Conversely, if every report results in the reported employee being fired, unscrupulous people may use the process to make up behavior to report to remove people they don’t like, regardless of ethical behavior. Thus, you need to make it clear that false reports are a sign of unethical behavior themselves. This is a very complex task, and it’s not a process you can establish overnight. It’s not an easy thing to piece together an ethics board, instill it with the authority necessary to investigate and make judgments, and ensure that the board itself is ethical. It’s also crucial that everyone, from the top C-levels to the lowest entry-level workers, is equally beholden to the ethics board. If higher-ups in the company have seeming immunity from consequences, the entire process fails. Put Ethical Requirements at the Forefront of Job Listings Once you have your internal affairs in order and have worked to establish yourself as one of the most publicly ethical companies, you can start requiring ethics standards in your job applications. Every job posting typically has a line paying lip service to honesty, but how often do you see it listed in the bullet points at the end of a job description? This is a two-part process. First, you need to write a detailed description of what ethics and honesty mean in your organization, and how they play into successfully applying for, being hired for, and successfully working in a role in your organization. Second, you need to make sure not to compromise. One of the greatest pitfalls in ethical hiring is deciding to let ethical standards slide in order to hire an employee with a promising skill set and experience level. Unfortunately, this fails in two ways. First, it shows that you’re willing to compromise on ethics, which sets a bad precedent for your existing and future employees. Second, unethical applicants may be embellishing their resumes, so you’re not actually getting the value you hoped to get by relaxing your requirements. Don’t settle for anything less than fully ethical and honest new hires. Look for Ethics Training or Experience on Applications While the pre-screening tests don’t necessarily work, you can get a good sense of an applicant by the information they put on their resume and in their application, and in what they leave out. First, look for the good signs. Look for certifications or training in ethics and honesty. Organizations like the ECI , NASBA , and MSI provide ethics training and certification tests; if an employee has taken such tests and can list those certifications, it’s likely a good sign. Second, consider watching for work history in known ethical companies. Lists like this one provide an overview of companies that are recognized for their integrity and honesty. Applicants with work history with these companies may be more promising and worth pursuing, as long as the reason they left isn’t that “they didn’t fit the culture.” Watch for Red Flags on Resumes Conversely, it pays to look for the red flags. What might stand out on a resume as a sign that there’s an ethical issue at play? Here are a few examples: Unusual career transitions. Some people make abrupt career shifts because they’re unhappy with their direction, but others are blacklisted from entire industries due to their conduct, and it’s important to discern which is the case. Long gaps in work history with no explanation. Gaps in work history can have reasonable explanations, especially with issues like the Great Recession and the Coronavirus Pandemic causing huge spikes in unemployment. Look for gaps in work history that lack a reasonable explanation; the applicant may be hiding something. Disproportionate job titles for their experience. Someone with only a year or two of experience is unlikely to have a C-level position earned honestly. They may have been given the position without earning it, or they may be inflating their job title to make their resume look better. Neither is a good sign. Failure to follow directions. One trick you can use to filter candidates is including a specific requirement for resumes or cover letters. If the applicant doesn’t customize their documents for your application, they’re self-filtering. There are other red flags you might find in a resume that might indicate a poor quality employee without necessarily indicating an unethical employee, as well. Be sure to familiarize yourself with those red flags so you can spot them when they come up. Pay for Good Background Checks Background checks should be part of any hiring process, once you’ve reached a point where you’re considering interviewing candidates. Unfortunately, the quality of a background check can vary wildly. Sometimes a background check can miss something as obvious as a public criminal conviction. It’s worthwhile to make sure you’re incorporating good background checks into your hiring process. Look for Candidates on Social Media In addition to systematic background checks, it can be worthwhile to do some simple research. It’s becoming more and more common for companies to simply Google search their potential new hires. It’s becoming increasingly common for unethical employees to be reported to their workplaces and suffer the consequences for their public opinions. That’s not to say that you should attempt to compromise social media accounts that aren’t public, demand access to private accounts, or otherwise commit a breach of privacy in order to research your applicants. It’s enough simply to see how a prospective new hire presents themselves online. Often times, a simple Google search can reveal if an applicant has been involved in any scandals or criminal cases in the past, and that information can be used to make a judgment on a candidate. It is, however, important to search for the context in the information that comes up. Don’t make a judgment on someone based on name alone, for example, in case you have the wrong person. Take the Time to Contact References Many companies make hiring decisions without ever calling references or checking with previous employers. Yes, it’s a lot of work to go through for each applicant, and it’s easy to want to ignore it for at least your low-level non-management employees. It’s important to use the information you’re given, though, to make a sound decision. Obviously, anyone listed as a reference is going to be someone with a generally positive opinion of the candidate. That’s why they’re listed. You can glean a lot from how a reference answers questions, how exuberant they are, and how honest they are in their assessment. When contacting previous employers, there are limits on what you can ask and how you can use the answers you receive. You can, however, make a judgment based on how questions are answered. If the employee was good, their employer will likely be more than happy to expound upon their virtues. If their employer is careful to give only the bare minimum of facts with no compliments or personal assessments, it may be a warning sign. Incorporate Ethics Questions in Interviews When an applicant has made it through your screening and to the interview stage, you’re given the opportunity to judge their ethics and honesty in a person. This is where ethical questions are much more effective. Rather than judging a written answer to a common question, you can judge a response delivered in real-time. Questions such as “when was a time you had a disagreement with a manager, and how did you resolve it?” and “have you ever been asked to do something you disagreed with? What did you do?” can be a good way to judge an applicant’s character , not just based on their answer, but based on the situation, their response to it, and how they deliver their story. Involve Your Best Employees in Interviews If you’ve established your company as honest and trustworthy internally, you can involve your most ethical employees as part of the interview process. These employees, tasked with thinking about honesty and culture fit, can help judge the character of an applicant and how their personality will fit with the team you have already established. They will have different concerns and different perspectives than you do while conducting the interview and can offer their opinions on to of more objective measurements of a candidate’s suitability. Make no mistake: hiring ethical employees requires a lot more than a simple employment screening. It’s a lot of work and may require broad shifts in your entire hiring process. Once that process is established, however, the benefits compound upon themselves for as long as you can maintain your ethical standards.

Millennials, now mostly in their 30s, have been struggling in the workforce for most of their adult lives. With recessions and a lack of traditional career openings, they’ve come to be known as the job-hopping generation. As Gen Z starts to enter the workforce, they too will have unique challenges to face. These challenges mirror the challenges faced by companies looking to recruit talent in these generations, but they also present an opportunity. Millennials and, to a lesser extent, the oncoming Gen Z graduates want to have stability and careers with progression. Companies that can offer them what they want can recruit awesome candidates from within those age groups. The key is in knowing what they want and how to give it to them, within your existing business framework. These strategies below are a mixture of things to do, things to avoid, and ways you can start recruiting millennial and Gen Z candidates. 1. Know the Differences Millennials and Gen Z are both young, technologically inclined, and generally skeptical of the world around them. While millennials grew up during an economic boom and graduated into a recession, Gen Z grew up in the recession watching their parents and friends struggle. This has shaped the outlooks of both generations in a distinct way. It’s important for any business looking to recruit these generations to recognize that they are, in fact, different generations, with different experiences, outlooks, and desires. Treating them the same, as a broad pool of “young people”, will significantly dampen the effectiveness of recruiting efforts. Some key differences: Millennials have an inherent optimism, while Gen Z candidates tend to be more pragmatic and realistic. Millennials tend to be more collaborative, while Gen Z candidates feel more self-reliant and independent. Millennials saw the rise of social media and are more forthcoming with personal information, while Gen Z candidates saw how this has been abused and tend to be more private. It’s important to know the differences between these generations, to more appropriately target them with messaging and recruiting initiatives. 2. Start Recruiting Gen Z Now The oldest of Gen Z candidates are 27 today, while the youngest are around 16-18, depending on which definition you want to look at. This means they are ripe for recruitment messaging throughout the end of their high school and throughout their college careers . Now is the time to start experimenting with recruitment messaging through various channels, from in-person meetings to social media via the platforms they actually use, like Snapchat and Instagram.  Remember; strategies need to be developed and evolve over time, they can’t change overnight. Start testing now and be prepared to weather failure before finding success. 3. Offer Career Growth Millennials have experienced a decade of working in an environment where job security is scarce and the chances of retirement feel slim to none. Gen Z is entering the workforce with the same feeling, which is why nearly half of the entire working generation works in the gig economy or as a freelancer: “Nearly half (46%) of Generation Z workers are freelancers, a number that is only projected to grow in the next five years” As a recruiter, if you can offer job security, upward mobility, a defined career path, and the promise of retirement, you can become very attractive to members of these generations. This means more than just promises; if a candidate works for you for a year with no sign of potential improvement, they’ll be highly likely to start looking for alternatives. 4. Be Tech-Savvy One of the biggest defining traits of millennials and Gen Z is technology. Millennials saw it grow and evolve into what it is today, and are adept at navigating changing technology and adapting to new standards. Gen Z has been inundated with technology since they were born, and are equally at home with it. This means that in order to successfully recruit these generations, you need to know their technology. This extended to every part of the process, from making sure your job application process is mobile-friendly to utilizing modern tech in your workplace. Nothing turns off a young candidate from either generation more than learning that they’ll be required to use software older than they are. 5. Maintain Your Brand Reputation In the past, when someone considered applying to a company, they might think about that company’s reputation among their community. They could ask friends and family about their experiences with the company, but exposure may be limited, and it was easier to control negativity. These days, with the prevalence of online reviews everywhere from Yelp to Glassdoor, it’s very easy for a young digital candidate to learn about your company’s reputation. This means more than just the truth; if a few disgruntled ex-employees decide to review-bomb your company, your candidates will see it. You need to be aggressive with reputation management , in a way that presents not just the truth of the matter, but a good-faith effort to improve where your company falters. 6. Offer Modern Perks Gen Z in particular is interested in the flexibility of a freelance (or gig-focused) lifestyle , and many of them don’t want to feel tied down by the stringent requirements of a traditional 9-5 full of meetings and overbearing bosses. Fluidity, flexibility, and an individual management style are all requirements for recruiting Gen Z. One powerful perk for Gen Z employees is a flexible mentorship program. By allowing interested Gen Z employees to shadow others and learn more than just a single role within a company, you can both train a valuable and flexible employee and keep a traditionally bored young person engaged with the company. This can be bolstered by offering a “job mosaic” of both lateral and vertical mobility. 7. Strongly Consider Remote Work The global pandemic has highlighted one thing: many jobs traditionally thought of as office work can be successfully done remotely with little or no issues. As long as the technology is in place to support remote work , it can be greatly beneficial to both employees and employers. Offering flexibility with remote work is more than just a temporary necessity; it’s a hugely beneficial perk that can attract both younger millennials and Gen Z candidates. Millennials love the flexibility it gives them, though they will often continue to attend in-office shifts for the collaboration and in-person interaction. Gen Z will love the independence it gives them, as a chance to work at their own pace and prove their value on their own terms. 8. Working for a Great Cause Older generations often want careers for their own benefit; to support their families, to save up for luxury purchases, and so on. Younger generations, by contrast, tend to have higher-level goals in mind. They don’t just want to support themselves, they want to make the world around them a better place, both for their local communities and for the world as a whole. You can utilize this as part of your recruitment and outreach messaging. Think about your role in your community and both nationally and globally. Determine ways that your company is making the world a better place, and emphasize that by working for your company, these young candidates will be helping to make that dream come true. “If you’re planning to recruit from Gen Z, be aware that your work environment is going to be a major factor in attracting them. Salary and financial security are important, but they’re interested in working for companies that demonstrate a positive impact on society. That needs to be reflected in the employer branding.” It’s important that your company actually does work towards your stated goal. Gen Z in particular loves to dig into their causes, and if you promise that you’re working for the greater good but you aren’t, they will find out and they will call you out on it. 9. Listen to Them Millennials and Gen Z have both been forced by circumstance to be entrepreneurs and self-motivated individuals, and while not all business ventures succeed, they have their own experiences and their own ideas that can prove to be valuable feedback for any company. Be prepared to listen to ideas from your younger recruits, and consider that feedback seriously. If you have reasons why their feedback won’t work, learn how to express those reasons. Employees from these generations who feel like they’re being ignored will be more likely to jump ship, or worse, leave to create a more agile competitor. 10. Fine Tune Your Work-Life Balance Decades ago, a job was a 9-5. Work stayed at work, and home life stayed at home. Over time, more and more exploitation of workers led to longer hours, more time spent working at home without pay to meet deadlines, and less time for family and friends. In reaction to this, younger generations have aimed for more flexible work and benefits, to work on their own terms. “Generation Z see less segregation between work and life — they’re more about balancing that and making it seamless so work gets done anywhere, anytime; without sacrificing either one” Millennials and Gen Z are extremely sensitive to work-life balance concerns and are much more likely to choose their personal lives over their jobs. This is further reinforced by their habitual lack of long-term prospects and the general attitude that mobility only occurs when changing jobs. For Gen Z in particular, flexibility is crucial. They don’t care about the hours, they care about the tasks. As long as they can get their tasks done and meet their deadlines, why should it matter when they work? If you can meet this attitude , you’ll be an ideal haven for Gen Z candidates. 11. Pay Attention to Culture For millennials, a good culture fit can be a reason to accept an offer that otherwise has fewer perks and benefits or lower pay than other offers they receive. They are particularly sensitive to mismatched culture and tend to be vocal about calling out injustices, both locally and on a larger scale. To successfully recruit millennials and Gen Z, you need to emphasize your culture in your brand marketing, both in what your intended culture is and what your actual culture is. They will definitely be turned off by a mismatch between what you say and what they see. 12. Change Yourself, Not Your Candidates Gen Z in particular is highly individual. They will be very resistant to the idea that they can be hired on for a role and then be molded to fit that role. They are who they are, and they aren’t going to change just for a job they (likely) only figure will stick around for a year or two. They will want to pick a role that suits them or shapes their role to better fit who they are. Resisting that kind of matching will make it much, much harder to recruit and retain Gen Z candidates. Gen Z is the next big wave of young employees, and they bring with them a new paradigm in work and recruiting. Now is the time to adapt to that paradigm. Staying Ahead in the Recruitment Game Navigating the nuanced world of Millennial and Gen Z recruitment is more than just understanding generational differences—it’s about acknowledging the evolving landscape of the job market and adapting to meet the needs of these younger generations. They come with unique experiences, values, and expectations that cannot be ignored.  By offering flexibility, valuing their voices, promoting a strong company culture, and embracing technology, you can position yourself as a desirable destination for these young talents. As we move forward, it’s imperative that companies stay ahead of the curve, or risk losing out on the immense potential these generations have to offer. Need help with your recruitment efforts? Contact our team today , and we’ll assist in securing the best Millennial and Gen Z talent for your company.

In today’s fast-paced and unpredictable healthcare landscape, the challenges of recruiting and staffing competent, dedicated professionals are more pressing than ever. This blog post is the ultimate guide to healthcare recruiting and staffing because it delves deep into the intricate world of healthcare recruitment.  It’s about understanding the multifaceted needs and aspirations of potential candidates, navigating the complex web of certifications and regulations, and cultivating an environment that not only attracts but also retains top talent. From the profound impact of the current pandemic on healthcare professionals’ morale and career trajectories to the critical need for specialized certifications, we explore every facet of the recruitment process in this guide.  Read this blog post for actionable insights and strategies to enhance your candidate pool, streamline your recruitment process, and ultimately build a resilient, skilled workforce capable of weathering the storms of this demanding yet rewarding industry.  Special Considerations with Healthcare Recruiting and Staffing Healthcare workers have a number of special considerations that you have to keep in mind when you’re managing recruitment. Healthcare workers have an extremely high turnover rate. Healthcare is an extremely demanding career, with patient lives on the line every day. It can be extremely stressful simply by the nature of the work. Add onto that administrative, governmental, and institutional shortcomings, and it becomes a minefield. The turnover rate for healthcare and related fields is nearly 20% , and that’s before the current pandemic began pushing every single healthcare worker to their limits. There’s an existing shortage of healthcare workers. Demand for healthcare workers is high and increasing. Every level from the custodial and food service workers in hospitals to the physicians, dentists, and surgeons performing procedures, is high and increasing. Again, even prior to the current pandemic, demand for healthcare workers was outstripping availability, with an existing shortage of over 42,000 workers and a predicted shortage of over 120,000 by 2030 . The pandemic only makes things worse. Healthcare workers will burn out and leave the field. Others will die. Many more will linger on, their spirits gone, unable to advance in their fields. This all presents a challenge for healthcare recruiting. Not only is it increasingly difficult to find workers willing to continue their careers, but it will also be difficult to find new graduates willing to join the workforce under such stressful conditions. Healthcare workers need special certification. Unlike many other fields, where on the job experience or education rules the day and specific certifications are often optional, healthcare is strictly regulated.  Healthcare workers require specific certification or degrees for their desired roles. It’s impossible to hire an untrained and unqualified worker for most healthcare roles, though lower-level roles like receptionist, custodial staff and food service are always available to nearly anyone. Increasing Your Candidate Pool The first part of any good recruitment process is building a candidate pool . There are, of course, many ways to do this, but in healthcare, recruiting often starts early. First, remember that part of training for healthcare workers and certification involves on-the-job training. Healthcare students must gain hands-on experience shadowing preceptors and spending time in the thick of things. This is a valuable experience, of course, but it also serves as an opportunity for the student to experience culture in the facility they’re working in. What this means is that some healthcare workers will develop a strong affinity for particular facilities or an aversion to others. Many qualified candidates will choose to avoid certain hospital networks, for example, either because of their experience or because of their reputation. As a recruiter, you have to keep the culture of your facility or network in mind. Listen to existing healthcare workers. Accept feedback and understand the shortcomings of your system. Work to address them if you can, and be up-front about those that aren’t within your control. To a certain extent, simply being honest with candidates , acknowledging issues that you’re attempting to solve, can entice them to give your system the benefit of the doubt. What this all means is that a facility will want to start recruiting early in the education process. Campus recruiting – getting potential candidates interested before they’ve even graduated – is essential for many healthcare facilities. Maintaining contact with training facilities, educational institutions, and certifying agencies is crucial. Second, take advantage of different channels for building up a candidate pool . You have your standard channels, of course. Sites like Indeed , Glassdoor , CareerBuilder, and LinkedIn are standard multi-industry recruiting portals, and they have just as many healthcare workers as other kinds of workers available to be recruited. You also have your usual recommendation channels. When a job opening is available, existing healthcare employees can recommend people they know from within or outside of their facility. Recommendations are often one of the strongest indicators of a high-quality reliable worker, so paying attention to these channels can be very valuable. Additionally, you have the healthcare-specific job portals. For example, MyCNAJobs is a portal for healthcare workers with CNA training. Other boards, such as Healthcare eCareers , the JAMA network , and Medical Jobs are all good resources. There are also many healthcare-specific recruiting agencies available for a facility to work with. You should also consider streamlining your recruitment process. One of the biggest modern complaints among job seekers, within healthcare and in other industries, is when application tracking systems layer on the paperwork, asking candidates to fill out information already present in other channels. Streamlining this process might mean using a different system, implementing language parsing for resumes, and other techniques. Maintain Multiple Candidate Pools As a staffing organization, either internal or external to a healthcare facility, you want to make sure you’re maintaining multiple pools of candidates. Each role should have a pool. This means having an upper management pool , a lower management pool, a pool for doctors, a pool for surgeons, a pool for nurses, a pool for janitorial workers, a pool for food service workers, and so on. Each major division of roles should have a pool of its own. The benefit of maintaining these pools separately is that it makes filling a particular role much easier. You don’t have to filter one large, disparate pool; you can filter through a pool where you know all of the candidates in it are qualified. Filtering based on experience, by certification, and by position are all ways to find the best workers for a given position. Maintain a Verification Process As mentioned, healthcare workers need to be trained and certified for their position. This generally involves not just education at a qualified and accredited facility but passing specific tests such as the NCLEX and other such exams . An important part of hiring in healthcare, then, is verifying that the worker has indeed passed their tests and are certified. With doctors, this means board certification. Board certification can be checked. Certification Matters , for example, is a tool that allows anyone – patients, other healthcare workers, and recruiters alike – to check if a particular doctor is board-certified. Each state will typically also maintain a database of certification for doctors. There are also healthcare-focused HR platforms you can use for staffing. Part of what makes these healthcare-specific platforms is their ability to sort and verify information about candidates, including certification. Out Reach If you haven’t been in contact with a particular candidate since their time in education, it can be tricky to reach out to a new candidate and entice them with an offer. Identifying candidates and reaching out to them is an important part of recruiting, and as such, it’s important to put together the right kinds of communication. Part of this means establishing your brand as a healthcare facility or as a recruiting agency. Knowing who you are, and establishing a reputation such that others know who you are, is a critical part of successful recruitment. Everyone recognizes Johns Hopkins or the Mayo Clinic; they should also recognize you. Part of this comes down to properly formulating outreach, whether it’s through email, phone, messaging, or another channel. LinkedIn has examples of email or message-based outreach you can use as a starting point. Using their templates verbatim isn’t a great option, but using them for ideas you can customize for your own messaging is better. Emphasize Employee Retention With such a high turnover rate, the facility that proves it can treat its workers right is the facility that will never have problems with staffing . Much of the turnover in healthcare stems from factors well beyond the facility’s control, such as insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and the government. That just means that what the facility can control, it should. Here are some tips your organization can pursue. Improve benefits for employees. Healthcare is an incredibly demanding career. In part, this is simply the nature of dealing with people when they’re suffering, at their lowest moments. In part, however, it’s due to the ineffectual desire for executives to get every penny they can out of their facilities. Benefits to employees do not have to be limited to things like their pay scale and their own healthcare coverage. Benefits can include consistent shifts, adequate time off, flexible work environments, and more. Some benefits you might consider for recruiting in healthcare include: Relocation assistance. If you’re willing to help fund relocation, you can attract talent from a wide range of locations, casting a wide net and filtering to the best workers. The best facilities develop national or global reputations for quality, both in terms of patient care and employee treatment. Ongoing training. Medical roles are constantly evolving as new knowledge is discovered, tested, and proven. Everything from which drugs are recommended for specific ailments to methods of treatment for diseases can change. Ongoing training helps ensure that healthcare workers are always able to provide the highest quality care. On-site or affiliate facility access to amenities. Providing healthcare workers with access to a gym, free or discounted food, and other amenities helps them feel better treated. Adequate leave. Leave for anything from vacations to medical leave to maternity and paternity leave should be offered to all employees. Appropriate levels of leave, particularly for new parents, are a huge benefit many workers don’t expect to get in today’s climate. Ensure proper staffing levels. One of the biggest sources of stress for healthcare workers is a facility that is understaffed. Not only does it put more stress on individual healthcare workers, it means the quality of care for patients drops, and that in turn means that healthcare workers – who are generally in it because of their compassion – feel less like they can make a difference at their facility. It brings them closer to burnout and increases turnover . The best thing a facility can do for its staff is to hire more staff . With more workers, patient care can be handled appropriately, coverage doesn’t need to be a matter of managing crisis to crisis, and trained employees can cover gaps in each others’ knowledge with ease. Invest in your facility. While it’s tertiary to the process of recruiting, healthcare facilities need to ensure that not just their employees, but their tools are kept up to date. Using modern software is important, for example, both because new graduates will have trained on it and because it can better handle modern patient care. Up-to-date machinery helps reduce stressors like alarm desensitization, which can affect patient care. Healthcare is about more than the workers. With a proper recruitment plan, operating from the ground up, you can strive not just to hire temporary healthcare workers who will leave after a year or two, but long-term permanent nurses, doctors, and other workers. Providing a strong foundation to candidates, attracting them with promises of benefits, compensation, and flexibility, and then upholding those promises is the key to successful long-term fulfillment in the healthcare sector. Get started now; the industry is going to need it in the years to come. Conclusion Healthcare recruiting and staffing is as challenging as it is vital, demanding a strategic, compassionate, and proactive approach. This ultimate guide has traversed the complex terrain of healthcare recruitment, shedding light on the unique challenges and offering practical solutions to build a robust, committed workforce. Navigating the high turnover rates, the alarming shortages in healthcare professionals, and the stringent certification requirements necessitates a nuanced understanding of the industry and a human-centric approach to recruitment. The strategies discussed—from early engagement with potential candidates to leveraging specialized job portals, from maintaining diverse candidate pools to ensuring a streamlined and empathetic recruitment process—are pivotal in addressing these challenges. Moreover, the emphasis on employee retention through comprehensive benefits, adequate staffing levels, and continuous investment in both the workforce and the facility underscores the importance of a nurturing work environment. It’s about creating a culture that not only attracts talent but also celebrates and sustains it. As the healthcare industry continues to evolve, particularly in the wake of the pandemic, the principles and strategies outlined in this guide stand as a beacon for healthcare institutions. The path to a resilient healthcare system is paved with dedication, understanding, and strategic action in recruitment and staffing. The time to fortify our healthcare workforce is now, ensuring that the industry is equipped to meet the demands of today and the uncertainties of tomorrow. Do you need help hiring more healthcare professionals? Contact our team today and we will help you recruit!