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Hiring teams are likely well aware that it is illegal and unethical to discriminate against candidates based on “race, color, national origin, sex, religion, age, or disability.” However, it’s also essential to ensure that your hiring practices aren’t allowing favoritism to guide staffing decisions in your workplace. Favoritism in hiring certainly can cross into the realm of illegal. For example, research has found that men are more likely to hire other men, while women are more likely to hire other women. This points to the reality that favoritism and its related discrimination might be all too common in recruiting and hiring. At the same time, favoritism doesn’t have to be unlawful to impact your organization negatively. Factors as seemingly harmless as preferring a candidate because you belonged to the same fraternity or sorority, or share common hobbies, can mean that you aren’t hiring the most qualified person for the job. Let’s take a look at how you can combat favoritism in your hiring practices to ensure that you are always selecting the best candidate for the position. What Is Favoritism in Hiring? Favoritism is precisely what it sounds like– favoring an individual for reasons that don’t have to do with their abilities and experience, but instead due to some extraneous feature. That might have to do with a person’s likes and dislikes, membership in a favored group, or another reason entirely. Organizations should be motivated to eliminate favoritism in hiring individuals and in giving out promotions. One specific type of favoritism is known as cronyism . This is when a person is favored because they belong to a network of insiders. Another, more narrow kind of favoritism is nepotism . In hiring, nepotism occurs when someone is hired because they are related to someone in the organization rather than based on their skills, abilities, and experience. Cronyism and nepotism are two types of in-group favoritism, which means that a person favors someone else for being a member of a group they belong to. People can also show out-group favoritism, which is when you favor someone who belongs to a group you don’t belong to. An example of out-group favoritism might be hiring someone because they went to an Ivy League school you have always held in high regard, even though you didn’t attend the school. Why Is It Important to Avoid Favoritism in Your Hiring Process? Playing favorites can be a problem in the office, but it’s also important to avoid it during the hiring and recruiting process. One of the most apparent reasons why combatting favoritism in hiring is important is that it can hurt your organization. After all, if you favor someone in the hiring process for reasons that don’t have to do with their ability to perform the role, your company won’t be gaining the most capable employee for the position. Favoritism in the hiring process can add up over time to cause issues in your company culture as well. For example, if your existing employees believe someone was hired for reasons other than their qualifications for the position, it can lead to resentment, bitterness, and other negative cultural attributes. It’s also essential to avoid favoritism when promoting employees. If it is clear to your team that someone received a promotion because they are your close friend, for example, rather than their ability to fulfill their necessary duties, it can negatively affect motivation, productivity, morale, and the culture as a whole. Is Favoritism in Hiring Illegal? Depending on why an individual is favored in the hiring process, it may or may not be illegal. For example, hiring a less-qualified candidate because they like the same sports team as you isn’t unlawful, though some could consider it unethical. However, hiring one candidate over another because of protected characteristics is illegal. An employer cannot make an employment decision because of an individual’s race, religion, color, sex, national origin, disability, age, or genetic information. Illegal favoritism stretches beyond your actual hiring decision, too. Employers cannot publish job advertisements that discourage people from applying or show a preference toward certain people based on the protected characteristics listed above. For example, it might technically be illegal to publish a job post seeking “recent college graduates” for a position, even if that seems relatively harmless. That is because people over the age of 40 (as this is how the government distinguishes the protected characteristic of age) might be dissuaded from applying. It’s essential to avoid favoritism when recruiting candidates as well. It is similarly illegal to discriminate against people based on a protected characteristic in the recruiting process. In the application and hiring process, an employer also cannot discriminate based on a protected characteristic, and their hiring decisions cannot be based on assumptions or stereotypes due to a person’s possession of one of these protected characteristics. Any tests you require as a part of your job application process must not exclude anyone based on these protected characteristics, and the test must be necessary and related to the job. Employers are also required to provide accommodations for individuals with a disability if they are necessary to apply for the job (so long as significant expense or difficulty isn’t caused to the employer) These protections apply to job referrals, assignments, promotions, pay and benefits, discipline, and discharge. By favoring an employee because they aren’t in a protected class, you are likely breaking the law. For example, if you choose a female candidate over a more qualified male candidate because you assume that the open position is a woman’s job, you are discriminating against the male candidate. 5 Tips to Combat Favoritism in Your Hiring Practices To make sure that the most qualified candidate is hired for any open positions at your organization, it’s essential to work to combat favoritism in your recruiting and hiring process. Here are five ways to ensure that preferential treatment isn’t impacting your hiring decisions. 1. Rewrite Your Job Descriptions One of the first places you can begin combating favoritism in your hiring practices is through your job descriptions. The application pool you receive can be significantly impacted by even the subtlest word choices, so it’s worth taking the time to ensure that no candidates are dissuaded from applying because of how the description is written. For example, using certain words in a job post can come across as more masculine to job seekers, potentially leaving women to feel as though they don’t belong in the work environment to the extent that they don’t apply. Words that typically dissuade women from applying to a job include adjectives such as “determined” and “competitive.” On the other hand, words like “cooperative” and “collaborative” tend to draw more women than men and might deter men from applying. Are you interested in learning how to improve generational diversity in your workplace? If so, check out these five ways to confront age bias . 2. Institute Blind Hiring Practices Another way that you can reduce favoritism in the hiring process is by instituting blind hiring and recruiting practices . Blind hiring involves anonymizing the resumes and applications of candidates so that recruiters can focus only on their experience and skills rather than other factors that could lead to favoritism or discrimination. When you follow a blind recruitment process, several common identifying details can be left out of resumes and applications. Whether you have a third-party anonymize these documents or you use a blind recruiting software, some of the information that can be removed from resumes and applications includes: Gender Ethnic background Names Age Education Personal interests A person’s name can indicate many pieces of identifying information, such as their gender, nationality, and ethnic background. Even if the indication is false (for example, a person with a name that sounds female but is actually male), favoritism or discrimination could arise, even unconsciously. Leaving out the specific educational institution where a person received their degree can also reduce favoritism in the hiring process. For example, a recruiter might feel a sense of camaraderie with someone who attended their alma mater and show favoritism towards them during the process. Most hiring teams would never dream of explicitly being discriminatory or showing favoritism, but it’s essential to understand that this can be very subtle. For example, if a person’s interests are listed, a hiring team member might favor them because they share a similar hobby without even realizing it. 3. Standardize Your Interview Process While unstructured interviews are often the preference for hiring teams, research has found that they are “among the worst predictors of actual on-the-job performance.” In this type of interview, the goal is for a candidate’s skills and experience to unfold through a natural conversation rather than being guided by defined questions. On top of being less effective as a hiring practice, unstructured interviews also open up the process to potential favoritism. The person conducting the interview might be more likely to favor someone they feel they have a lot in common with, for example, over someone else with more experience with whom they didn’t “click” with as much. Implementing standardized interviews can allow you to minimize bias and focus only on factors that directly impact candidate performance. Ideally, the interview process can be another independent data point that can be incorporated into the hiring decision. 4. Have Candidates Complete a Work Sample Test Another way to remove potential bias that might lead a hiring team to favor one candidate over another is by including a work sample test. This test mimics the type of work expected of the candidate within the role. By having a standardized test for all candidates, you can weigh out their performance against one another in a way that doesn’t incorporate non-related factors. If the position that you’re hiring for is customer-facing or otherwise requires high levels of interpersonal skills, you might find that incorporating likability as a measurable factor could be helpful. Studies have revealed that employers tend to hire people whom they personally like the best out of the candidate pool, as well as the fact that the initial impression made in the first ten seconds of the interview can lead to a candidate getting hired or not. While it is natural for people to want to work with others they get along with, it’s important to combat favoritism in the form of natural chemistry or common interests. If you know that likability is a significant part of the role the candidate will be fulfilling, consider grading all of the candidates on a likability score to help control this as a factor and remove it from other parts of the process. 5. Be Self-Aware of Your Existing Biases Learning about hiring prejudices and how they work is essential in combating favoritism in the hiring process. On top of that, you’ll also want to work to be self-aware of any existing biases you might have. Even if you work hard to treat everyone equally in the hiring process, favoritism can still emerge when you don’t even realize it. Subtle things can impact whether you favor one candidate over another. For example, something as simple as a person having the same breed of dog as you could unconsciously lead you to give them preference over another candidate. No one wants to feel like they are unfairly favoring one candidate for reasons that don’t have to do with expected job performance, but the reality is that it’s more common than we’d all like to think. By having a sense of how you might be swayed to favor one candidate over another, you can keep an eye out for preferential treatment or favoritism during the recruitment and hiring process. Do you have any questions about how to combat favoritism in your hiring practices? Did we miss any essential tips that you want to contribute? If so, please feel free to leave a comment below, and we’ll get a conversation started on the topic! We love talking about all things recruiting and hiring, and would be happy to help you work to eliminate favoritism in your recruiting and hiring process.

Most engineers in the U.S. work in the manufacturing industry , particularly in the production of electronic products, machinery, and transportation equipment. However, since engineers help to solve problems through the application of scientific, technological, and mathematical principles, they are highly sought-after across industries. Hiring top-tier, experienced engineers can be challenging because there is more demand than supply in the field. At the same time, engineering positions are often so specialized and technical that it’s essential to find someone highly suited for the role. If you’re trying to recruit engineers, you might be frustrated that there are more job postings for these professionals than individuals to fill them. This means you have to go out of your way to attract the best candidates and convince them that the open position at your organization is the best of all possible options. Let’s talk a bit about the types of engineering and the challenges that companies often face when recruiting engineers before discussing some tips and tricks to help you out during the hiring process . The Different Types of Engineers Engineering can, in broad terms, be separated into four primary groups. While there are countless other interdisciplinary subjects and sub-disciplines that are a part of the engineering field, getting a basic sense of the main categories of engineers can help you zero in on the type of specialist you are searching for. Electrical Electrical engineers can work in various industries, including manufacturing, research, telecommunications, and more. Specializing in the design, testing, and manufacturing of various electrical components, these engineers work in one of the broadest fields in the industry. Some examples of electrical components an electrical engineer might work with include communication systems, motors, power generation systems, and navigation systems. The median salary in 2020 for an electrical engineer was $103,390. The position typically requires at least a Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. Mechanical Mechanical engineers develop, design, and build mechanical devices such as tools, machines, and engines. Combining mathematics and engineering physics with materials science allows these engineers to design, manufacture, and maintain mechanical systems. The median salary in 2020 for a mechanical engineer was $90,160. The position usually requires the candidate to have a Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. Chemical The field of study surrounding the design and operation of chemical plants is known as chemical engineering. Through chemical engineering, raw materials are transformed into useful products using efficient commercial processes. It’s common for chemical engineers to work in laboratories or offices to design and troubleshoot production processes for the manufacturing of fuels, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, foods, and more. Chemical engineers had a median salary of $108,540 in 2020. A Bachelor’s degree is generally required for the position. Civil Civil engineers primarily focus on the design, construction, and maintenance of the built environment, including bridges, roads, dams, canals, pipelines, railways, the structural components of buildings, and more. These engineers deal with all things infrastructure and can work in both the private and public sectors. They commonly spend time both in the office and on project sites. The median salary for civil engineers in 2020 was $88,570. The position typically requires a Bachelor’s degree. Engineer Recruitment: Common Challenges If you’ve already begun the process of recruiting engineers to work with your organization, you may have run into some difficulty along the way. Numerous online employment sites have ranked engineering as one of the most challenging jobs to fill. This means that you might have to go above and beyond your regular recruiting practices to attract the right candidate for the job. High Demand, Low Supply One of the most obvious reasons that it is challenging to hire high-quality engineers is that the demand is outpacing the supply . Many of the best engineers are nearing retirement, while not enough engineers graduate from colleges and universities to fill the gap. While there can be benefits to bringing on new graduates, you’ll likely notice that there is a learning curve that equates to a less efficient process overall. Extended Hiring Process The average time it takes to fill an engineering position is fifty-eight days, which is fifteen days longer than the average length of time for all job positions. This is more evidence that recruiters have to work harder to find the right candidate for the position. These jobs can also take longer to fill because there can be so many technical aspects associated with them. This can mean that the hiring process is longer than usual, as more screenings and interviews are required for an organization to feel comfortable committing to a candidate. This can also cause issues, though, because it means that your ideal candidate has more time to negotiate with other organizations while they are interviewing with you. That means you could get three-quarters of the way through the process with the ideal candidate, only to find that they decided to go with another position. Tips For Recruiting Engineers Anyone who has been looking to hire engineers in the current market likely knows just how challenging it can be. Let’s look at some tips to help your recruiting process be more effective and efficient. Creating Your Job Posting It’s essential to clearly communicate the expectations and responsibilities of a position when you’re writing the job posting. The highest quality candidates will only take the time to apply for positions that they believe they are well-suited for, so it’s important for the posting to communicate all the essential functions that they will be required to perform in the role. You’ll also want to include details about whether the position is permanent, full-time, or part-time, and what candidates can expect from the company culture. Assess Both Technical Skills and Soft Skills When searching for an engineer, it’s easy to focus only on technical skills. Soft skills are also essential in the workplace, though, along with personal passion. Finding an engineer who is genuinely passionate about their work can make a massive difference in the outcome you receive. An engineer with the necessary soft skills can ensure they fit well as a long-term candidate within your company culture. Every time you create a new job posting, you have the opportunity to collect and analyze data to inform your recruiting team and allow the next round of hiring to be even more seamless. Check out this recent post to learn more about recruitment analytics and how you can use data to improve your quality of hire. Encourage Referrals From Employees Whether you have full-time engineers on staff or you’ve been working with contract engineers, consider creating a referral program to help find the best candidates. There’s a good chance that your existing employees have an expansive network within the engineering field. People that you are already working with will typically have a good idea of what your company is looking for in an engineer and which types of candidates would be best suited for open roles. You can offer incentives to help encourage employee referrals, monetary or otherwise. Consider Using Digital Channels While employee referrals and well-written job postings can go a long way to help you find the right engineer for your organization, there are additional, non-traditional channels you also might consider using. For example, you might find high-quality prospective candidates on engineering Slack channels or other online forums. You can also find digital networking channels supported by tech conferences, which could provide additional opportunities to connect with engineering talent. Create an Internship Program Depending on your engineering needs, you might find that creating an internship program creates a steady stream of future employees. If you can build a successful and attractive internship program, you can reduce the use of company resources in recruiting. Internship programs often attract younger candidates who have recently graduated from college. By starting these individuals in a suitable, beginner-level position, you have the opportunity to cultivate a long and vibrant relationship with a new generation of talent. If you’re considering starting an internship program, consider reaching out to local universities with top-tier engineering programs. It isn’t uncommon for universities to require students to participate in an internship program before graduating, and it’s possible you could partner with local colleges in a way that benefits all parties involved. The structure of your recruiting process can significantly impact how quickly and effectively you can fill open positions at your organization. If your recruiting team has primarily been focusing on passive candidates when a role opens up, you might find that pivoting to an active recruiting strategy could save your company resources in the long term. You can learn more about the difference between proactive and reactive recruiting in this recent post. Advertise Your Culture Since there is more demand for engineers than supply, it’s essential to understand that engineers have their pick of the litter when it comes to jobs. On top of the salary and benefits that come along with a position, engineers will often look at additional factors such as the company culture . To attract top-tier engineers to your organization, advertise the positive aspects of your culture. Include a few bullet points about the culture in your job posting to help prospective candidates see what makes your company stand out from the crowd. Screen Your Candidates Because engineers are in high demand, it can be tempting to take the first marginally qualified person who comes along. However, it’s essential to screen your candidates thoroughly to ensure they will be a good fit for the position for the duration of the job. Otherwise, you could find yourself back at square one in just a few months’ time. Either through email or during an in-person interview , consider asking some screening questions that allow you to filter the candidate pool further. Some questions you might ask during this stage of the process include: How much experience do you have in this field? What are your salary expectations? What are your long-term goals in this field? Including an assessment can help you gauge the practical knowledge and skills of potential candidates. Of course, you’ll also want to perform the necessary background checks to look into the employment history, criminal record, and qualifications of any candidate you are considering hiring. You also might need to verify the licenses or certifications of candidates, depending on the state your business operates in and the industry. Have you been considering shifting to a blind recruitment process at your company? Learn more about how anonymous hiring works in this article. Have a Long-Term Strategy Chances are, this isn’t the last time you’ll be working to recruit an engineer for your organization. For this reason, it’s a good idea to devise a long-term strategy that you can turn to repeatedly as you build your team of engineers. Whether you periodically need to hire a contract engineer or your organization has dozens of engineers on staff, creating a system that helps you recruit and hire the best talent in the field will ensure the process is as efficient and effective as possible. Do you have a position that needs to be filled in a hurry? Be sure to take a look at our complete guide to effectively recruiting during a time crunch . Consider Hiring a Recruiter Finding the right engineer can be a struggle, but it doesn’t have to be when you enlist some help. Recruiters specialize in finding the perfect candidate for open positions and can do so more quickly and with greater ease. This can be particularly useful in a competitive market, as they have highly developed knowledge that they can apply to the recruitment and screening phases of the process. If you need a rock star Emerge Talent Cloud to help grow your workforce, you’ve come to the right place. To learn more about what makes Emerge Talent Cloud different than other agencies, sign up for a free consultation today . Conclusion In the quest to recruit top engineering talent across various specialties—electrical, mechanical, chemical, and more—the challenges faced by organizations are manifold. The highly specialized, technical nature of engineering roles, coupled with a market where demand outstrips supply, necessitates a strategic, multifaceted approach to attract and retain the best in the field.  Crafting clear, detailed job postings, emphasizing both technical and soft skills, and showcasing your company culture are pivotal first steps in drawing in high-caliber candidates. Leveraging digital channels, encouraging employee referrals, and instituting robust internship programs can broaden your talent pool. Additionally, adopting a long-term, proactive recruitment strategy, including the potential engagement of specialized recruiters, can streamline the process, ensuring a consistent influx of skilled engineers.  By navigating these complexities with a comprehensive, well-considered plan, organizations can not only overcome the hurdles of the competitive engineering job market but also secure the innovative, skilled professionals essential for driving success and growth in an increasingly technical world. Ready to elevate your engineering team with top-tier talent? Don’t let the complexities of recruiting in a competitive market slow you down. Reach out to our expert recruitment team today and discover how we can streamline your hiring process, connect you with the industry’s best engineers, and drive your organization forward. Page updated on January 29, 2023.

The people who make up an organization are perhaps the most critical factor in its success. Every day, personnel at a company make countless decisions and actions that help determine whether a business grows or struggles. For this reason, hiring decisions are crucial for businesses to get right. When you select a high-quality candidate for a position, it means that they have the potential to increase the success and effectiveness of the organization as a whole. One of the ways that modern companies are making their hiring process more efficient and effective is with the use of recruitment analytics. What are recruitment analytics, and how can they benefit your recruitment process? How can you use data to improve your quality of hire? What Are Recruitment Analytics? Recruitment analytics is the application of big data analytics to the hiring process. Allowing your recruitment team to measure and adjust its strategy based on collected data, recruitment analytics can help you make better, more efficient hiring decisions. This type of software can help identify patterns that emerge in your recruitment data. For example, your analytic software might discover that new hires commonly leave the organization only after two months. This could point toward issues in the onboarding process, candidate selection, or the job description. As you might imagine, this data analysis can completely revolutionize your hiring process. There are tons of essential questions that can be answered by recruitment analytics, including: What channels are producing the best candidates? What similarities do my best candidates share? What is the total cost of hiring for a new position? At what stage in the recruitment process do most prospective hires drop out? Recruitment analytics can draw data from many different sources. Commonly, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, applicant tracking systems (ATS), and human resources information systems (HRIS) are used as data sources. Additionally, this software can use information from satisfaction surveys, job advertising platform data, and brand data. Another way that hiring teams use technology to improve their recruitment process is through the application of software that helps to facilitate blind recruitment. Also known as anonymous hiring, blind recruitment tools can help avoid unconscious bias and improve efficiency. How Can Data Improve Your Hiring Process? Your hiring efforts can be significantly improved by recruitment analytics. By making data-driven hiring decisions, you can keep your hiring process competitive, make better hiring decisions, and help your organization succeed and grow in the long run. When you utilize recruitment analytics, you track, measure, and analyze data from existing employees and prospective candidates. Let’s take a look at how collecting and scrutinizing this data can improve your hiring process. 1. Improve the Quality of Your Hire Perhaps one of the most compelling reasons an organization might want to use recruitment analytics in its hiring process is that it can improve the quality of its hires. These methods will allow you to better identify the top candidates for any given position, explore the skills and qualities that your best hires share with one another, and gather data to help inform an even better and more efficient decision in the future. This means that when you have open roles in your organization, you will be increasingly able to match the right candidate with the right position. This can help reduce turnover, improve employee morale, boost productivity, and help to create a healthy and positive company culture. 2. Tracking Performance You can also compare your performance against your recruitment KPIs and industry standards. This means that your recruiting team can become increasingly efficient over time as they can optimize their workflow and find areas where improvements can be made. 3. Boosting Efficiency Hiring the right candidate for a position can be extremely time-consuming . That being said, there’s a good chance that inefficiencies and bottlenecks in your hiring process are difficult to see without using recruitment analytics. This doesn’t just mean that you’ll be able to find the right candidate more quickly and with a smoother workflow, but it also means that it will cost less to hire each new employee. 4. Allowing For Future Forecasts If you only start to look for new candidates when an existing employee gives their notice or receives a promotion, it means that you don’t have the same competitive edge as many other, more proactive organizations. While it can be challenging to predict the future, you can use recruitment analytics to help anticipate gaps that will emerge in organizational skills and talent. Similarly, this type of data analytics can help you create a plan for the next year or next five years regarding the cost per hire, time to hire, frequency of hire, and overall budget for the recruitment process. 5. Improving Diversity Many HR departments are focused on and committed to improving diversity in their organization. While doing so can present unique challenges to companies, recruitment analytics can help them meet their diversity goals. Gathering and analyzing hiring data can allow recruiting teams to keep track of their diversity initiatives and identify where alterations can be made to create more desirable outcomes. There are numerous ways that analytics can be used to help your team ensure that the organization is adequately diverse. For example, you can examine each stage of the recruitment funnel with a complete demographic report. Increasing generational diversity in the workplace is a significant focus for many hiring teams and HR departments. You can learn more about how to confront age bias in this guide . 6. Optimizing the Cost of Recruiting We all know that the hiring process isn’t cheap, but it’s well worth the cost when you find the perfect hire for an open position. When you’re able to make well-informed recruiting decisions, the candidates you select will be well-suited for the role, will remain with the organization for some time, and will help contribute positively to the company culture. The more effective your recruiting process is, the less you will have to spend overall on your hiring budget. Through data analytics, you’ll also be able to see which channels produce the highest-quality candidates and which haven’t been particularly useful for your organization. As you might imagine, this means you can allocate your resources in the most productive direction for your organization. Your hiring team can work smarter, not harder, when filling open positions at the company, which means you can reduce spending on the hiring process over time. How Can Data Improve Your Quality of Hire? While the quality of hire might sound like a somewhat subjective metric, recruitment analytics can help pinpoint how much value new hires add to your organization. The baseline criteria for a hire to be considered a quality hire is that they create more value while employed at your brand than how much it costs to recruit and hire them. This measure is often used to determine how successful a new hire becomes in their role at the company. However, recruiting teams can also use this metric to look at the overall success of recruitment as well. If you’re only looking at the quality of hire on an individual basis, you are losing out on valuable information that could help improve the hiring process and quality of hire on an organization-wide basis. When you analyze the quality of hiring on a larger scale, you’ll notice that patterns start to emerge that you can use to improve your hiring process further. Through recruitment analytics, you can keep track of how many of your hires become top performers, how long new hires typically stay with the organization, and more. Recruitment analytics can collect historical data regarding your candidates and your recruiting metrics. That doesn’t just mean that you’ll be better able to identify the right candidate when they come to you, but it also means that you’ll be more equipped to transition to a proactive recruiting strategy. A critical aspect of having a proactive recruiting strategy is understanding the difference between active and passive candidates. This article takes a deep dive into what you need to know about these different types of prospective employees. Best Practices For Using Recruitment Analytics Whenever you’re collecting data for your organization, there are practically an infinite number of ways that you can organize and analyze the information. Let’s take a look at some of the best practices for using recruitment analytics. 1. Collect the Right Data Understanding your goals in using recruitment analytics can help you pinpoint the most useful data to collect in the process. Data collection gets more useful the longer the timeframe you’re working from– the more information you have to analyze, the more you’ll be able to identify persistent trends. 2. Select Your Metrics Some of the most tracked recruiting metrics by organizations using recruitment analytics include cost per hire, time to hire, and retention rate. Companies might also choose to track the quality of hire, candidate quality, application completion rate, and more. 3. Visualize It Another built-in challenge with recruitment analytics is making sense of all the data you collect. While it’s great to be tracking the right data and metrics, it can be frankly overwhelming to try to understand what all of these numbers mean for your hiring process. One of the most valuable things you can do at this stage is to use visualization tools to better grasp the information and patterns hidden in your data. Visualization can help you identify easy opportunities to improve your hiring process and also spot trends. 4. Plan For the Future With Your Data Being able to plan for the future can give your organization an edge. If you cannot make predictions grounded in data about the future, you’ll be stuck in the position of always being reactive rather than proactive. With predictive analytics, you can make an educated assessment of how much money you will need to hire a new candidate, how much time it will take to fill a specific role, which sources have historically produced the highest quality candidates, and more. 5. Recognize the Limitations of Recruitment Analytics While recruitment analytics can be a revolutionary tool in your hiring process, it’s essential to recognize that this technology has its limitations. There will always be fewer quantitative factors that impact the job market that you might not be able to pick up on from simply looking at the data. For this reason, it’s important to incorporate data analytics into a larger recruitment process instead of solely relying on this technology as an all-inclusive strategy. 6. Optimize Your Hiring Process Once you have collected enough data to start seeing trends in your hiring process, the next step is to use that data and analysis to optimize your recruitment strategy. For example, your analytics might help you discover that your turnover rate is higher than desired. While recruitment analytics can help you identify this problem, you must take actionable steps to solve the problem. One of the best things about using data in the hiring process is that you can use these tools to get quantifiable results regarding whether the steps you’re taking are improving recruitment at your organization. By gathering actionable insights from your recruitment data, you can optimize your hiring efforts by making meaningful changes. 7. Get Some Perspective As you continue to collect and analyze recruitment data over time, it’s essential to zoom out to grasp a larger perspective on your hiring process. It can be easy to have tunnel vision when you’re focusing on filling specific open positions or positions that you anticipate will need to be filled in the near future. Your hiring team can benefit significantly from the longer-term analysis. This means tracking progress both month over month and year over year. You can then use this information to compare your progress against industry standards and your organizational and recruitment goals. Is your organization using recruitment analytics to improve its quality of hire? Did we leave anything out about how data can make the hiring process more effective and efficient? If so, please feel free to leave a comment below, and we’ll get a conversation started! We’d be more than happy to discuss the topic further if need be!

Business ebbs and flows. The vagaries of the overall economy, the seasonality of a niche or an individual business, and even the availability of your marketing budget can create a push and pull on everything related to your business. Hiring is no exception. There are many reasons why you may need to fill an open role during a time crunch. Maybe a critical employee left during a project where they’re most in demand. Maybe an employee encountered unexpected medical issues. Maybe slow attrition has built up such that, combined with increased seasonal demand, you need to fill entry-level seats as quickly as possible. Hiring during a time crunch puts time-based pressure on an already strenuous process. It forces you to adapt to a short timeframe; you don’t have the luxury of a drawn-out process with multiple interviews and intensive skills testing. Instead, you need to make your best judgments as quickly as possible. At the same time, you must avoid using gut feelings or superficial traits to make a decision . How can you recruit effectively during a time crunch? Here are the most important tips to keep in mind. Don’t Skip the Basics The foundation of effective hiring is laying the groundwork to make sure you’re picking the right people for the right roles. It can be very tempting to skip some of this groundwork due to the time it takes, but all you’re doing, if you do so, is minimizing the chances of finding a good, long-term hire. What is the “groundwork” you need to do?  Create your candidate profile. Creating your candidate profile means putting together a description of the role and the duties the employee will be tasked with performing. Then, you can select the essential skills necessary to succeed and the optional skills that would make a candidate an excellent choice. You can also pick deal-breakers that would remove even an otherwise great candidate from the running. It can take some time to assemble this profile, though the longer you’ve been doing it, the easier it will be. You may also have an older document with the profile for the role from before your current employee left. If so, dust it off and update it to the modern demands of the role. Be sure not to use it as-is unless you review it to ensure it’s still accurate. After all, in a modern business, roles, duties, and job definitions change over time.  Create your job posting. Your job posting is an essential part of recruiting. Unless you’re exclusively promoting from within or pursuing passive candidates, your job posting is where you’ll get most of your leads. A lot goes into a good job posting – much of which you should have on hand as a template anyway – but you always need to customize it for the specific role you’re looking to fill. Here’s a guide on making your job posting stand out .  Check existing resources. Once your business is established, you should find it pretty rare that you need to start from scratch when you’re recruiting. You should have existing resources you can check into. Previous candidates who applied to the role but didn’t make it at the time . Keeping a candidate pool warm is an evergreen strategy. Known passive candidates who may be interested now that a role has opened up . Engaging with passive candidates is a long-term project, but you may be able to accelerate the process to pull in a good candidate on short notice. Employee referrals to fill a role with people who have a recommendation from your existing employees . Of course, you can’t skip the whole process on the recommendation of a current employee, but you can get good leads. Internal promotions can allow you to fill higher-level roles with existing, known quantity employees, and then use a lower-pressure hiring process to fill the role they vacated. These can give you excellent avenues to fill an open role on relatively short notice.  Manage expectations. Sometimes you’re only looking for a temporary employee for a given project or a seasonal role, and you know you won’t have the opportunity to keep them on staff when the project finishes. In these cases, you must be up-front with that information. The last thing you need is to get three phases deep in the interview process with a promising candidate, only to mention that the role is temporary and have them drop out immediately. Managing expectations is a critical part of hiring, regardless of whether or not you have a time crunch on your hands, but it’s especially vital when wasted time is devastating. Prune Overly-Restrictive Job Requirements You may have heard this phrase before: “Perfect is the enemy of good.” A common trap people fall into – whether they’re learning a new skill, performing a new task, or hiring a new employee – is trying to get it perfect. 99% of the time, “good enough” is good enough. Perfection adds much more to the burden of the task and delays its completion. In hiring, the most common source of this is creating an overdone, too-extensive candidate profile and rejecting any candidate that doesn’t match it 100%. This often happens if you’re trying to replace a specific employee in a particular role, and your candidate profile is too much like a profile of the employee who left. No one will be identical to the person who left, and it’s essential to separate what is necessary from what is just trying to copy the former employee. One of the biggest culprits is skills and experience lists. How many of the skills on your “must-have” list are genuinely essential? Most of the time, you can cut back on that list and open up your candidate pool to a broader group of people. Then, you have more ability to pick someone to fill the role. Everything else, you can train on the job. It is, however, critical to recognize that some skills are actually essential. You need to determine whether or not you have time and the luxury of training a new employee to meet the demands of the role, or if your time crunch means you need to have them hit the ground running. It often comes down to the difference between a time crunch that demands your payroll be full and a time crunch that has specific deliverables and deadlines looming. If you can cut back on time spent hiring in favor of more time training, this is often a much more effective way to hire an employee who will stick with your company. On the other hand, if you don’t have the luxury of time for training them, you need to be more stringent in finding people with the right requirements, and that can take longer. Streamline the Hiring Process The hiring process has many steps, from creating a job posting to final interviews, hiring, and onboarding. The more you can streamline and speed up, the better off you’ll be. The biggest areas you can streamline are communication, skills testing, and interviewing. When streamlining communication, you want to be responsive and rapid with your messaging. You have limited time to fill a role, so you need to be on the ball with communicating with your candidates, and they need to be quick with their responses. Make sure to be clear with your expectations; you miss out on great candidates if you eliminate them for transgressions they didn’t realize were rules to break. “For businesses on an accelerated hiring spree, ensure candidates understand the immediate opportunities available to them and be honest about the long-term prospects. Is it a stopgap role only, or is there the prospect of longer-term employment and growth within the company? Candidates will appreciate the transparency.” – Forbes . For skills testing, understand two things: whether or not you truly need it , and if you do, how to accelerate it . Skills assessment platforms are often designed to proctor tests in a limited amount of time, but you need to be clear with your expectations. Anyone who reaches the point of the hiring process where they need to take an assessment should know that they have a limited number of days to do so. Again, it’s all about managing expectations. For the interview process, it’s essential to be flexible. If you try to adhere to a strict in-person, during-business-hours schedule for interviews, you will run into scheduling conflicts and delays. Instead, consider: Sticking around after-hours to do interviews with people who work the same hours you do and, thus, are unavailable at those times. Allowing online interviews . You often don’t need to meet your candidates in person until later in the process; initial interviews may be easier to set up digitally and give you ample opportunity for the easy screening interviews and first-line discussions that make or break a candidate’s viability. Cutting back on the number of interviews . The more rounds of interviews you need to do, the longer it will take, especially if you have more than just a couple of viable candidates. If you can eliminate one interview and spread the questions from it to others, you cut back on the time investment significantly. There are almost always ways you can streamline your hiring process. Often, simply picking up a good ATS platform and configuring it properly can go a long way towards assisting with the initial filtering and lead you to the more advanced, personal decisions that a human has to make. Don’t Be Afraid to Throw Money at the Problem You may have seen studies of today’s modern candidate-driven job market that show entry-level roles with shortages, while higher-level roles (and roles with better compensation) never seem to have a shortage. There’s a good reason for this, and that’s just money. Money can speed up many processes and smooth out many bumps in the road. Invest more in an ATS to filter and manage your candidate list more effectively. Invest more in advertising a job listing to get more exposure in a shorter amount of time. Offer a higher base salary to attract better candidates to the role. Offer a bounty for employee referrals that successfully stick with the company. You may also consider hiring a recruiter who specializes in rapid hiring. This will, of course, have an additional fee, but they will be more experienced with filling roles quickly and can help you get someone with boots on the ground faster than you can on your own. Never Stop Hiring A common problem with many companies is that they treat hiring as an individual task that happens when they have a role that needs to be filled. As such, their hiring process is shut down and mothballed when they don’t have an active need for new employees. Unpacking and starting up that process as necessary takes additional time. Instead, take steps to keep your hiring process warmed up and ready at all times. Maintain a careers page and accept applications even if you’re not actively hiring. Maintain regular communication with your candidate pool via a regular newsletter. Create and maintain candidate profiles for every position within your company, no matter how filled they are or how loyal your current workers are. Make sure your hiring managers are practiced in the hiring process and can get started at the drop of a hat. While it may seem like an unnecessary burden on your HR staff and hiring managers, being prepared when the need arises will speed up the process dramatically. Sooner or later, every business runs into a time crunch in hiring, whether it’s the need to fill out a staff quickly or the need to replace an essential employee on short notice. Knowing how to accelerate your hiring process while maintaining accuracy and reducing turnover is an essential body of knowledge. Do you have any questions or concerns about recruiting during a time crunch? If so, please feel free to leave a comment down below, and we’ll get a conversation started on the topic! We’d be more than happy to assist you and your company however we possibly can!

Companies are currently in an unprecedented place when it comes to employment. At the low end, entry-level workers are spoiled for choice, and a push for increased wages and benefits makes it hard to fill the ranks if you can’t afford it.  Conversely, senior-level employees have their pick of career options at the upper levels. Recruiters struggle to attract these valuable, experienced individuals, and it’s no longer just a matter of the number of zeroes on the end of the paycheck. Recruiting senior-level employees is still possible, but you’ll need to know how to do it properly. Here’s the best guidance we have to offer. Know the Role Inside and Out Perhaps the biggest roadblock to hiring for a senior-level position is not knowing precisely what needs to be accomplished and who you need to accomplish it. What does that mean? It’s two facets of one problem. On the one hand, you need to know the role. That means understanding exactly what the job duties will be for the individual you hire. Will they be a C-level or director who makes company-guiding decisions using their industry experience and network connections to make decisions? Will they be in senior management, as the person to whom all issues are escalated and who makes the final determination on any problem that crosses their desk? Do they approve budgets, direct spending, and push for initiatives that change the fundamental way your company operates? Before you can even begin looking for a candidate, you need to know the role, which means defining every aspect of the role as closely as possible. The biggest single problem with hiring senior-level employees is that they are often very specialized in their careers and experience. They’re good at what they do, but they may struggle if you hire them to do something outside of their wheelhouse. Sure, some may adapt and succeed, but many more will leave for another opportunity more aligned with their skills, which leaves you back where you started. “One of the biggest blockers to hiring senior-level employees is not a lack of qualified applicants, but rather a misalignment between what a recruiter is looking for and what candidates include on their resumes. Before writing the job description, think about what your company is trying to solve by filling this position. Fully understand the needs and qualifications for the role prior to releasing the description, and then write it accordingly.” – Recruitment Juice . Consider creating a comprehensive job profile with the relevant skills, experience, and work history you need, which you can then use to create your marketing and job posting to find the right kinds of candidates . Aim for Passive Candidates The higher you go up the organization chart, the less likely the employees there will ever be actively looking for work. Passive recruitment works fine for lower-level and even some mid-level roles, but senior-level employees are near-universally employed and more or less happy where they are. After all, they have their pick of companies to work for when they want to move on. “A study by Experteer Switzerland shows that 97% of senior candidates in a company want to be ‘found’ or ‘approached’ by headhunters for relevant vacancies.” – Experteer . Senior-level employees are almost always passive candidates. That means once you know the role you’re looking to fill, you need to figure out exactly what skills, experiences, past roles, certifications, and qualifications you need from the person you want to fill it. Then, critically, you need to take this narrow profile of a theoretical individual and look for real people who match it. You can do this in many ways. You can identify comparable roles in other organizations and look for the employees in those roles. You can pick the role where an experienced individual may be promoted into the role you’re filling and look at that one-step-down roster. You can go to LinkedIn and find people with the skills and expertise you’re seeking. Once you find a potential candidate, you need to approach them with an offer. Be discrete! While it’s not illegal, many companies frown upon the idea of poaching employees and may be combative if you try.  Moreover, a candidate may be hesitant to accept your offer if you make it too public, fearing reprisal if they don’t like working for you. Consider restricting your messaging to personal email accounts and private social media, and avoid sending messages to company email addresses or calling on company phones. Another thing you might consider is looking for candidates who have a proven track record of success. Senior-level employees often make a name for themselves, whether it’s by spearheading development, pushing for social change, or guiding a company to success in troubled times. Proven success can be just as important as skills and experience on paper. Make a Compelling, Customized Offer A compelling offer for a senior-level employee needs to have three things: A powerful reason why they should leave their current company to work for you. A plain and frank discussion of the job’s duties and benefits. Room for negotiation. When you approach a potential senior-level hire, you need to recognize that your offer, should they accept, has the potential to uproot their life and career trajectory. Unless they are broadly dissatisfied with their current position, they will likely be hesitant to make such a leap. What can you provide to make a compelling case for your role? Learn what makes your candidate tick. Different employees are driven by different motivators. At the upper levels, money is only occasionally a driving factor. More often, these individuals want connections, power, benefits, the opportunity to have a tangible impact on the world around them, or the satisfaction of leading a high-performance team. Explain the advantage of working for you over their current workplace. You mustn’t actively trash-talk their current employer. You want to be respectful of their current situation and possibly even avoid making direct reference to it. Instead, know what their current employer offers to the best of your ability, and discuss how you offer something better. Align this with the primary interests of the candidate for the most significant impact. Start with a good pay and benefits package. Pay and benefits are the most subject to negotiation, but you need to start at a good place that offers room for that negotiation. If your starting offer is laughably low, your candidate will know that you can’t offer the growth they want and will turn you down. Pay particular attention to benefits. Often, senior-level employees already make enough money to satisfy their needs. You want to be able to offer benefits that are of particular interest to them, such as lengthy parental leave, unlimited PTO, excellent healthcare, or flexible working arrangements. Discuss opportunities for personal development. Remember that your senior-level candidates will be just as in-demand working for you as they are working for their current company, possibly even more so. You want to be able to offer avenues for personal growth that are difficult to match, so there’s a tangible reason for them to stick with you. These can range from opportunities to network with industry leaders, to working on the cutting edge of your industry, to avenues to develop their skills even further. Offer a compelling vision of their future with your company. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” isn’t just an interview question for entry-level workers. It’s an essential aspect of hooking senior-level employees. The key is remembering that senior-level employees have concerns unique to their station. They may be less concerned with short-term benefits and more with their retirement accounts, stock benefits, and a more permanent living situation. They may have 10-20 years of career ahead of them rather than 30-40. They may be more concerned with raising families than seeing the game on the weekend. Stability is often a valued commodity. And, of course, everything above is subject to personalization and negotiation . Some senior-level employees will be more interested in certain benefits or perks of a career than others. Some may be concerned with making the most money possible. Customization is the number one consideration for your offer. Consider (But Don’t Rely On) Employee Referrals A good source of passive candidates can be referrals from your existing employees. However, this is a little different for senior leadership than for the rank and file. In particular, you may be talking to employees about their previous bosses or to C-levels about their former direct reports. Unfortunately, relying on referrals isn’t viable in senior-level positions. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the big draw of a referred employee is a social connection, and that’s generally less important for senior-level employees. The second is that you run the risk of nepotism and similar adverse hiring when you rely on personal connections, which can leave you with sub-par hires that are difficult to remove due to their connections. Pay Attention to Culture Company culture is essential to monitor and improve for long-term business success. With low-level employees, you can hire people who conform to your existing company culture. With senior-level employees, however, you are hiring the people who guide and develop the company culture. This means that, in addition to skills and experience, you need to pick candidates who have the cultural values you want in your organization. That can mean people who fit with the culture you have established, but it can also mean people who bring new values to the table and who can show what those values mean. You may be hiring these individuals not just for their business acumen, but for their place as a beacon of a particular kind of company culture . It is likewise crucial that you don’t pick someone whose cultural values clash too much with your organization. Even if you’re trying to move your company in their direction, it will be resisted if the change is too significant. Be Persistent but Patient It takes time to engage with a senior-level candidate and convince them to make the leap to your organization. They may not respond immediately, and if they do, they may not have a positive initial impression. It’s your job to keep at it, engage with them, and answer their concerns. Consider Looking Inward Senior-level roles are difficult to fill. So, why not try to fill them with people you already know all about? Internal promotions can be an excellent way to reward the skills and loyalty of existing employees. These individuals already have social connections and a solid awareness of their coworkers, which they can leverage to build and reorganize teams under their purview. They also know your business and your systems and can use their newfound power to make beneficial adjustments that outsiders might not recognize. You can also promote up the chain this way. By promoting a senior manager to a director, you can then promote a junior manager to senior manager and a team leader to junior manager. Then, you’re left with the much easier-to-fill role of team leader, and can either promote a standard employee or hire an external team lead. The one area of caution here is that, depending on your company and industry, there may be regulations about the requirement to post a job publicly when it opens. You may not be able to simply promote someone without advertising the role. This is most common among government agencies and contractors, but may also be relevant elsewhere. Regardless, looking inward may be just as viable a solution as looking outward. Conclusion Once you have a candidate in mind, engaging with them and negotiating what they truly want out of their role is key to a successful hire. Customization in every part of the process is the key to success. There’s no template process, no boilerplate offer, and no standard package that will fit the bill. Do you have any questions or concerns about recruiting senior-level employees? If so, contact our team today , and we’d be more than happy to provide the guidance needed for a successful recruitment!

Generational diversity in your workplace can have many benefits, including bringing different perspectives to your organization, creating the opportunity for knowledge sharing between generations, and improving customer experience. Unfortunately, there are many stereotypes about the various generations that can leave companies with teams that aren’t able to benefit from age diversity. For example, some organizations or HR teams might assume that older people will be resistant to change, more costly, and less able to deal with an increasingly technological world. These stereotypes aren’t just harmful to older workers, but they’re also harmful to your organization. By working to improve generational diversity, you can simultaneously confront age bias. What do you need to know about age bias and generational diversity in the workplace? How can you use the latter to confront the former? What Is Age Bias? Age bias, sometimes referred to as ageism, is a type of discrimination that involves holding negative stereotypes about people based on their age. People of all ages can be impacted by age bias, whether young or old. Instances of ageism can be found in countless situations and settings, whether in healthcare, the workplace, or social environments. What Is Generational Diversity? When you work to create generational diversity in your workplace, it means that a wide range of generations are represented within your organization. Generational diversity isn’t just something you should promote for PR reasons- having a healthy balance of generations in your workplace can benefit your brand, your employees, and your clients. For example, younger generations tend to value novelty, innovation, variety, and diversity. However, they lack the experience and knowledge that can only be gained through time in the workforce. Therefore, when you create multigenerational workforces, both generations can benefit and grow from the strengths of the other. Which Generation Makes Up the Largest Workforce Segment? According to the Pew Research Center, Millennials are the largest generation in the US labor force. Analyzing data from the US Census Bureau found that 35% of workforce participants are Millennials, meaning they were born between 1981 and 1996. While there may be 56 million Millennials making up a big chunk of the working population, four other generations are present in our current economy. The next largest segment of the US workforce is Gen Xers, a generational term that refers to people born between 1965 and 1980. Americans born between 1946 and 1964, commonly called Baby Boomers, made up 25% of the labor force in 2017, while the Silent Generation (born 1945 or earlier) only comprised 2% of the working population. As of 2017, 5% of Post-Millennials (also known as Gen Z) had jobs in the US. However, as more Americans born in 1997 or later have reached working age, the percentage of Gen Z in the workforce has increased since the studies were conducted. The Five Generations Making Up the Modern Workforce The Department of Labor predicts that 99.3% of the US workforce will be comprised of Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers. As the Silent Generation grows older, fewer and fewer of them are participating in the labor force. Let’s take a closer look at each generation in the modern workforce to illustrate how each group has valuable skills and characteristics to bring to any organization. 1. Gen Z Born between 1997 and 2012, the youngest members of this generation are only about ten years old in 2022. As the years continue to go by, Gen Z will increasingly make up a substantial part of the workforce and most likely replace Millennials as the largest generational group in the US economy sometime down the road. Having grown up with technology being an integral part of their lives, it’s no surprise that Gen Z is considered the most tech-savvy generation in the workforce. Compared to the other generations, they tend to prefer career stability and be more cautious. 2. Millennials Sometimes referred to as Generation Y, Millennials are drawn to the startup mentality and are innovation-focused. Preferring flexibility in the workplace and the ability to maintain a healthy work-life balance, Millennials are expected to make up as much as 75% of the workforce by 2025. Great at multitasking and always interested in working smarter rather than harder, the needs and wants of Millennials have noticeably impacted company cultures around the world. Millennials tend to require quite a bit of feedback from their employers compared to older generations. A few negative stereotypes about Millennials include being too dependent on technology and being self-involved. 3. Gen X Since the Gen X generation is smaller than the Baby Boomers and Millennials, you don’t find as much discussion about them as you do with these more popularly discussed generations. Gen Xers have the potential to bring a lot of value to any organization. They are known for being self-sufficient and extremely independent, while also being the generation that brought work-life balance to the forefront of the conversation. While they might not be as tech-savvy as Millennials or Gen Z, Gen X is known for being very capable when it comes to technology. 4. Baby Boomers Baby Boomers are known for being a hardworking generation that puts quite a bit of focus on professional accomplishments. Competitive and goal-oriented, you’ve probably heard Baby Boomers referred to as the “workaholic” generation. While Millennials and Gen Z might prefer communicating via text or online, Baby Boomers tend to prefer phone calls or in-person communication. 5. The Silent Generation The smallest segment of the working population, the Silent Generation, is typically said to include people born between 1928 and 1945. Considering that someone born in 1928 would be 94 in 2022, you can understand why the Silent Generation is less and less represented in the workforce with each passing year. Having grown up during the Great Depression and World War II, it’s fair to say that this generation had a very different life experience than their younger coworkers. Typically considered to be very resilient and have a strong work ethic, people in the Silent Generation tend to value life stability, financial security, and comfort. When the Silent Gen first entered the labor force in the 1950s and 1960s, they commonly joined traditional corporate hierarchies. At this time, professionalism and workplace etiquette were highly valued. 5 Ways to Confront Age Bias with Generational Diversity You can employ numerous techniques to improve generational diversity in your workplace. 1. Establish Employee Retention Practices Increasing generational diversity in your organization isn’t just about hiring people of various ages but also improving employee retention, so the representation of generations in your workplace is organically diverse. There are many good reasons to implement strategies to reduce employee turnover, and improving generational diversity is only one. As you likely know, hiring new employees and having frequent turnover is incredibly costly. By determining where your pain points are to incentivize employees to stay aboard the ship for years or decades to come, you can reduce your costs and improve your workplace culture. Some things you can do to improve employee retention, as well as generational diversity, include improving communication, fostering teamwork, and building a mentorship program. When recruiting new employees, you want to ensure the experience is positive for everyone involved. You can learn more about creating the best possible candidate experience in this article . 2. Pivot Your Recruiting Strategies Another way to confront age bias in your organization is to adapt your recruiting strategies. You’ll want to be able to attract candidates across generations. You can do this by ensuring that your job posting deliberately appeals to individuals of all ages. For example, Millennials might be more drawn to discussions of social responsibility and personal development opportunities, while Baby Boomers might be more interested in learning about your organization’s industry awards. Where you post your open positions can also help to increase generational diversity. Gen Z and Millennials are more likely to be tied to the digital world, for example, while Baby Boomers might be better reached through referrals or your professional network. That being said, you shouldn’t assume that Baby Boomers don’t use social media. In 2018, more than 60% of people between 50 and 64 used at least one social media platform. Are you looking for ways to attract talent virtually? Check out these thirty online recruitment ideas . 3. Put Together Generationally Diverse Teams For Projects One of the best things about generational diversity in the workplace is that it creates the potential for true growth and innovation in your organization. Older workers tend to benefit from younger, tech-savvy, and more flexible employees, while younger workers can benefit from older employees’ experience and accumulated knowledge. When putting together a team for your next project, consider creating an age-diverse team to leverage each age group’s particular strengths. This is also the perfect opportunity to foster teamwork and relationships between employees of various ages. While creating age-diverse teams can create potential for disagreements or conflicting opinions, many employers and employees find that teams made up of people from various generations can create better outcomes and contribute positively to the company culture. 4. Avoid Making Assumptions Based on Age There has been a significant campaign in recent years to remove bias from the workplace, and age discrimination is no exception. It’s essential to avoid stereotyping or making assumptions about people based on their age to take full advantage of your generationally diverse workforce. There are generalizations about each generation, but Baby Boomers might suffer the most in this regard when it comes to the workplace. For instance, a commonly held belief is that older people aren’t knowledgeable about technology and therefore less suited to an increasingly computer-based economy. However, one survey found that employees over 55 are less stressed out by using technology in the workplace than their younger coworkers. 5. Adapt Your Communication Style There are many ways you can change your communication style to confront age bias and increase generational diversity in your organization. For one, you can make an effort to overcome any age-based biases you hold and listen to your employees to understand what they need and want. Doing so can help avoid the negative aspects of stereotyping while also improving employee engagement, opening lines of communication, and boosting efficiency in the workplace. You also might consider tailoring your style to meet the needs of each individual employee. This has to do with how you treat people and the avenues through which you contact them. Different generations tend to have different preferences when it comes to communication. For example, Millennials prefer to communicate through text or instant messaging, while Baby Boomers would rather talk on the phone. You can work to meet your employees more than halfway by understanding individual and generational preferences. There’s also the opportunity for your multigenerational workforce to learn from one another. For example, you might consider creating an initiative where older employees can mentor younger employees. In comparison, younger employees might help older workers understand the ins and outs of social media and the digital landscape. You’ll also want to think about your methods for delivering feedback. You’ll want to understand your employees’ preferences at the individual level while also grasping generational tendencies. For example, Gen Z tends to prefer having a lot of feedback right away, while Gen X typically wants to be left alone. Do you know other strategies for confronting age bias in the workplace that I missed? Or, perhaps, do you have any questions about how to improve generational diversity in your organization, or about generational diversity in general? If so, please feel free to leave a comment below, and we’ll get a conversation started on the topic! Tackling bias and discrimination in the workplace is critical, and doing so properly is vital to the ongoing operations of your business. Together, we can make the workplace a safer and more inclusive environment for everyone involved. We’re always happy to assist our readers with improving their workplace in any way we can, so if any questions or concerns ever come to mind, please feel free to reach out at any time! Additionally, be sure to check out our other articles about how you can combat the other forms of discrimination in the workplace so that you can fight discrimination at all levels!

In an ideal world, employees will adhere to the handbook, common sense, government, industry regulations, and laws. Unfortunately, humans are not computers, and the behavior of individuals can vary wildly. Add in stress, social pressures, the influence of alcohol, or various other factors, and you have a recipe for misconduct. Misconduct can take place in the workplace, or it can take place outside of it. An employee’s behavior often reflects on their employer, and it’s up to you to handle their misconduct professionally. Here’s how to do it with a minimum of issues along the way. Bear in mind, of course, that the best-laid plans rarely survive contact with real-life situations. Use these tips as a guideline, but be aware that you may need to adapt to changing circumstances on the fly. #1: Define Misconduct in Workplace Policies The first thing to do is to ensure that you have policies in your employee handbook that define what constitutes misconduct. Misconduct is generally divided into two categories: gross and general. General misconduct is behavior that is not illegal, but may be immoral or, most often, disrespectful. Rude comments, discourteous behavior, insubordination, chronic tardiness, and other such issues fall under general misconduct. General misconduct is most often where you need to define the boundaries within your handbook, because different organizations and cultures can view different actions at varying levels of severity. Gross misconduct, meanwhile, is misconduct that is generally grounds for immediate termination of the offending employee. It’s often, though not always, illegal. For example, theft and fraud, embezzlement, property damage, assault, sexual harassment, and drug abuse can all be forms of gross misconduct. Gross misconduct can often be defined simply as illegal activities, but you may want to include more specific definitions for certain behaviors. The line drawn for sexual harassment may be more or less strict, for example, and general “offensive behavior” can vary as well. Additionally, misconduct like a violation of safety protocol may not be strictly illegal, but endangering the safety of other employees is a severe offense. You’ll want to make sure you have definitions for misconduct that are publicly available and that all employees are made aware of them to avoid issues with penalizing employees for policies they had no idea existed. In general, minor misconduct should result in a verbal warning and documentation. A written, formal warning is warranted if it’s too severe for a mere verbal warning, or if the employee has already been warned. For even more severe misconduct or for employees who have been written up before, you may need to enforce suspension or mandatory training for the issues. Finally, for illegal activities, activities that harm the company or your other employees, or other forms of gross misconduct, as well as when an employee has already been suspended before termination becomes the final option, short of criminal charges. #2: Develop a Process Many workplaces implement a “three strikes” policy for less-severe misconduct, usually general misconduct. That allows otherwise-good employees to adjust their behavior, particularly in instances where cultural mores vary. For example, what one group might consider playful banter might be more disparaging or insulting to another. Issuing warnings for those kinds of misconduct can allow the offending employees to adjust their behavior, make amends, and improve their standing. At the same time, you will want clauses that define stricter penalties for irreparable conduct. For example, if an employee is caught sexually harassing someone, violating criminal laws , or committing fraud against or on behalf of the company, a warning is generally not enough to suffice. The penalty should suit the crime. Zero-tolerance policies are essential for misconduct that warrants such actions. Another defined part of your process should be expectations for employees who witness misconduct. Are they expected to report incidents, and if so, in what fashion and to whom? When management receives allegations, what do they do? This should be defined. #3: Remain Vigilant for Adverse Impact One of the most challenging aspects of handling misconduct is avoiding adverse impact, disproportionate action, and unfair treatment in the workplace. It’s all too common for higher-up management to cut their friends slack when they would immediately terminate a lesser employee for the same action. It’s also distressingly common for minority employees to be punished more severely for similar actions that don’t receive as much repercussion in majority employees. That is why having clear policies and a clear process already in place is critical. It helps ensure that you treat your entire workforce fairly and helps you avoid the legal repercussions of discriminatory behavior. #4: Gather Information The key to any misconduct incident is to gather information about allegations, no matter the situation. Issuing punishment based on one employee’s word may not be enough to provide accurate testimony of an incident. In some cases, gathering information may be as simple as interviewing several employees and collecting their stories. In other cases, you may need to pull security camera footage, interview outside parties, or verify critical details of a situation. You may even hand off the investigation to law enforcement in extreme cases. “If an impartial internal investigation isn’t possible, you should get a third party to conduct a fair and unbiased employee misconduct investigation. This is also important if you don’t have a trained workplace investigator on board. Furthermore, if you’re dealing with a complex, potentially time-consuming complaint, it might also be a good idea to consider an external investigator.” – AIHR . Generally, you will want to have a preliminary action in place, such as putting the offending employee on leave while you investigate. You may also need to take measures to prevent them from hiding their trail, like temporarily suspending access to computer systems. In any case, unless the evidence is unambiguous and the misconduct is severe enough, it’s usually not ideal to make a snap judgment. #5: Provide Secure Communications Channels A common problem with misconduct in the workplace, especially if it comes from administration or higher-level management, is that the people in charge of handling reports are the people conducting themselves improperly. Thus, any company seriously intending to handle misconduct properly must have two things: A way for employees (and outsiders to the company, as necessary) to report misconduct, potentially anonymously, to avoid repercussions. More than one person with the authority to pursue allegations. This way, your employees won’t find themselves in positions where reporting harassment threatens their job, or the only recourse to report to is the person who behaved improperly. #6: Address Root Causes This one is important. Sometimes, in the case of general misconduct, there are underlying reasons that you can solve by providing more support to your employees. For example, if an employee is chronically tardy , it may be due to inflexible childcare obligations. Providing a childcare stipend, offering flexible hours so long as the appropriate amount of work is completed, or even offering partial remote work on days when they cannot find childcare, can all be good options. Similarly, if an employee has problems with substance abuse, mental health, or similar issues, you may invest in support networks and access to therapists as part of employee benefits. After all, it’s often better to assist someone with their problems than to exacerbate them through termination for reasons like addiction or mental health struggles. #7: Maintain Records Employees who have a history of minor misconduct may not warrant immediate termination, but they can become a liability over time. The longer they are allowed to persist in misconduct, the more they will have a suppressive effect on other employees’ morale, productivity, and loyalty. Maintaining records of past issues helps you see any history of previous misconduct if a new allegation arises. This is where multiple warnings and strikes come in. If you have previously issued a verbal warning for misconduct, it may be time to escalate to a written one. If you have issued a written warning, you may escalate to disciplinary action such as mandatory sensitivity training. If previous severe punishment has been issued and another incident occurs, termination is likely on the table. #8: Be Ready for Damage Control Global culture is swiftly growing more connected and more aware of the behavior of individuals. More importantly, culture has shifted towards holding companies responsible for the conduct of their employees.  The days of saying “what they do when off the clock is none of our concern” are over. Instead, it’s now expected that misconduct outside of the workplace will reflect upon the employer, and the actions the employer takes further reflect on their reputation. If allegations come in, especially from outside sources, be prepared to make a statement about the issue and that you’re investigating it. Likewise, be ready to discuss policies and disciplinary action based on the outcomes of your investigation. You may very well need to defend your company, which can extend to terminating problematic employees for the good of the business. #9: Know When to Escalate Escalating beyond an employment decision and to potential criminal investigations may be necessary in certain circumstances. It’s virtually never the case for general misconduct, but certain kinds of gross misconduct may warrant it. For example, assault, fraud, theft, and other law violations can result in termination followed by legal proceedings. That said, this option should not be held as a threat. It’s simply a reality that exists in the case of misconduct that warrants it. It may also be beneficial to know local agencies for investigations, such as a computer forensics company, in the case of more serious investigations. #10: Understand Laws for Termination Depending on where you’re located, you may have different laws regulating terminating an employee. Unless you’re in an at-will state and can terminate an employee at any time for any reason, you may need to consult with an employment lawyer and ensure that you have justification for a fair termination. A fair termination requires reasonable belief and evidence of gross misconduct, proof of a thorough investigation into the matter, and legal justification for the termination. “Because of this significant legal hurdle for instances of termination, it’s critical that you take detailed notes at each stage of the process. That will ensure that you give all employees due process and have a clear history or records that support your disciplinary decision.” – Recruitee . The last thing your company needs, after all, is a protracted lawsuit for wrongful termination. #11: Minimize Instances of Misconduct As with many problems, reactionary solutions are often worse than proactive solutions. Ongoing training for your employees can help keep them aware of what is and isn’t acceptable in the workplace regarding behavior and general misconduct. Likewise, maintaining awareness of company policies helps keep people aware of where the line is, and any changes to those policies should be announced. More importantly, your company culture should be inclusive, proactive, and aimed at minimizing undue conflict. You may need to invest in training for leadership, communication strategies, and other frameworks for reducing the chances of misconduct in the first place. #12: Be Consistent Above all else, when handling employee misconduct allegations, consistency is crucial. You’ll need to be consistent in acknowledging allegations, investigating potential issues, and meting out penalties according to the type, degree, and severity. Hesitation, favoritism, and “cutting some slack” for good behavior; these all show up as discriminatory or adverse practices. The more you can define in advance, and the more you can offload in documentation, forms, and impartial processes, the more consistent your handling of incidents will be. Misconduct doesn’t always have to result in immediate termination, but the enforcement of policies should be consistent, no matter whether it’s a new hire , an old hand, an entry-level worker, an executive , or anyone in between. Conclusion  Navigating the complex waters of employee misconduct can be a daunting task for any employer. From defining what constitutes misconduct to ensuring consistent enforcement of policies, it’s a multifaceted challenge that requires a delicate balance between fairness and firmness.  The key lies in preparation, understanding, and consistency. By defining clear misconduct policies, developing systematic processes, and ensuring equitable treatment across the board, businesses can handle these situations professionally and maintain a positive workplace environment. Remember, every incident of misconduct offers an opportunity for growth and learning.  Ready to create a more harmonious workplace? Contact us today to foster a positive work culture and ensure you’re equipped to handle any challenge. Let’s build a better workplace together!

Whether you’re trying to bring a product to launch faster, test out new potential markets, or increase production for a short period of time, staff augmentation can be a powerful tool to help your business stay flexible and grow. However, there’s a lot of confusion about what staff augmentation is, exactly. If you start to research the term, you’ll find that a lot of the information available is specific to the IT sector. While IT staff augmentation has become an increasingly common phenomenon, it isn’t the only industry where the outsourcing method is relevant. Are you wondering what you need to know about staff augmentation and whether or not it’s right for your organization? Let’s take a look at everything you need to know. What Is Staff Augmentation? Staff augmentation is the process of hiring niche staff and specialists based on the requirements and needs of your organization. Utilizing an outsourcing strategy to meet submission deadlines and staff projects successfully, this technique lets companies augment their capability through the temporary use of outside personnel. When you utilize a staff augmentation model in your workplace, you hire highly skilled resources on a contractual basis rather than hiring them permanently. It is a specific type of outsourcing strategy that allows an organization to have the flexibility to staff a project and respond to individual business objectives. Rather than hiring new, full-time employees when you are working on a particular project or considering expanding your organization into a new market, staff augmentation can allow companies to meet their goals and deadlines without taking on new full-time staff. What Are the Different Types of Staff Augmentation? There are several different types of staff augmentation that you’ll want to understand. The three primary types are commodity, skill-based, and highly-skilled staff augmentation: Commodity : This type of staff augmentation allows you to have reliable workers who can perform a variety of tasks, such as manual labor, warehouse work, retail, or events. Skill-Based : Skill-based staff augmentation allows you to fill out your company’s needs for types of work such as clerical work, data processing, transcription, and basic copywriting. Highly Skilled : In some instances, you might require that your organization be augmented with highly-skilled work. That might include brand design, software engineering, or contract law. Staff augmentation can also be divided into short-term and long-term solutions. Short-term staff augmentation services might be used when your in-house specialists aren’t available for a specific project or when your organization only has a short-term need for specialists or workers. On the other hand, long-term staff augmentation can be used to help cut operational gaps or fill a skill gap in longer projects. Some organizations also might use staff augmentation if they struggle to find the right in-house hire in a timely manner. How Does Staff Augmentation Work? In recent years, the term staff augmentation has transformed from a buzzword to a staple in various industries across the globe. While it’s been particularly revolutionary in the IT industry, it doesn’t have to refer to hiring technical specialists specifically. If your company has aggressive project requirements and deadlines, staff augmentation might be the solution you need to get the competitive edge you desire. So, how does staff augmentation work? Firstly, you’ll need to identify where your needs lie. What are the resources your organization or team could benefit from? What expertise or specialization would help you reach your project goals or deadlines? The next step is to search for temporary staff to fulfill your organization’s needs. Of course, you can augment your staff on your own, but many larger organizations utilize staff augmentation services as they can provide the most time and cost-effective method of augmenting their staff. Once you have found the ideal candidates to help fulfill your organization’s needs, you will want to go through a previously designed onboarding process. By having a successful onboarding process , you can ensure that your temporary employees will be successfully integrated into the project at hand. When Should You Leverage Staff Augmentation? There are countless scenarios when your organization might feel it’s appropriate to use staff augmentation. Some of these include: Strategic: You can strategically use flexible labor as a way to gain a competitive advantage, such as by increasing your team’s agility or increasing the speed of a project to the market. Specialized skills: Staff augmentation can be used when you only need specialized skills for a period of time, such as tech setup, brand and logo design, or facilities setup Bridge to hire: You can also use staff augmentation to provide capacity while you work towards building a permanent team, such as when you are going into a new line of business or opening a new location Increased capacity: Staff augmentation can be used to fulfill a temporary need for increased everyday work, for example, for seasonal businesses, when there are spikes in demand, when you’re increasing production, or when you’re working on a specific project In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in staff augmentation among companies and organizations across the globe. If you’re weighing out your options for building a team, you’ve likely been researching the different virtual recruitment tools you can use to attract online talent. In a world where the job market is increasingly online, finding the best talent requires that your organization has a substantial online presence. Check out our list of thirty ways you can make the transition to virtual recruitment seamlessly. What Are the Benefits of Staff Augmentation? Only your organization can determine whether staff augmentation is the proper strategy to fit your needs. However, there are certainly many benefits that this practice provides for businesses both on a temporary and ongoing basis. 1. High Productivity When you hire specialized staff specifically for a particular project, they can put the entirety of their focus toward reaching the goals and deadlines you set for them. Rather than being pulled in several different directions, as regular staff typically are, staff augmentation can help increase your company’s productivity when it matters most. 2. Adaptability and Growth One of the most apparent benefits of staff augmentation is that it allows organizations flexibility that hiring a full-time workforce doesn’t. If your company is considering expanding its operations, for example, hiring a temporary team can allow it to trial the idea while mitigating risk at the same time. For growing businesses, staff augmentation allows hiring individuals or teams on a project-by-project basis. That gives them the freedom to evaluate and analyze new projects in terms of their market viability without investing too much. 3. Affordability We all know that hiring full-time staff is costly. At the same time, organizations require specific types of labor and knowledge to function optimally. Your organization doesn’t need to be short on resources to understand the benefit of hiring a cost-effective workforce. However, staff augmentation can undoubtedly be an excellent option for projects with strict budgets. How much it costs to use a staff augmentation service will depend on several different factors, including the cost of training, hourly rates, and more. It usually costs less to utilize a staff augmentation service than to hire a full-time staff. 4. Resource Saving Hiring staff can be a time-consuming and costly endeavor. When you use a staff augmentation service, you can save time and money so that those resources can be redirected elsewhere. 5. Flexibility One of the most significant benefits of staff augmentation is that it allows you to increase and decrease your workforce practically on-demand. In a way similar to retail stores hiring seasonal employees during the holidays or busy periods of the year, you can turn up or turn down the size of your workforce at the drop of a hat. If you’re considering replacing an employee in your workplace, the process should occur discreetly. Whether you’re changing your staffing by switching from full-time staff to an augmented staffing solution during a transition period or if you’ve decided an employee’s performance and behavior warrant termination, it can feel difficult to know how to go about the process without creating a scene. Take a look at this article about how to replace an employee with discretion . What Are the Challenges of Staff Augmentation? There are also some challenges that staff augmentation presents to any organization. For example, some projects might require that a specialist have a high level of institutional or contextual knowledge. Regardless of how experienced the temporary team member is, this type of scenario can mean that it takes a long period of time for the project to ramp up to full speed. As you might imagine, this can make staff augmentation less cost-effective. Some organizations also worry about the sustainability of using staff augmentation services. For example, they might be concerned about having an increased dependency on third-party services from which they draw their talent. Lastly, staff augmentation probably isn’t the best solution for skills needed on an ongoing basis or for long-term projects. For instance, if you are considering augmenting your staff for a project that you expect will take three years, you are running the risk that the temporary staff will turn over before the project is finished. What Are Staff Augmentation Services? When you are engaging staff augmentation talent, there are many different options for you to choose from. Depending on the needs of your company or organization, you’ll likely find that one of the various types of staff augmentation services will be more appropriate. 1. Traditional Staffing Providers If you’re looking for extra workers on projects where a high level of skill isn’t required, this might be an option that works for your organization. You can typically find skill-based and commodity-augmented staff through these methods. 2. Gig Platforms You can gain access to independent workers through online gig platforms . This can be a good choice when you prioritize speed and flexibility, and you can generally find skill-based and commodity workers this way. 3. Master Vendor Staffing Providers If you’re searching for a lot of commodity workers at a low cost, these large-scale staffing programs might suit your needs. However, it’s worth noting that talent quality can be very inconsistent. 4. On-Demand Talent Platforms Another type of online platform that you can use to augment your staff, you can use to find highly-skilled augmented staff through this method. 5. Direct Independent Relationships Of course, you can also hire independent contractors directly as an organization. Doing so offers low overhead and lets you control the quality, but this route has its challenges. 6. Consulting Firms and Boutique/Specialized Staffing Firms Finally, you can also use smaller agencies or firms to hire highly-skilled and skill-based talent. While you can find quality workers this way, there is usually a high overhead. What’s the Difference Between Outsourcing and Staff Augmentation? Technically, staff augmentation is a type of outsourcing. However, you might hear the two terms used interchangeably when they aren’t synonymous. Outsourcing is when you hire another individual or company to be responsible for a task or project that could be done internally. For example, your organization might outsource its web design, customer service, or digital marketing needs. Even though you could choose to have in-house teams for these purposes, it can make sense to outsource particular tasks to save both time and money. On the other hand, staff augmentation is when you temporarily fill out your staff with additional team members, often in pursuit of a specific project or goal. While outsourcing is often considered more affordable, it can mean that you lose out on valuable insights from in-house employees or short-term augmented staff. When you hire temporary in-house employees, you can maintain greater control over the workflow. Even though outsourcing can save you money, depending on the task at hand, the final product might not align with your expectations or fit your organization’s needs. With staff augmentation, you aren’t simply handing over a vital project to another individual or organization. Instead, you are temporarily incorporating an individual or team into your organization, allowing you to have a lot more control over the process and implementation of the project. Do you or your company have any questions about staff augmentation? If so, please feel free to leave a comment down below. I always reply to every comment and love engaging in conversations about recruiting and staffing solutions.

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 de-escalate 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 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 a 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, undercompensated, and underappreciated. 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 continuity, no culture, and no humanity can survive. At this level, you need a traditional hiring process that is just as optimized but different. 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 person 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, de-escalate 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!

No company has a perfect workforce. Sometimes employees leave, sometimes conflicts arise, and sometimes behaviors get out of hand to the extent that action must be taken. No business owner enjoys deciding to terminate someone’s employment, but now and then, it must be done. Removing (and replacing) an employee should generally be done discreetly. Making a big event out of it can have repercussions, including other employees choosing to leave because of it. Not to mention the disruption of a public termination, distracting the rest of your workers. Before you consider terminating an employee, you should ensure you’re within your rights to do so. Sure, at-will employment laws in many states make it possible to terminate any employee, with or without cause, at any time, but that doesn’t mean you won’t open yourself up to a wrongful termination suit if you fire the wrong person at the wrong time for the wrong reason. For example: Terminating a female employee a short time after she mentions planning a child or maternity leave Terminating an employee who takes time off for life-saving medical treatment Terminating an employee for taking a day off for a religious holiday Terminating an employee for discussing unionization or salary information These are all examples of wrongful termination. Even if those aren’t the stated reasons for their termination, you’re put in a bad position if they can make the case before the courts. So, a “tip #0” for this list is to ensure that you’re terminating an employee without opening yourself up to liability. Here’s a checklist for wrongful termination from the employee’s point of view; you can use it to verify they won’t have a case against you. If you’ve verified that you need to terminate an employee for valid reasons and you want to do so discreetly, here are some tips to help you make the process smoother. 1: Determine Timing The first thing you want to do is determine when you will be terminating the employee. There are three primary factors to consider. The first factor is any special occasions that would make the termination especially rude. Terminating an employee on their birthday, right when a new child is born, right before the holidays, or at another unfortunate time can be considered borderline offensive. We realize that it’s not always possible to avoid such timing, but if you can, you should. Otherwise, you’ll gain a reputation as the company that “fired someone right before Christmas,” which doesn’t look good when hiring other people. Remember, the narrative can be significant, and you’re trying to be discreet. Terminating someone will foster ill will, but they aren’t as likely to start spreading stories or leaving bad reviews everywhere they can as they would if they were terminated on a worse occasion. The second factor is how the employee is likely to react and, more importantly, what access they have to critical information or systems. Terminating a front-line worker with few responsibilities and no significant access isn’t a sensitive or urgent matter. On the other hand, terminating a high-ranking manager, a critical IT worker, or another individual in a sensitive role can be dangerous. Most people aren’t going to sabotage your business on their way out, nor will they attempt to steal your data, both of which are violations of contract and illegal. However, it’s best not to leave things up to chance, especially in cases where the damage might not be discovered for months or years. The image of someone being escorted from the building by security can fuel rumors, as can a sudden termination and a temper tantrum. It can be a good idea to time their termination to avoid crowded times. The third factor to consider is how essential their role is and, thus, how quickly they need to be replaced. A critical employee may need to be replaced immediately, so you should have a replacement lined up when you terminate them. Other times, you may not have that luxury. 2: Create a Plan for Hiring a Replacement The next thing you want to do is plan the employee’s replacement. Terminating an employee is disruptive enough, but leaving the rest of your team without guidance or enough workers to do the work will make it even more prominent. Of course, you don’t want to tip your hand too early. If your employees catch wind that you’ve posted a public job listing for an already filled role, they can guess that whoever is in that role will soon be replaced. That can set off drama and cause other problems, which is precisely what you hope to avoid. You have a few options here. You can seek word-of-mouth recommendations from trusted sources outside of your organization . Word can still spread, but you can use an informal hiring process to interview candidates for a role without posting the job publicly. You can check your existing candidate pool . If the employee you’re terminating was recently hired, or you hired for a similar role recently, you may have warm leads for others interested in the role. You can approach them about the alternative job and see if they’re interested, and progress with the rest of the hiring process as usual. You can post a job advertisement on less prominent job boards . While your employees might regularly check Indeed or Glassdoor, they might not check a niche job board . On the other hand, they might see it immediately if they’re in that niche. It’s a risk you take if you still need to publish the job listing openly. You can seek internal promotion . For example, suppose you’re terminating a manager. In that case, you can promote one of their reports to their position, promote a lower-level employee to the team, and hire someone for the lower-level role, which will be much less suspicious, especially if it’s a position with a lot of churn. Work with a staffing agency or a recruiter to handle the actual recruitment process up to the point of signing an offer, out of view of the public eye . This option can be especially relevant if it’s a member of your HR department you’re replacing. The key here isn’t specifically which option you pick; it’s that you choose one and implement it before terminating the employee. Otherwise, you’re left with a significant gap in productivity and people wondering what happened. 3: Inform Only Those Who Need to Know Terminating an employee is rarely a unilateral move. You will need to have someone in finance, HR, and possibly their manager on board and aware of the situation, and potentially even “sworn to secrecy,” though you can’t necessarily enforce such a promise. The fewer people who know about the situation, the easier it will be to control rumors and prevent the workplace game of telephone from misrepresenting the situation. In most cases, most of your employees won’t really care, but gossip travels fast and is part of workplace socialization, so it’s not always possible to prevent it. The people who need to know are those whose duties are required when an employment change happens. You may need to talk to: HR , to process the paperwork and manage duties, replacements, and legal forms. Legal , if there’s any suspicion of wrongful termination, breach of contract, or other legal matters. Financial , to ensure that final paychecks are paid out, retirement accounts are handled properly, and other aspects of benefits work appropriately. Managers , so they know why an employee has disappeared and can prepare their team to handle the situation. This all varies depending on who you’re terminating and for what reason. You may, for example, need a closer discussion with legal and with a victim of workplace harassment if you’re terminating someone for violation of physical boundaries or sexual harassment. 4: Have Documented Reasoning Even employees who don’t harbor ill will against you may consider a wrongful termination suit if someone convinces them the situation could work in their favor. It’s always better to protect yourself and be safe than to be sorry you didn’t. As such, you will need to document behaviors and build a case for termination if there are any questions about it. Some reasons may not need this level of documentation. A workplace harassment issue, adequately investigated, is an immediate breach of contract and behavior and results in termination. All you need is proof that it happened. In other cases, you may need a “backup” reason, such as underperformance. However, you cannot simply terminate someone for underperformance with no prior documentation. The employee may be able to pull past performance reviews where they’ve been recorded as excellent, or may be able to prove that you’ve never disciplined them or given them feedback. While it’s not technically a breach of law or contract, if your employee policies state that unilateral termination isn’t possible, it can be used against you. Documentation protects the company and is the duty of HR, the employee’s manager, and you to produce. Just make sure you’re not trying to build a case on a fraudulent basis; employees will defend themselves if necessary, and you don’t want to find out what they can do the hard way. 5: Reconsider Termination Blind termination may be required in some cases. An employee who displays bigotry on the job or off the clock causes a liability on social media, harasses other employees, or otherwise crosses uncrossable lines should be terminated. On the other hand, if an employee underperforms, there may be ways you can handle the situation more gracefully. You may consider implementing a performance improvement plan . Sometimes, employees who underperform have reasons for it; poor training, personal issues, or unclear goals, and a disconnect in communication can lead to tricky situations. You can sculpt a mediocre or poor employee into a good one by providing clear training and a clear path to improvement with tangible goals. Consider an incentive to quit . Sometimes, an employee you want to go might be a thorn in your side if you fire them, but they may be willing to quit. Amazon famously offers up to $5,000 for employees to quit ( with caveats ). Though it may look like you’re paying them off, it can effectively remove a problem employee. Restructure a department . If your problem employee is a manager, consider merging two similar departments and unifying them, making the problem manager redundant and cutting their position. Just make sure the teams can work together, and the manager remaining can handle it; otherwise, you will have a worse situation. It’s always possible that there are alternatives to termination. All too often, the people in charge of HR or a business have a limited view of the available options. Moreover, personal biases against a problem employee can exacerbate a negative viewpoint and even lead to viewing an employee in a worse light than they actually are. Sometimes termination is unavoidable. When it is, the best thing you can do is work to replace them as discreetly as possible. Sometimes, though, being discreet isn’t the best solution. Keeping a termination on the “down-low” can fuel rumors worse than a public termination. You may need to issue a statement to the individual’s team about their termination, providing non-personal details about why it happened. Just make sure that, if you do this, you don’t phrase it in a way that could be considered a threat to the rest of the team. How you handle terminations says a lot about your management style and how your company can handle growth and the hurdles that come with it. Just do the best you can, learn from mistakes you make along the way, and strive to improve your processes each time they need to be executed. Do you or your company have any questions about discreetly replacing an employee or how your company can do so appropriately? If so, please feel free to leave a comment down below, and we’ll get a conversation started! As we mentioned, it is critical to be able to do this properly to ensure the least possible adverse effects, so we would be more than happy to assist you however we can!

As difficult as it is to recruit high-quality candidates, it makes sense that your company should do everything it can to keep your employees around. This means that one of the most important metrics measuring your workforce is your employee retention rate. Some level s of turnover are natural and unavoidable. People retire. People have outside pressures in their lives that force them to move or quit. People get injured or sick and can’t continue to work. And, of course, people leave for greener pastures, no matter how green the grass is on your side of the fence. Contrary to popular wisdom, the employee retention rate is not simply the inverse of employee turnover . The two are deeply related, but some considerations go into retention rates that are not factored into turnover and vice versa. Defining Retention Rate Employee retention rate is a percentage that measures how many employees stick with the company over a given period. Thus, to define retention rate, you need to define a unit of time. Retention rate can be measured over any period, whether it’s a month, a quarter, a year, or longer. Historic retention rates are important to monitor, so you can see if retention is going up or down over time. Retention rates can be important for long-term measurement and short-term measurement. In the long term, you can measure from quarter to quarter or year to year, to see the impact of policy changes, cultural changes, new management, or other large-scale changes you make to your company. In the short term, the retention rate can show the impact of acute policies and changes, as well as external pressures. Most companies, for example, have very skewed metrics over the last year because of the coronavirus pandemic, throwing the labor market into disarray. On a scale of a decade, it’s likely to be a blip on the radar. On the scale of a year or two, it’s a dramatic shift. Measuring the retention rate in both scales helps you put the data into perspective. As mentioned above, employee retention is not simply the inverse of employee turnover. If you have one position where an employee leaves, you hire a new one, they leave too, and you hire their replacement, you have two instances of turnover but only one position of lost retention. The Basic Formula Let’s take a look at the basic formula for retention rate. It comes in two parts. Part 1: TE – EL = ER, where: TE: Total Employees at the beginning of your timeframe. EL: Number of those employees who left during the timeframe. ER: Employees remaining at the end of the timeframe. You then use your calculated ER for part two. Part 2: ( ER / TE ) * 100 = Retention Rate This leaves you with a percentage retention rate, which can be above or below 100%, for the given timeframe. Sample Situations There are two basic situations you can be in. In the first situation, you have some turnover. Say you start with 100 employees, and five employees leave during Q1. TE(100) – EL(5) = ER(95) ER(95) / TE(100) = 0.95 * 100 = 95% Retention Rate The second situation shows an increase in hiring with no turnover. Say you start with 100 employees, hire five more, and none of them leave during the timeframe. TE(100) – EL(0) = ER(100) ER(100) / TE(100) = 1 * 100 = 100% Retention Rate You’ll note that hiring new employees does not subtract a negative number from the calculation. Hiring does not affect retention rate calculations. You need to measure employees who have been on staff for the entire period being measured. This means that employees who are hired and bounce quickly do not reflect on the retention rate for that period. If you’re measuring Q1 retention rates, and have an employee who is hired and only stays on for three weeks before leaving, they do not add to the number of employees at the start and do not remove themselves from the number of employees at the end. The reason for this is simple. You’re calculating retention, and retention doesn’t include those employees. A more realistic example will include mixed numbers. Let’s say you’re a company with 36 employees on January 1. You hire five new employees in February. Two of those employees leave in March, as well as two employees who were with you originally. By the end of the first quarter, your company has 37 employees. Your calculation disregards the five new hires and only cares about the two long-term employees who left. TE(36) – EL(2) = ER(34) ER(34) / TE(36) = 0.94 * 100 = 94% Retention Rate for Q1 Now, your company in this situation has 37 employees at the start of Q2 for future calculations. Annual calculations for the year, however, will still consider 36 as the starting point. Factors to Consider for Calculating Retention Rate Retention rate is outwardly simple, but there are several factors you need to consider or define for your calculations. Choosing your timeframe. Perhaps the largest factor you need to define is the timeframe you’re using to calculate your retention rate. Common choices are monthly, quarterly, annual, and the fiscal year. A shorter timeframe shows you more granular information. A monthly measurement gives you an idea of the effect of seasonality, of specific events in your business or industry, or the effects of policies, management, and other similar-in-scope considerations. For example, if your management implements a policy of oversight on employee productivity that is considered onerous, this can potentially hurt your retention rates in the following months. If you decide to cut your employee vacation time, you might also notice a change in your retention rate for that year. Over a longer timeframe, you have less granular data, but a longer-term view of how your business is changing over time. Comparing quarterly retention rates for several years gives you an idea of how your business is handling its employees, its policies, and changes in industry and culture. This also gives you reasonably useful data to see how your company handles major events. The Coronavirus pandemic and its related unemployment rates, for example, will be reflected more in annual retention rates than in monthly rates. Systemic recessions, as well, are reflected more in larger timeframes. Defining your headcount. It’s one thing for a traditional company to calculate headcount. Payroll in HR should have an accurate number at all times, after all. Things get muddier in the modern world when you consider gig workers, part-time contractors, and other non-standard employees. If you have a freelancer on retention, but they haven’t done any work for you in Q1, do you count them? Typically, anyone who isn’t a traditional employee on the payroll is ignored for retention rates. As contractors, consultants, or freelancers, they are not solely employed by your company. With variable work, it can be difficult to define whether or not to consider them employed for headcount purposes. This also means that a company can downsize its workforce in favor of gig workers, and it will reflect poorly on retention rates, even though the company itself may be thriving. This leads us to the next point: Putting retention rates into perspective. Retention rate is just one metric out of many that tells us information about your business. You will also want to consider turnover rates, profit margins, sales, customer satisfaction, and so on. Downsizing and firing several employees may increase your profit margins, but decrease customer satisfaction. Is that good or bad? It depends on your company’s perspective. Another way to put retention rates into perspective is by using them to benchmark your company against industry standards. There are many sources for industry-specific data . Typically, industry journals and HR agencies will publish annual statistics. You can also segment your workforce. Consider: What is the retention rate in your company by age group? Do millennials stick around longer than Gen Z? Do boomers stick around longer? What is the retention rate for specific demographics? If you have significant turnover amongst minorities or women, you may want to look for hostile policies or environmental factors. What is the retention rate in each department? Is your sales team satisfied and sticking around, while your IT team has a high turnover? What is your average length of retention? This is a different, but related, calculation: how long do employees stick around? Retention rates don’t always reflect a slow but steady churn. You can ask yourself questions like this to help analyze your situation. In general, a retention rate of 85% or more is considered good, though of course, this varies from industry to industry. If a specific group of people has a low retention rate, such as women or minorities, you might consider checking into the company culture. A hostile work environment, especially one involving racism or sexism, can be bad not just for productivity and employee satisfaction, but can also open your company up to legal action. Likewise, a low retention rate for specific departments might indicate an issue with policies, systems, or management. An IT department forced to work on outdated software with no leeway to improve might grow frustrated and leave, to use a common example. Categorize employee turnover. Part of putting your retention rates into perspective is knowing when turnover is good or bad. Exit interviews are a key part of this. Employees leaving because they’re retiring after a long and successful career is not a bad thing; employees leaving because they feel harassed or lack career progression is bad. In this way, you can categorize whether your retention rate is low for a good reason or a bad reason, and can take appropriate actions as necessary. How to Improve Retention Rates Retention rates can be improved, though they will rarely stay at 100% for very long. There are always factors outside of your control that force employees to leave, from starting a family to sudden death and everything in between. There are, however, many factors you can control. Improve the quality of the candidates you hire. The entire hiring process needs to be focused on finding the right people for the right role. Retention can drop when you hire people who aren’t truly qualified. It can drop when you hire overqualified people. It can drop at any time when your employees are otherwise dissatisfied with their role in your company. Improve your onboarding, mentorship, and support programs. A huge part of employee turnover is a lack of connection. Leaving new employees to flounder without training or feedback, leaving them feeling like they have no one to talk to about problems, and leaving them without social connections are all causes of turnover and, thus, lower retention rates. Improve your pay and benefits. Let’s face it; many people stick around for their salary and benefits and will leave when they get a better offer. The better the pay scale and benefits package you can offer, the better your retention will be, simply because other companies will have a harder time poaching your employees. Improve your career progression and growth. Again, employees often leave when they feel like they’re stuck with no way to progress their careers. Progression can encourage retention through various means. Consider implementing training policies (and the accompanying pay raises), promotions internally, and other forms of personal and professional growth. Improve communication both up and down the chain. When employees don’t feel heard, they don’t want to stick around. Uncertainty about the future of their company, about changing policies or management, or even just a lack of avenues for feedback can all depress morale and discourage retention. Communication is critical to a happy and loyal workforce. Improve company culture and diversity. Studies repeatedly show that diverse and engaged workforces are more productive, more creative, and more loyal than the inverse. Improving your company culture will improve retention across the board. There may be some initial friction when policies change and new hires are brought on, but if you make it clear that diversity is critical and not going away, things will settle. Overall, it’s not necessarily difficult to calculate employee retention rates. What’s difficult is figuring out how to put those rates into context, extract actionable information, and develop a plan of action based on that information. You can’t do any of that without the data!

The term “group interview” can be used to describe two kinds of interview formats. The first is the actual group interview and is the style we’re discussing today. This is the format where one interviewer (or a small team) interviews a group of candidates at the same time. The second type is where several interviewers interview a single candidate at once. People call this a group interview because it involves a group of interviewers, but it is more formally called a Panel Interview. Group interviews have pros and cons, so are they the right choice for your business? It’s not an easy answer, so read on to learn how to decide on an interview format for yourself. The Benefits of a Group Interview Format A group interview typically involves one or a small handful of interviewers in a situation where they interview numerous candidates all at once. This has a few notable benefits over other interview styles, though the benefits might not be beneficial to your company depending on your business.  Group interviews are efficient. Per SmartRecruiters: “Group interviews are efficient, allowing organizations to interview multiple candidates at the same time thereby saving numerous hours of labor.” If you have 10 candidates to interview for a position, a panel of two interviewers, and 30-minute interviews, the math is clear. Interviewing each candidate one-on-one is an investment of ten man-hours (30 minutes times two interviewers times ten interviews). Interviewing them in groups of five is an investment of two man-hours (30 minutes times two interviewers times two interviews). This allows you to prune through large candidate pools much more quickly and efficiently than if you had to interview them one by one.  Group interviews can showcase how candidates work with one another. Everyone will say they play well with others and work well in groups, but until you put them in a group scenario, you won’t be able to judge them accurately. With a group interview, you can see some beginning characteristics emerge. Which candidates treat each other as competition? Which ones pay attention, and which ones stay isolated? You can judge the character of your candidates in a situation you can’t normally look for in a standard interview.  Group interviews can show how a candidate reacts under stress. A group interview is a high-stress event, where each candidate not only has a shorter amount of time to leave a lasting impression, but they can see some of their competition in front of them. Which ones rise to the challenge, and which ones fold under pressure?  Certain kinds of candidates thrive in a group competition setting. The most motivated, outgoing, and charismatic individuals will typically make a lasting impression and thrive in a group interview situation. This is good if that’s the kind of person you’re looking to hire, but it might not be valuable if you’re not looking for those personality traits. If you’re building a high-performance team for leadership , it can be great. If you’re looking for someone who can buckle down and get a job done but doesn’t need charisma to do it, you might not find them in a group setting.  You can test impromptu teamwork. A new employee will be challenged to get up to speed and work with people they’ve never met, and you can test that ability by setting team challenges for your group to solve, working as a group. You can see which candidates thrive in that situation, and which ones don’t. Again, this can help you find specific candidates for specific kinds of roles, but it might not be useful for others. Overall, group interviews are most often used for situations where you need to hire numerous candidates, often for low-level, entry-level, or “ unskilled ” positions, like food service, hospitality, and retail. Positions that require specific character traits, specific skills, or a more detailed look at individual candidates will not benefit from group interviews. The Drawbacks of Group Interviews You may already be able to see some of the drawbacks of group interviews, and perhaps have experienced them yourself, either as a candidate or as an interviewer. There are some obvious drawbacks and some that aren’t so obvious.  Group interviews require multiple interviewers. While one person may be able to run a small group interview, they can’t watch everyone at once. A good group interview is also a panel interview, with 2-4 interviewers watching the group. Each panel member may have specific characteristics they’re watching for, or everyone might have the same interview scorecard . An added benefit of using a panel of interviewers is helping to remove bias from the interview process. One person might be more susceptible to a loud and charismatic candidate than another or might miss a critical detail that another will catch.  Group interviews are very public. In some situations, a candidate might not want their current employer to know they’re seeking a new job, for fear of repercussions. These candidates might not want to attend a group interview, because other people in the group might catch their name and post about it, or recognize them and talk about it, and the news can filter back. This isn’t always a concern, but it can be a concern in some situations and for some candidates.  Group interviews are very impersonal. Per BrightHR: “The downside to the group interview’s time-efficient process is that you have less time to talk to each candidate. If you have a strong shortlist of candidates and enough time to meet them all, traditional interviews might still be the best option.” Even if you schedule a 30 or 60-minute session for a group interview, if you have 5+ members of the candidate pool, you still only have a handful of minutes to get to know each candidate. You often have to make snap judgments about these candidates when you don’t have time to get nuance, details, or even a sense of who they are as people. You may miss excellent candidates simply because a louder and more outspoken candidate dominates the conversation.  Certain kinds of candidates won’t shine. Group interviews are poor for assessing certain qualities in a candidate, such as focus, independence, and skill. Since you only get a superficial sense of who your candidates are, you can only test for surface-level skills and personality traits, and you can’t ask too detailed a set of questions.  A group environment will suppress certain kinds of candidates. Some people despise group interviews and, even though they may be perfectly suited to the job, will refuse to even apply or attend a group interview. Other people may excel in both an individual interview and in an actual job but might choke when placed in the competitive environment of a group interview. Group interviews also have a generally bad reputation, and they might reflect poorly on your company.  Group interviews can be tricky to perform and might require unique skills. Much like how one-on-one tutoring or mentoring is different from teaching a class of 20-30 people, interviewing a single candidate is very different from interviewing a group. HR managers who are skilled at interviewing in individual sessions might not have the skills necessary to wrangle a group. You will likely need to focus on planning the structure of a group interview carefully. You may also need to make special considerations for the dynamics of a group. How to Conduct a Group Interview Successfully If you think a group interview might be right for your business, it’s worth the effort to learn how to conduct them properly. A poorly-run group interview reflects badly on your company and can make you look disorganized, disrespectful, or both. Here are our tips for running one successfully.  Consider observing a group interview first. You may be able to network with other companies or experienced HR managers to sit in on a group interview, or you might find a recorded video of successful group interviews to learn from. Watching one in action and talking to the people who run it can be very insightful.  Put together your interview panel in advance. You always want to have more than one interviewer present for a group interview. This panel should meet in advance, discuss what you’re all looking for in the interview, and make sure everyone has scorecards on hand. This allows everyone to be on the same page, able to divide and conquer by observing the group, and can help manage a group if it gets out of control. Additionally, your panel should rotate duties throughout the interview. Have each member ask questions in rotation, so there’s no clear “leader” who candidates will focus on impressing. Make sure your candidates know. The worst thing for a candidate is to show up to an interview, only to learn that it’s a group interview. Candidates will prepare for their interviews in advance, and preparations for different kinds of interviews take different courses. Some candidates will give up on your company after this kind of surprise. Don’t rely solely on the group interview. A group interview is meant to cut a large candidate pool down to a smaller one. It’s not meant to be everything you need to make a final hiring decision unless you’re hiring in bulk and plan to hire almost everyone who passes the interview. Generally, you will want to use a group interview as an initial filter and then set up individual interviews with the most promising candidates afterward.  Remember how group interviews are perceived. Group interviews often have a bad rap as little more than a cattle call for low-quality jobs provided by employers who don’t particularly care. As Terri Lee Ryan writes for Chicago Now: “Group interviewing can be one of the most humiliating tasks you do when you are seeking a job. It’s tough enough out there in our economy without having to subject yourself to the pain of a group interview. My advice is to never go to one of these interviews. If the company doesn’t respect you and your time enough to set up an appointment, take a pass.” This isn’t a unique opinion, and in fact, many high-quality candidates will share it. Group interview formats can suppress applications from some of the best candidates, so use them with caution.  Make sure to debrief. A group interview format, for the interviewer panel, should involve several meetings. In advance of the group interviews, the panel should meet to discuss the format and the division of labor. Immediately before the interview, the group should meet and refresh everyone on their roles, the scorecards, and anything new that may have come up. After the interview, the panel should debrief and discuss the candidates, their impressions, and any thoughts about both the candidates and the format itself. Are Group Interviews Right for Your Business? Group interviews wouldn’t exist if they didn’t have some benefits. The truth, however, is that they can often be overused, poorly managed, and inefficient. They can save time, but at the cost of only checking for surface-level details about candidates. This means that group interviews are acceptable for hiring numerous candidates in volume, such as when staffing a new retail store from the ground up, or when hiring for low-skilled positions. Conversely, if you only have one role to fill or you need a more technical or skilled individual to fill a role, you should avoid group interviews. Additionally, modern technology tends to serve some of the purposes of a group interview. In the past, group interviews were often used as a “first stage” filter to take a large candidate pool and turn it into a smaller candidate pool, from which you can draw the best individuals for one-on-one or panel interviews, before proceeding to skills tests and hiring decisions. With modern technology, a large amount of this filtering can be done through algorithms, machine learning, HR-AI systems, and impartial judgments before the candidates reach an interview stage. The filtering can be done in advance, so you don’t need to spend the man-hours or the management necessary to organize a group interview. While the final determination is up to you, it often depends on the purpose of the interview and whether or not you should use a group interview. We’ve also compared phone and in-person interviews as well as video interviews, if group interviewing doesn’t sound like a good option for your company. The choice is yours. Are you considering a group interview? What has your experience with them been? Have any questions for me? Let me know in the comments section below! I reply to every comment and would love to hear from you.