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Conducting interviews is a core part of the human resources team, but there are several ways to go about it.  Two of the most common options are phone interviews and in-person interviews. Both options are viable for interviewing a candidate, but they have their pros and cons. Picking the right interview for the right situation is crucial, so it’s a good idea to review the advantages and disadvantages, both for your business and the candidates themselves. Read the rest of this blog post to learn about phone vs in-person interviews.  The Pros of Phone Interviews Phone interviews have been around nearly as long as phones themselves, and they are an essential part of the hiring manager’s toolkit. Part of the reason is the advantages they have over other forms of interview . ✅ Phone Interviews Eliminate Geographic Distance Perhaps the strongest advantage of a phone interview is the ability to conduct the interview regardless of the geographic distance between the hiring manager and the candidate. A candidate in California can interview for a job in New York, and the only concern is choosing a time that’s appropriate for both parties. Challenges increase with scheduling phone calls in different countries – a candidate in Australia interviewing for a job in New York will need to be up in the middle of the night – but arrangements can always be made. ✅ Phones Calm Some Interview Anxiety Passing an interview and winning a job can be a life-changing event for a candidate. Stakes are high, and so too are stress and anxiety. There are a lot of different ways to alleviate anxiety in candidates , but conducting a phone interview can be helpful for many people. Phone interviews eliminate some of the sources of stress, such as an unfamiliar office location, worrying about dress code, eye contact, and dozens of other things that are on their mind the day of their interview. ✅ Candidates Can Use Resources and Notes In a real job setting, employees are rarely tasked with performing their job without resources on hand. An internal knowledge base is a common resource for most companies, so why shouldn’t a candidate have access to notes and information to help them with an interview? They might not be able to bring their notes with them to an in-person interview , but they can keep them on hand for a phone interview. ✅ Effective for Initial Screening Phone interviews are shorter and have lower stakes than in-person interviews, which makes them ideal for the early phases of screening your candidates . Once your ATS has performed a basic screen and you’ve selected your initial candidate pool from your available applicants, you can conduct phone interviews to select the best candidates to proceed to in-person interviews. The Cons of Phone Interviews Phone interviews may be a tried-and-true form of an interview for businesses, but they aren’t 100% effective at selecting the best candidates for a job. That’s why other forms of interviews still exist, after all.  Some of the biggest drawbacks of phone interviews include: 🟥 Some Candidates May Have Phone Anxiety Job interview anxiety is normal and expected, but some people have phone-centric phobias or phone-specific anxiety . This often results in poor performance in an interview when the candidate would perform exceptionally during an in-person interview. Unless the role is phone-heavy, in which case, the candidate is self-selecting. 🟥 It Can Be Difficult to Build Rapport and Judge Character One of the greatest challenges with phone interviews is the loss of many communication cues that are present in in-person conversations. Body language, facial expressions, gestures, and other non-verbal communication cues are lost over the phone. When you ask a question and hear silence on the other end of the phone, is the candidate stumped or processing a wealth of information? Body language can tell you, but the phone cannot. How important this information is, well, that depends on a lot of factors and is the subject of scientific study. 🟥 Duration of Interviews is Often Shorter Phone interviews tend to be shorter and more formulaic than in-person interviews, where a conversation can emerge and meander organically. Phone interviews tend to be a shorter call-and-response format with fixed interview questions and little room for deviation. While this can help in impartial judgments on the candidates’ answers, it also gives less leeway for nuanced and complex answers. 🟥 Technology Can Fail A person will not suddenly lose their ability to speak in the middle of an in-person interview. On a phone interview, however, any number of technical issues can get in the way of the session. Phones disconnect or lose signal all the time, connections can be poor and lead to low voice quality, and so on. Interviewers and candidates must both be vigilant and prepared for technical issues. The Pros of In-Person Interviews In-person interviews have been conducted for as long as people needed to take on other people to accomplish tasks, and are older than most societies, though many things have changed over the centuries. Meeting candidates in person has many distinct advantages. ✅ Longer Interviews Give More Time to Build Rapport Where a phone interview might last for 15-20 minutes, in-person interviews can last for 30 or more. This gives you a lot more time to cover answers, discuss topics, and gain a solid impression of the person you’re interviewing. You can take the time to build rapport and have a more honest conversation with a candidate in an in-person interview setting than you can in a phone interview. ✅ There’s More Flexibility to Clarify and Expound Upon Questions and Answers Conversations can ebb and flow in an in-person interview. You can express curiosity and leverage excitement to get a candidate to come out of their shell, you can get a stronger impression of who they are beneath their interview preparation, and you can take the time to dig deeper into the answers they provide. This is especially important in interviews for technical roles, where a technical advisor or manager of the given department can ask more technical questions to assess skills and thought processes that a typical HR manager might not know enough to assess. ✅ Personal Charisma Plays a Role What kind of person are you dealing with as a candidate? Are they introverted or extroverted, type A or type B, team players or lone wolves? Assessing the type and quality of the person you’re interviewing can be especially important when you’re putting together high-performance teams or are seeking highly-skilled, charismatic, or assertive people. A lot of this, again, comes from non-verbal cues and elements of body language that don’t come through in a phone interview. ✅ Effective for Later Screenings Phone interviews have a lower barrier to entry and lower stakes. Most people recognize that a phone interview is merely the first step of an interview process (though the reality is it’s somewhere in the middle). In-person interviews are better for the narrower candidate pools when you’ve chosen the best options to interview and need to figure out which of them is the best one to fill your open positions. The Cons of In-Person Interviews In-person interviews have a few drawbacks of their own, of course. Otherwise, they would be the only interview style used. The truth is, while they play an important role in the hiring process , they aren’t perfect. 🟥 Geographic Distance Causes Problems and Inhibits Some Candidates Conducting in-person interviews is difficult for candidates who live outside of your local geographic area. They may have to drive into town, they may have to fly in and book a hotel for a night, or they may have to make arrangements to visit at the appropriate time. This can be even more difficult if you’re hiring internationally; the need to navigate visas, customs, and other travel roadblocks can make it difficult to conduct such interviews, especially on short notice. 🟥 Dress and Physical Impressions Bias Interviews Everyone judges the people they meet, no matter how much effort they put into eliminating those judgments. While a large part of the modern hiring process relies on assessments, paperwork, objective questions, and other techniques to eliminate bias, some elements of physical appearance can still influence decision-making when not properly accounted for. For example, when you are presented with two otherwise identical candidates, do you hire the one with the fitted suit or the one with an ill-fitting suit? By rights, this shouldn’t matter, but the impression they leave on you is different. Dress is one of the least dangerous judgments to make, as well; often, inherent biases in terms of gender, race, and presentation can be much more insidious and dangerous. As Lou Adler writes for LinkedIn : “It’s imperative to prevent biases from creeping into the interview as much as possible to make fair (and good) hiring decisions.” 🟥 Scheduling and Confidentiality Can Be Important When interviewing a candidate with the intention of hiring, there may be concerns about scheduling and confidentiality. It can be difficult for an employee to take a day off to interview for a new job, and if they are discovered, that can cost them their existing job, regardless of whether or not you extend an offer. Scheduling becomes a juggling act, and poor interview scheduling practices can jeopardize otherwise great candidates. What About Other Interview Formats? There are other formats for interviews that can be conducted in the modern age. ✅ Recorded interviews are interviews where the company sends a questionnaire to candidates, who record videos of themselves answering the questions. These allow the candidate to prepare for their questions ahead of time, record multiple takes to get a good one, and showcase some elements that are missing from phone interviews, such as body language and gestures. However, due to the asynchronous nature of the interview, there’s no call-and-response. As such, these interviews are rarely used. ✅ Video interviews are interviews conducted through a video chat service, such as Skype or Zoom, or with a dedicated video interview service . They have many of the advantages of an in-person interview while minimizing some of the drawbacks, such as the need to bring candidates in from disparate geographic areas. The largest drawback to video interviews is their reliance on technology. Like phone interviews, video chats can fail, and technical issues can plague conversations. Unlike phone interviews, many more pieces of technology need to work in tandem for a video interview to be a success. If someone’s microphone, speaker, camera, or internet connection fails, the entire interview fails. With a phone, at least it’s just a phone. That said, there has been an explosion in video interviews in the past year, primarily due to the safety concerns caused by the Covid pandemic. They’re “the next best thing” to an in-person interview, so long as the technology cooperates. ✅ Chat interviews are rare but may be used for initial filtering, and some modern companies are experimenting more with them. These are similar to phone interviews in that they are usually used for early screening. They use a platform like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or simple SMS messaging to conduct a brief interview. While this interview style can be useful for some basic screening and for engaging with potential cold candidates or old candidates who may not still be interested, they have many disadvantages. They have all of the disadvantages of phone interviews, and then some. The absence of voice through chat is even more difficult for both interviewers and candidates than voice-only communications. Additionally, many of these services are primarily mobile, and mobile devices are slow and difficult to type through, with autocorrect leading to errors as often as it corrects them. ✅ Other interview styles exist as well, such as group interviews and all-day skills assessments. These styles have their unique purposes, such as serving to filter through large candidate pools where requirements are not strict. Often, these are used for entry-level jobs, internships, and “unskilled labor” positions. The social dynamics can be of mixed usefulness. Overall, there’s no single best interview format. Each interview format has a specific role to play. Chat and recorded interviews are not in vogue, and they’re likely valuable to some specialized companies.  Conclusion  To sum it all up, phone interviews are a good screener for the middle of the hiring process. Video interviews can bridge the gap between phone and in-person interviews, and can occasionally serve to replace one or the other, or even both. Which you choose is up to your hiring process. Which you prefer, phone vs in-person interviews, depends mostly upon your hiring process. Contact our team today to learn how we can help you with building your team.

Most industries are made up of professionals, and those professionals often form organizations to help advance their fields. Those organizations often develop tests or examinations that they can use to judge the skills, knowledge, and abilities of people in their industry.  With a rigorous examination, a certification can become a valuable asset, and people who hold those certifications become more sought-after than their counterparts who have not passed the exam. In many ways, Human Resources isn’t very different. There are three primary certifications in the industry: SHRM-CP, PHR, and SPHR. If you’re looking to make yourself a valuable HR asset, you could probably benefit from acquiring certification, but which one should you focus on? Let’s examine these certifications and determine their quality. Who issues them? How rigorous are their standards? Are there any loopholes, flaws, or issues with the systems? Learn About the Benefits of Partnering With an HR Recruiter What Is SHRM-CP/SCP? SHRM-CP is a certification offered by SHRM, the Society for Human Resource Management. SHRM is a recognized authority in the human resources space, and its content is frequently cited on this blog and many others. They know what they’re talking about and are one of the largest human resources organizations in the world. SHRM offers two certifications, of which CP is the first. The other is SHRM-SCP, which we’ll discuss lightly as well. SHRM promotes its certifications as: Competency-based. Rather than testing your ability to remember facts and strategies, they test how well you’re able to implement them. The exams are updated routinely to include information about how these modern workplaces work, rather than an outdated view of how they should work. The SHRM certifications are applicable in any industry and any country, rather than within certain boundaries. Thousands of employers seek human resources employees with certifications, and SHRM-CP is often the certification being cited as “in-demand”. The exam is also accredited. According to SHRM: “The SHRM-CP and SHRM-SCP exams are accredited by the Buros Center for Testing, asserting that the HR credentials meet the highest standards in testing.” You can learn more about what this means here. What Are the Requirements of SHRM-CP? Before you can take an SHRM examination, you must meet certain requirements. These requirements depend on the exam you want to take and your education level. SHRM-CP (Certified Professional) requires: If your education is less than a Bachelor’s Degree and you are in an HR role: Three years of HR experience. If your education is less than a Bachelor’s Degree and you are not in an HR role: Four years of HR experience. If you have an HR-related Bachelor’s Degree: One year of HR experience. If you have a non-HR-related Bachelor’s Degree: Two years of HR experience. If you have a non-HR-related Master’s Degree: One year of HR experience. If you have an HR-related Master’s Degree: Current employment of any duration. The price of the exam varies as well: $300 for early bird members, $400 for early bird non-members, $375 for non-early members, and $475 for non-early non-members. SHRM-SCP (Senior Certified Professional) is similar, but all of the numbers are increased. You can read their chart here . The SHRM-CP examination is broken into segments covering core competencies, such as leadership techniques, ethical practice, relationship management, cultural effectiveness, business acumen, and critical evaluation. What Is PHR/SPHR and What Are Its Requirements? aPHR, PHR, and SPHR are three certifications offered by HRCI, the Human Resources Certification Institute. HRCI is not quite as large or as old as SHRM, though they are in the modern-day, relatively comparable organizations, and they are both headquartered in the same city. In actuality, they offer many more than three certifications: aPHR: Associate Professional in Human Resources, aimed at newcomers to the HR industry starting their careers. aPHRi: Associate Professional in Human Resources (International), the same certification, aimed at international roles. PHR: Professional in Human Resources, aimed at established HR employees who want to progress in their careers. PHRca: Professional in Human Resources (California), a CA-specific variant of the test for local employees. PHRi: Professional in Human Resources (International), the upgraded version of aPHRi. SPHR: Senior Professional in Human Resources, aimed at established professionals looking to move into the upper ranks of HR executives. SPHRi: Senior Professional in Human Resources (International), the same thing for international roles. GPHR: Global Professional of Human Resources, a certification for top-level executives who primarily work with multinational corporations and who have globalized concerns. All of these different certifications have different requirements for education and experience levels. They all have a $100 application fee, as well as a fee to take the exam, ranging from $300 to $500 depending on the exam. You can view each certification here and check each of its requirements individually. The breakdown of what each PHR certification covers varies from exam to exam. For example, the general PHR exam, comparable to SHRM-CP, has this breakdown: 39% Employee and Labor Relations 20% Business Management 16% Talent Planning and Acquisition 15% Total Rewards 10% Learning and Development HRCI is unique in that they offer the introductory certification aPHR, all the way up to high-end executive certifications in GPHR, with many options in between. SHRM does not offer quite as much variation. This is good in that it gives a granular impression of the skills and abilities of the person with the certification. On the other hand, it means a professional in HR will need to progress through many more certifications and spend much more money doing so throughout their career. How Do These Certifications Compare? Each certification has its niche. They are all valuable, but which one is more valuable often depends on your goals as a human resources professional. SHRM certifications are broadly recognized. The organization SHRM is one of the largest in the field and has a global membership. Their certifications test a lot of soft skills, and they are often well-rounded certifications that prepare you for a long career in human resources. SHRM-CP and SHRM-SCP are good certifications if you intend to work in a large organization with large HR teams, or dedicated teams for other related aspects of HR, such as legal and compliance.  Since the SHRM exams do not cover legalities, compliance policies, and specifics quite as much, they are better suited to generalists and administrators. The PHR certifications offered by HRCI are more granular, which means they are a better indication of the skill level of the prospective employee. When you have aPHR but not PHR, an employer knows you have basic skills and experience, but haven’t reached a level of professional attainment they might want in an experienced hire. If you have PHR but not SPHR, they know you’re experienced but not senior-level. PHR certifications are better than SHRM certifications in two ways. They cover more in the way of legality, compliance, and technical details. SHRM tends to test more soft skills and the application of management techniques, whereas PHR is generally more concerned with specific knowledge and compliance. They are better suited for international or global companies. PHRi or the GPHR certifications are designed for companies that operate in non-US countries or across borders, and thus have special concerns that domestic companies might not. PHR certifications also seem to be better regarded, though this varies from company to company and industry to industry. From UpstartHR : “My immediate supervisor is PHR credentialed. When I announced that I had earned my SHRM-CP credential, the response was underwhelming and I was left with the impression that they are not convinced that it is on par with the PHR credential.” Additionally, it seems that the industry broadly recognizes HRCI more than SHRM, at least in terms of certifications. Again, according to UpstartHR: “In terms of purely being recognized by the hiring community as a show of your professional skills, HRCI certifications are requested about four times as often as SHRM certifications.” It’s also worth mentioning that SHRM is a membership society, while HRCI is not. This means that members of SHRM can gain many benefits from the organization, without necessarily needing to take and pass their exams. It’s also worth noting that these certifications (while overlapping) are not mutually exclusive. You can take and pass both if you have the time and funds for it. The truth is, however, that a lot depends on the organization whether or not this will be valuable. Companies often tend to prefer one or the other, but the preference of which usually comes down to which one the head of the HR department themselves happens to have. Which Certification Should You Pursue? Several factors will influence what certification you should pursue. Consider the following questions to help you decide which of these certifications makes the most sense for you and your profession. Are you new to HR and want a certification to kick-start your career? If so, go with the aPHR certification. The SHRM-CP certification is aimed at mid-level professionals. Unless you have an HR-focused Master’s Degree, you need several years’ worth of experience in HR to even qualify to take the test. Thus, the only real certification available to you as a newcomer to the profession is aPHR. How large is the organization you want to work for? Small companies often tend to prefer PHR certifications. This is because they tend to be broader and more applicable to various facets of HR, including legal issues. SHRM certifications don’t cover all of this. If your company is small and needs a “jack of all trades” HR professional, the PHR certifications are a better option. Conversely, if your company is large enough to have a dedicated legal/compliance team, you may not need the specialization that PHR provides. The SHRM certifications are generally better for putting your skills and knowledge into practice and can arm you with powerful techniques for managing a dedicated HR team. How global is your organization? As mentioned, PHR is often best for smaller companies, while SHRM is good for mid-to-large organizations. However, the largest organizations, the multinationals, and the global corporations tend to swing back in PHR’s favor. The international and global PHR certifications are extremely useful in these contexts and teach a lot of international, regional, and cultural facets of HR that SHRM might not. That said, not all major corporations care about certifications at that upper level. By the time you’re reaching executive and C-level human resources roles, certifications are less important than your experience and your track record. Companies will often care more about what other organizations you’ve worked for and what tangible results you’ve brought to them over any pieces of paper you’ve earned from a certifying body. Which certification does your organization prefer? This is not an objective factor. If your company prefers PHR certifications, earning a PHR certification is better than earning an SHRM certification. Conversely, if your organization prefers SHRM, a PHR certification may be less valuable. If you’re looking to leave your current organization in favor of a different company, it can be worthwhile to investigate the leaders of HR for that company. Look at their LinkedIn bios and their professional portfolios, and see which certifications they have earned. This can inform you which one will be better for applying to that organization. Some factors are not a real concern. For example, both organizations have similar continuing education requirements, and the pricing for exams is comparable enough to make no difference. The education and experience requirements for SHRM certifications are mirrored by their equivalent PHR certifications. PHR is more granular but offers more room for mobility. The long and the short of it is that neither certification is truly better than the other. They are comparable in many ways, and they are better than not having a certification at all. However, if you’re interested in specific areas of human resources, like international or legal HR, you may be more inclined to earn PHR certifications over SHRM. Conversely, if you’re in an organization that is a member of the SHRM and prefers its atmosphere, the SHRM certifications may be more valuable. Learn About the Benefits of Partnering With an HR Recruiter

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

Companies always need to optimize their business processes, and few are as important as the hiring process. Part of hiring is knowing who, exactly, you’re looking for to fill a role. No, we don’t mean picking a specific person to try to headhunt or poach from a competitor, though that can certainly happen at the highest levels of management and executive teams. What we mean is creating a candidate profile. This article will introduce you to candidate profiles and show you how you can work them into your hiring process. We’ll also cover some examples of candidate profiles that you can use for inspiration when creating your own. Let’s dig in! What is a Candidate Profile? In marketing and sales teams, there’s a detailed description of an audience called a customer profile. Your customer profiles are descriptions of what a typical customer might look like. A store selling baby clothes might have a customer profile for a young, first-time mother, unsure of how to navigate the troubled waters of parenthood, looking for safe, comfortable clothing for their child. They might also have a customer profile for a father who doesn’t quite know what he’s doing, or a single parent struggling with a low income. A customer profile guides the actions of marketing and sales. You know who you’re marketing to, and that allows you to know how to market to them. Advertising that is aimed at a young single mother will look different than advertising aimed at a couple with their third child. Different campaigns have different targets, and thus different copies. A candidate profile is a relatively similar concept applied to hiring. You know what position you need to fill, so you work backward, figuring out what attributes of a candidate are important to have. It’s essentially a blueprint made up of three sets of qualities: Personality traits. Past work history and experience. Skills and abilities, both soft and hard. These, combined, form a profile that is a picture of the kind of person you want to fill your role. As Harver says: “If you’re trying to figure out what steps to take to improve your recruitment process, you can do so by focusing your recruiting strategy on your ideal candidate.” A customer profile differs from a candidate profile in one major way: demographics. A customer profile can use demographics such as race, income level, gender, and sexual orientation as factors to influence marketing. A candidate profile cannot include any of these sorts of characteristics, because they’re protected information and cannot be used to make a hiring decision, by law . This is fine, of course; when you’re filling a job opening, your goal is to fill the position with someone skilled and knowledgeable. Whether that person is black or white, male or female, or something outside of traditional categories doesn’t matter. As long as they can fit in with your company culture, perform the duties of their role, and help your business succeed, that’s all you need. What Goes into a Candidate Profile? A candidate profile, as mentioned, has three sets of information you want to look for in an ideal candidate. Typically, these are then sorted into two categories: the must-have qualities and the nice-to-have qualities. Must-have qualities are qualities that are required for the candidate to be able to perform in their role. For example, a successful member of your sales team might need: Outgoing, exuberant, extroverted personality. Strong written and verbal communication skills. Positive and optimistic attitude. Goal-oriented and motivated by KPIs. Problem-solving drives to help customers. You might be tempted to add qualities like “familiar with our sales platform software”, but that’s not a necessary trait. It’s difficult or impossible to train a person to have the drive to problem-solve for customers, so you look for that quality when hiring. You can always train someone to use your software. Here’s an example of a sales candidate profile from HubSpot . As you can see, it doesn’t need to be complex, lengthy, or intricate. It’s simply a guide to the role, what qualities your hiring team should look for, and a template to use when drafting a job posting . Here’s an example of a developer candidate profile, from Sunscrapers . This is a longer and more casual-formatted candidate profile, of the type used to portray the ideal qualities of a candidate to those candidates themselves. They may have an internal-use candidate profile, used as a guide by their HR team, which is much shorter and more concise. Here’s an example of a general template, from CareerPlug. This candidate profile is a template with nothing specifically filled in for any role, just general guidelines for what you might want to customize for your role. You can use this as a general template and fill in the blanks for your company roles. Now that we have some examples and an understanding of how these work, let’s work to build a candidate profile of your own. How to Build a Candidate Profile If you want to put together a candidate profile, you need to take the time to examine several aspects of your company. Your company culture. What qualities are prized or valued within your company? Your team culture. Larger companies, especially, may find individual cultures arising within specific teams and departments; your candidate profile needs to reflect the team they’ll be joining, not necessarily the company overall. The specific role. A candidate profile must be specific to the role; you cannot use the same candidate profile for a sales role, a developer role, and a management role, because those three roles all have different requirements. Keeping this in mind, here’s a step-by-step process for developing candidate profiles for your company.  Step 1: Define your company or team culture, whichever is more relevant. Large companies will have overall, overarching mission statements and ideals, but each of their teams will have cultures of their own. Smaller companies may have one overarching culture that drives the entire company because “teams” consist of 2-3 people rather than dozens. Your job is to examine what the culture is in the most relevant sphere. You’re looking for qualities a prospective employee will need if they want to fit in and be part of the team. As Greg Kihlstrom writes for Forbes : “To be truly successful, a brand needs to be aligned with organizational culture. Only then will the message that is being shared with current and potential customers and employees ring true and result in lasting relationships with all of these important audiences.”  Step 2: Define the role’s duties and requirements. Think hard about each quality you are tempted to write down, and categorize it into one of three buckets: The candidate must have this already if they want to succeed. These are qualities that cannot be trained or taught and must be previously learned or inherent to the person’s character. The candidate benefits if they have it, but it’s not necessary for success in the role. These are qualities that help a person succeed, but are either not necessary for success or can be trained. The candidate doesn’t need this because we can give it to them. A lot of knowledge of specific institutional software, industry practices, and regulations falls into this category unless you’re hiring for a role that needs to know them, like an internal company auditor. This list of qualities is especially important because it needs to include both hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are things like knowledge of math and data science, or knowledge of PHP and SQL, or knowledge of Salesforce and Magento. Soft skills, meanwhile, are personality traits and qualities of them as a person that make them successful in their role or as part of a team. Cooperative natures, outgoing personalities, optimism, and a drive to solve problems are all soft skills. At this stage, it’s okay to brainstorm and write down far more than is necessary. Later steps will see you refining these qualities and requirements down to the essentials.  Step 3: Look at your most successful employees for inspiration. It can be difficult to put together the list of what is necessary for a role if you haven’t held that position yourself. Someone in HR might not know what makes a good salesperson, or what makes a good developer, or what makes a good factory line worker. Thus, you can turn to your experienced, successful employees in that role for an example. You can find this information in a few different ways. Observe them in their role. What do they do, how do they do it, and how are they successful where others are not? Talk to their managers. What makes this employee stand out and succeed where others don’t? What qualities do they have that can be replicated or sought out in hiring a new team member? Talk to them directly. Ask them questions about what they do, what they like about it, and what motivates them. What is most important for them to succeed, from their perspective? Taking this information from a variety of sources allows you to get a varied perspective on what is required for a role. You can also discuss with managers and team leads, specifically the people who will be working with a new employee, to see what hard skills and experiences are necessary for the role.  Step 4: Refine hard skills that are must-haves. You have a large list of hard skills that are relevant to your role; now you need to refine this list into something usable as a template for your job listing, your interviews, and your entire hiring framework. As mentioned, you want to divide these skills into buckets: what you need and can’t train, what you need but can train, what you want, and what isn’t necessary. Anything you can’t train goes in the must-have pile. This is your most crucial list and will form the bulk of your candidate profile, as well as your job listing and your interview process. If you use tools to set up pre-employment assessments or skills tests , for example, the selection of tests you run will be guided by this list of must-have hard skills.  Step 5: Refine soft skills that are must-haves. Similar to hard skills, you now have a large list of soft skills that are relevant to the role, and you need to refine that list into a usable list of requirements. Unlike hard skills, soft skills are very difficult to test for, and usually impossible to train, so you have to be more selective in what you choose as a must-have. The more must-haves you have on your list, the harder it will be to find a candidate that meets your needs. This list of soft skills comes into play primarily in writing your job listing, as well as what your hiring managers should be looking for when they interview candidates. You can get some of this information from a cover letter, which is what Wayne Elsey says on Forbes : “What is essential in the cover letter is to see if they took the time to understand the company and the position for which they applied. The cover letter can say it all.”  Step 6: Refine your nice-to-haves. Once you’ve picked out specific hard and soft skills to make into your hard requirements, you can start to fill out a list of nice-to-have qualities, skills, and features that set a candidate above the rest. Companies often run into two problems here. The first problem is including too many nice-to-haves in the must-haves pile. When the must-haves pile is too long, your candidate pool gets too small, and you’ll never find someone who meets them all. The second problem is including too many nice-to-haves altogether. This inflates your job listing, suppresses certain kinds of applicants, and muddies the waters of hiring. What you’re looking for here are a few key qualities you can use to look for, but not advertise as qualities you’re looking for. These will be key traits you can use to flag specific resumes and applications as top-level candidates.  Step 7: Figure out where your ideal candidates are likely to be, to know where to advertise your job . Now that you’ve put together your candidate profile, it’s time to put it to use. You have an accurate picture of the kind of person you’re looking for; now you need to find them. Where do they hang out? What do they do, where you can reach them? Use your candidate profile to guide the selection of advertising methods you use to circulate your job posting. Use it to target advertising towards the right kinds of people. Use it to filter resumes and cover letters, and to bring the best candidates to the top of the pool. And, of course, use it as a foundation for your interview process, to make sure you’re getting the best possible person for the job. Candidate Recruitment With Emerge Talent Cloud Streamline your hiring and recruitment process with Emerge Talent Cloud services. Our expert team will craft candidate profiles based on your company’s needs and take the hiring process off your hands. You focus on company growth, and we’ll focus on growing your candidate pool. Find Your Perfect Candidate with Emerge Talent Cloud Today

One of the biggest hurdles of talent management – more so than many other departments – is justification. Sales teams have easy sales reports and conversion data to share. Marketing can easily report its spend versus revenue. Talent management? Well, measuring and showcasing their return on investment is a bit more complicated. Measuring your return on investment isn’t just for showing off to the bosses. While justifying the expenditures to the CEO/CFO/CIO and other executives is important, it’s also a good way to benchmark performance from quarter to quarter and year to year. It’s data you can use to measure the value of optimizations, changes, tools, and investments that you make in your overall talent management process. Whether you’re trying to measure the efficiency and cost of your in-house HR department or you’re trying to measure the success of your current or future talent manager, this guide will help you focus on the metrics that matter. Recognize the Link One key to measuring ROI is understanding the link between the investment and the return. With sales, it’s easy; you have the expense of manufacturing a product, the expense of order fulfillment, the profit of the sale, and so on. It’s a rather simple and direct calculation. For something like talent management, the link can be more difficult to see. Here are some ways that the link manifests: Reducing the time to hire results in less lost productivity from empty roles and gets people up and running faster. Reducing time to hire and increasing quality of hire reduces the overall amount you spend working with a recruitment agency, thus reducing the cost of that agency’s contract. Consistent onboarding reduces turnover, which is costly itself – up to 2.5 times the salary of the candidate. Streamlining training processes reduces the overall cost of training, including physical materials and in-person training sessions. These and other links can be very important. Employee turnover is one of the most costly investments a company has to make, and it varies from role to role. According to PeopleKeep: “Some studies predict that every time a business replaces a salaried employee, it costs 6 to 9 months’ salary on average.” Moreover, for a C-level executive, it can cost over 200% of their salary, which means a $100K CEO might cost over $200K to replace. Understand What Matters You might understand intuitively that hiring better people for a job makes a business stronger, or that hiring someone a little less experienced and training them can be a better investment than hiring someone with a higher experience level. What you need to recognize, when calculating ROI to present, is what matters to the people you’re presenting to. The most important people to keep in mind when calculating ROI is the C-level executives in charge of making decisions. The CEO, the CIO, and the CFO are all important decision-makers, but they’re also all focused on different areas of the business. That is, after all, why your company has all three of them. If they were redundant, you wouldn’t need them all. What is your CIO looking for? Chief Information Officers are usually most concerned with institutional build-up and layered systems. They want to streamline a business to remove barriers between employees and the tasks they need to perform. According to Gartner , they often “rank talent as the no. 1 barrier to achieving their objectives.” Their goal is not just to see their number of team members grow, but to see a streamlined hiring process. They want to see how you’ve used your time and investment and used it to create more effective and more efficient processes. They want to see your results of hiring better candidates for each role, reducing turnover, and doing more with less. What is your CFO looking for? Chief Financial Officers are, of course, concerned with revenue and spending. They’re the most aware of the value of efficient and high-quality tools. They’re also often hyper-aware of the problems inherent in hiring underskilled employees for any given role, citing talent shortages as their largest constraint. CFOs are most likely to be won over with monetary considerations, though they will also be aware that there’s more to the value of an employee than their salary and the profits they help generate. You may need to justify expenditures on new processes and tech, with tangible evidence of results. What is your CEO looking for? Chief Executive Officers are guiding the overall course of the business, and as such, they need a bird ’s-eye view of the entire organization. They don’t need to be muddied down with minute details; rather, they want a broad overview of the pros and cons of various investments, processes, and tools. CEOs tend to be very aware that the skill level of their employees is a critical factor in their success. A high skill cap or a skill shortage can lead to devastating consequences over several years, and turnover is one of the major risks. Of course, all of this, for all C-levels, can change from organization to organization. Different C-levels have different backgrounds, and some of them may be more understanding and receptive than others. It can be worthwhile to talk to each in turn, if possible, to understand what their specific goals and needs are, and how to present information to them. Find a Place to Start Before you can measure a change in return on investment, you need to have a baseline. Before you can establish a baseline, you need to think long and hard about your metrics. What are you measuring? You need to identify metrics that you can measure and that matter. Sure, you can measure the average hair length of qualified candidates, but that’s meaningless data. You want to measure specific data that has a real, tangible impact on business processes and their end results. Turnover. Measuring turnover is one of the most important, tangible metrics you can monitor with a monetary cost associated with it. As we have already mentioned, the cost of turnover can be very high, particularly for higher-skilled and higher-ranking positions in your organization. Turnover impacts your finances directly, but it also impacts employee morale and productivity, which suppresses growth. Luckily, turnover is something that you can measure. You can track hard numbers for how many people are leaving and from what departments and positions, how quickly any given position turns over, and how much it costs to fill those vacancies. Pay particular attention to problem positions. Measuring this data can help you identify areas where, for example, a bad manager is driving away a lot of good talent. Denise Brandenberg writes on Chron : “There are several ways poor management affects turnover rates in a small business. Managers who operate like dictators, refusing to take other people’s opinions into consideration, [scare] off good employees. Companies that do not have 360-degree feedback tools or performance reviews that allow subordinates to rate their managers, also are at risk of high turnover. The bottom line is that when employees do not feel appreciated, or even feel as if they are taken advantage of, they do not want to continue working for their managers.”  Productivity. Measuring productivity can be somewhat harder than measuring something as obvious and financially tied as turnover. Productivity can be nebulous for many employees. More importantly, monitoring productivity metrics is never a one-size-fits-all solution. For example, in an assembly line, working faster directly correlates to more products leaving the line. On the other hand, an IT worker completing their tasks faster does not necessarily make the business better overall. Measuring the average time spent on a task just leads to competition for simple tasks and problem tasksbeing shuffled off and ignored. This is a common problem in call centers, where measuring the time spent on a call and incentivizing short calls leads to worse service because the employee’s goal is no longer service quality, but speed.  Time saved. Similar to productivity, you can measure time spent on certain kinds of tasks that can be sped up through the use of tools and processes, outsourcing, or another aspect of talent management. If your HR team is tediously creating performance reviews to process every quarter, something as simple as making a template they can use can save hours of work every quarter. In business, time is money, so efficiencies like that are directly responsible for better use of time and money. Your HR team may be able to spend that time doing something more useful to your organization. Even the actual measurement of your key performance indicators can be streamlined. Many modern tools and platforms for talent management have built-in metric tracking and can monitor those metrics for you, without you needing to tediously measure and calculate them time and again. This might take integration with existing systems, or even the replacement of those systems, but it can be valuable overall. Once you have identified the metrics you want to measure and how those metrics are directly relevant to the interests of your C-levels and anyone else who needs to care about talent ROI, you can start the measurements. At this point, you also have to decide how often you are going to measure your metrics. Some are as-they-happen, like turnover. Others might be ongoing measurements, like the performance metrics you monitor for employee activity. Figuring out how often to take measurements and compare them is critical. Finally, when it comes to benchmarking your success, PageUp says : “A common mistake people make is to fixate on trying to hit an industry benchmark. Benchmarks should act as a way to determine your HR strategy, not dictate targets you have to meet. They show you how you’re tracking relative to others in your industry so you can see where you’re doing well and identify areas for improvement.” Remember to only consider your own benchmarks for decision-making. Determine a Path to Improvement Once you have measured data over a long enough period, you can start putting that data to use. Some decisions will need to be made at an institutional level by your C-levels, while others will be better implemented at a managerial level. Some considerations may include: Looking for opportunities to streamline business processes. Whether you’re using an inefficient tool or you’re in need of a tool to replace manual repetition, identifying weaknesses in existing business processes gives you the opportunity to implement solutions to problems identified by your metrics. Monitoring turnover to watch for problem areas and seek out causes. The above example of a problem manager driving turnover is a key example. The managers themselves might look good on paper, but their attitude or their treatment of their subordinates causes extreme and unnecessary disruption to productivity, both through their own actions and through the disruption caused by turnover. Removing the problem element can be an immediate up-front cost, but the improvement to the department, to employee morale, and to overall turnover is worthwhile. Reviewing metrics to ensure accuracy of measurements. Every so often, it’s worth conducting a review of your metric measurement to ensure that you’re still measuring the right information in the right way. The call center example is a good one to illustrate a failure in measurement. Implementing the measurement of a metric can change employee behavior to adapt to that measurement, which itself can cause suppression in productivity. Review metrics to ensure they aren’t themselves a problem. Finally, look for the benefits and growth you’ve achieved. When you implement a change, you can monitor metrics and see improvements. Setting SMART goals allows you to draw a direct comparison between the actions you take and the benefit to metrics they show. That, in turn, can be written and contextualized. For example, being able to say you reduce employee turnover is good, but it’s better to be able to say “Our first-year retention of new employees is 80%; the industry average is 75%, so we’re doing well”. Contextualizing your metrics is how you present ROI in more than just an abstract sense. This presentation of ROI is the ideal report to deliver to your C-levels and other decision-makers. As Cornerstone says: “With talent management best practices in place, you can build a world-class workforce that is aligned, inspired, and delivering exceptional results – and most importantly, helping your organization achieve its strategic goals.” Establishing measurement and understanding metrics is the key to developing an understanding of your talent ROI.

A critical part of the hiring process is testing your candidates to make sure they will fit in with the company. This means testing several different aspects of a candidate: their ethics, their personality, their skills, and so on. Hiring the wrong people can seriously hurt your company's morale, culture, happiness, and productivity. There’s a dilemma here. Tests have a difficult time discerning the truth. For every pre-employment test out there, there’s likely a guide somewhere written about how to pass it. People looking for work will do whatever they can to secure a position, and that includes studying for tests that measure personality, choosing options they think you’re looking for rather than options that reflect themselves, and bending the truth. Engineering a pre-employment assessment is a complicated and time-consuming process, and you never know how accurate it will be until you’ve used it and measured the results. However, you can take advantage of the work others have done before you by using tools, resources, and platforms that already exist to do the bulk of your testing, with custom assessments added as necessary. Identifying Necessary Testing Assessments are an important part of the hiring process , but they can also suppress qualified candidates who don’t want to jump through hoops when their experience should be plenty of evidence of their skills. Determining how much and what kinds of tests are necessary is the first step towards developing a thorough, useful assessment process. As SHRM says : “To implement a pre-employment testing process, the employer must 1) determine which tests are necessary; 2) select or develop a test that appropriately evaluates the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) needed; and 3) monitor use of the test. Implementing a valid testing process can be time-consuming, but the wealth of information gleaned may be worth the effort. The first step is to identify the KSAOs required to perform the job: Knowledge is information the employee must possess (e.g., knowledge of accounting principles). Skills are learned behaviors needed to successfully perform a job (e.g., typing). Abilities are observable behaviors, including those needed to perform the physical requirements of the job (e.g., climbing stairs, lifting). Other characteristics include any other job requirements (e.g., attitude, reliability). The process of deciding which tests to use begins by isolating the KSAOs the new employee must possess on Day 1. In other words, what must the person know and be able to do without additional on-the-job training? Once the list of KSAOs is created, the employer can consider testing options.” Once you have some idea of the KSAOs you need to test for, you will have a strong basis with which to judge the assessments and tools you can use to look for them. It does you no good to test for accounting skills for an entry-level role that can be trained to learn them. It does you no good to test for basic programming competency for a high-level role that needs much greater levels of knowledge. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all assessment. You can use modules of different tests for your entire organization, such as ethical and moral personality assessments, but every role should have unique assessments to analyze the viability of a candidate for that specific role. Special note: Remember to make sure that your tests do not, intentionally or accidentally, screen for qualities that are protected. Questions that can be construed as testing for qualities associated with races, genders, ethnicities, sexual orientations, or other protected qualities can open your company up to discrimination suits . Platforms, Tools, and Resources Determining precisely how to use any individual tool or resource is an organizational decision; we cannot make specific recommendations. What works for one company might not work for another. Thus, we’ve put together as broad a list as possible, rather than a narrow list of specific resources. By no means should you attempt to use everything on this list; rather, research each option and determine which few are ideal for your organization. Modern Hire Modern Hire is a complete hiring platform with an assessment module. Their novel approach to pre-employment assessments uses predictive intelligence and machine learning based on a broad sample of candidate data harvested through their platform. While their assessments can be used by just about any company, they specialize in Healthcare, Staffing, Retail, Financial, Logistics, Hospitality, and Call Center industries. VICTIG VICTIG is a company specializing in employment screening, particularly with background checks, drug screening, and motor vehicle reports. This makes them an excellent platform to use to screen and assess candidates who apply for roles where they’ll be driving, handling heavy machinery, or having great personal responsibility. Plum Plum is a relatively new platform founded in 2012 to use machine learning and predictive artificial intelligence to screen and filter candidates. They boast that “Plum is 4x more accurate at predicting future success than resumes alone,” and they offer the ability to develop a neat and orderly shortlist of candidates, just in case your first choice falls through. Test Invite Test Invite is an assessment platform with a flexible engine you can use to develop your assessments. They have pre-designed assessments for employment screening , English proficiency, and certain skill aptitudes, and can be used to develop your own tests as well. You can use pre-created assessments, create your own, or mix and match with their library of questions. Toggl Hire Toggl offers several different services for businesses. The Hire platform is an assessment engine offering pre-employment tests. Their platform is one of the most user-friendly of the bunch for candidates, though your company may find it a bit restrictive. QuizCV This company provides an online, web-based testing platform. They have English proficiency, aptitude, cognitive ability, employment, and free-form tests. It’s a very specialized platform, with few additional features or integrations. It’s good at what it does, but it’s likely best used by smaller companies with more generalized assessment requirements. Qualified Qualified.io is a specialized assessment platform aimed entirely at software engineers and developers. They offer at-scale assessments with highly technical skills and aptitude testing, segmented by specific skills in specific kinds of software, such as AngularJS and Ruby on Rails. Overall, it’s an excellent assessment platform for testing software developers, and useless for other roles. Adaface Adaface is another platform meant to assess software engineers and developers. Unlike Qualified, Adaface has assessments for psychometrics, general aptitude, and lateral hiring, as well as the traditional coding tests. They also offer a few more general assessments for logical reasoning, data interpretation, English proficiency, and business analysis, among others. Aspiring Minds Aspiring Minds is another relatively new platform claiming to use artificial intelligence to optimize assessments and the overall hiring process. They offer a range of assessments, including cognitive ability, personality, coding, job simulations, job skills, and customer service tests. They’re also used by over 100 different Fortune 500 companies. Codility Codility is similar to Adaface and other platforms made specifically to assess developers and coders. You can work with your IT department to create assessments customized to your company or use the evaluations they already have in place. HR Avatar HR Avatar offers a custom test builder, along with a catalog of existing tests you can use. Their catalog is robust and offers hundreds of assessments for specific jobs and roles, such as account managers, purchasing agents, and programmers to bakers and bartenders. Additionally, they offer remote test proctoring, video interviews, and reference checks as part of their services. TestDome TestDome is another specialized testing platform used to assess skills. They can create a new, customized test for your organization, or use one of the hundreds of existing tests for specific skills. They offer specific tests for developer skills like Python and Ruby, as well as more generalized skills such as time management, digital marketing, and math. Harver Harver is a volume hiring platform and recruiting solution with built-in assessments. It’s another AI-powered platform and is very popular amongst large global brands, including Netflix. They measure aptitude, culture fit, and soft skills, including a predicted ability to succeed throughout the candidate’s career. Interview Mocha Another popular platform, Interview Mocha, is a skills testing platform with thousands of different skill templates, which can be mixed and matched to create customized assessments for your open roles. While they have many developer-focused skills, they also have finance, business skills, and many more options. Vervoe Vervoe is another AI-based platform with proprietary “talent trials” specifically designed by industry experts to test real, practical skills a candidate in a given role would need. Assessments are aimed at specific roles rather than skills and can test how an individual would perform in a role as a whole, rather than requiring you to holistically judge several different assessments that don’t encompass the whole picture. Pymetrics Yet another AI-based candidate assessment platform, this one uses specifically behavioral assessments to build a profile of a candidate. They explicitly focus on encouraging diversity in their clients and use a novel approach to assessment in a gamified neurological testing process. Xobin Xobin is a more traditional assessment platform, largely specializing in white-collar jobs. Their library of existing tests – containing over 1,000 pre-built assessments – includes IT, Marketing, HR, Sales, Design, Customer Service, Logistics, Accounting, Finance, Admin, and more. This huge array of tests can be time-consuming to comb through, but extremely useful for companies with disparate needs looking to test them all through one platform. Prevue HR Prevue is a relatively standard sort of assessment platform with one unique approach. They offer a novel “motivations and interests” assessment that helps separate candidates who are only in it for the money from those who have the passion and inspiration to succeed in their roles. Used carefully, this can be an incredible boon for high-level and creative-focused roles in particular. Athena Quotient Athena Quotient is a platform offering pre-employment screening tests that make use of a complex, proprietary algorithm analyzing overall judgment. It’s a powerful, unique assessment that was nominated for a Nobel Prize. It’s also a relatively quick assessment, demanding only around 30 minutes of time to complete. Great People Inside This platform offers pre-employment assessments but continues after hiring to help analyze and drive performance from your employees once they’ve been hired. It’s a way to help adapt your business processes to encourage success from the inside out, rather than what most other platforms do, which is bolster hiring but leave the rest to you. Owiwi Owiwi is a unique, novel candidate assessment tool that takes the form of a video game. Rather than a simple gamified testing process, this is a full game, where the choices a user makes throughout their playthrough analyze aspects of the person’s character, their soft skills, and their general traits. It’s certainly unique, though how well it fits with your organization may be up to you. Select International Select International is an assessment platform specializing in manufacturing, healthcare, safety, and leadership roles. Their overall platform is more or less standard, but their focus on certain industries is relatively rare amongst assessment platforms. They also offer specialized assessments for executive and leadership roles, which are traditionally left out of many assessment programs. The Predictive Index This company offers a “talent optimization platform” that provides assessments aimed at linking behavioral traits with job performance. Their history of successful utilization allows them a wealth of data they can leverage to refine the accuracy of their assessments. They have worked with over 6,500 clients and have 60 years’ worth of science on hand, having provided over 27 million assessments over the years. Wrapping Up There is no shortage of candidate assessment platforms available. Some are simple testing platforms. Some are advanced, AI-driven psychometric examinations of potential hires. Some are stand-alone, while others link with existing applicant tracking systems . There is something for everyone out there. We recommend spending some time determining what, precisely, you want to assess. Are you looking purely for technical skills and relying on interviews to assess culture? Are you looking for a technological solution to assessing culture, while training candidates for the technical skills they need on the job?  Every company has different priorities, so it’s important to identify those priorities in order to pick the best option amongst these platforms. Are you seeking the most talented employees? Contact us today for expert guidance and to find the perfect fit for your company’s unique needs.

Employees come and go. It’s simply a fact of running a business that, sooner or later, even your most dedicated employee may move on, whether it’s to a new career or retirement.  Sometimes it’s on good terms, and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes there’s plenty of notice, sometimes there’s not. There’s only one constant: you will have employee turnover. Just because it’s a fact of life doesn’t mean you can’t do something about it. How much turnover you get can be influenced by a variety of factors, many of which you can control. Understanding Turnover What makes an employee leave? You can broadly divide the reasons for turnover into two categories: voluntary and involuntary. Voluntary turnover includes reasons the employee decides to step away. These can be amicable between the employee and the company, such as a need for relocation, retirement, or a family illness. They can also be adversarial, such as a micromanager blocking the employee’s mobility or an interpersonal conflict with another employee. Involuntary turnover includes reasons the employee is forced away. These are generally adversarial, such as absenteeism, unsatisfactory performance, or a poor culture fit. Many of these factors can be addressed to reduce turnover. For example, an interpersonal conflict can be resolved, or the employees involved separated so they don’t need to work together. (Graphic and data provided by LinkedIn 2017 study and TalentLyft) You might expect that the ideal turnover rate for a company is zero, but that’s neither true nor, really, possible in the long term. Companies can outlast the lifetime of their employees; turnover is as inevitable as human mortality. On a less grim note, a long-term employee retiring can be a good thing, as it allows for internal mobility for a talented successor. A highly creative employee might move on before they stagnate, having left the company better than they found it. It’s better to have some small amount of turnover than it is to have stagnant employees, employees held captive by circumstance, and a toxic culture that retains employees through fear of burning bridges throughout the industry. What is the average turnover rate, and what can be considered a good turnover rate for your company? The actual statistics vary quite a bit from industry to industry.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics provides annual Job Openings and Labor Turnover Surveys and compiles this data into an aggregate report, which you can read here . Keep in mind that data for 2020 is skewed by the Coronavirus pandemic, so looking at 2019 data might provide a better overall average. Remember, too, that the true cost of turnover is larger than just the monetary cost of a severance package and the recruiting process to hire a replacement. The employee can take with them institutional knowledge. Their loss can reduce morale amongst the people who liked that employee, and amongst those who now have to pick up their duties. To reduce employee turnover, you must begin by hiring better employees. Picking the right candidate for the role and the company culture helps ensure that they don’t leave right away and that their presence doesn’t imbalance your existing teams and drive others to leave. Thus, we’ve divided our tips into two sections: pre-hire and post-hire. Pre-Hire Tips Pre-hire tips are steps you can take before you hire a new employee to help reduce the possibility of turnover in the first year after they’ve been hired. To a certain extent, these tips need to be applied even before publishing a job posting.  Pay attention to company culture. A good cultural fit is one of the most important determining factors in employee retention, and a negative trend in internal culture can drive a spiral of employee turnover that can be devastating for a business. As Mike Kappel writes for Forbes , “If employees don’t fit in with your work environment, I guarantee they won’t be happy. They won’t fit in, they won’t get along with their co-workers, and they’ll feel lonely. An outstanding candidate that doesn’t match the behaviors and culture of your business won’t stay around long.” Determining whether a candidate fits in with your company culture requires understanding your own company culture . Thus, a good trick is to ask yourself (or your employees) questions similar to those that a candidate might ask to get an individual sense of your culture. The Muse offers many such questions you can use to get an idea of what the culture is in your company (if you don’t already know). Keep in mind that, especially in upper management, what you see might not be what the employees on the ground experience during the day. Once you have a solid idea of your company culture, you can work some behavioral questions into your interview process to see how a candidate may react to certain situations, which can indicate how they would fit in with your culture overall. Offer competitive pay and benefits. Salary negotiations are one thing, but you need a strong foundation of benefits and base pay that satisfies your best possible candidates. For example, we covered what to offer to attract and satisfy engineering candidates . One of the key takeaways is flexibility. A lower base salary might be fine if you offer flexible hours, work from home, and loan assistance. Being able to adapt to what a candidate truly finds valuable is a powerful way to entice top candidates and keep them around. Express company culture through your job posting. When crafting your job posting , you want to write it in a way that expresses your company’s values and culture. You don’t have a lot of space with which to express these values, so you may need to do work in developing an employer brand that conveys enough information that you can reasonably expect candidates to have basic knowledge of your company before applying. Be honest with what you write in your job posting. Telling candidates that they’ll be working in a fast-paced environment with unique, ongoing challenges only leads to frustration if they find their day-to-day task list to be little more than busy work on repeat. The disconnect between job posting and job reality is a huge driving factor in turnover. Post-Hire Tips Once an employee has been hired, you need to uphold the promises outlined in the interviews, your company's reputation, and your job posting. Moreover, you need to make sure your internal culture, your business processes, and your other employees all contribute to a positive, effective workplace. Offer praise and recognition for good work. Studies have shown that recognition is a huge driving factor in retention. 20% of employees cite lack of recognition as a reason to seek a job elsewhere. 40% of workers say they would put more effort into their daily work if they were recognized for their efforts. A mere 9% of employees feel that their managers are good at recognizing contributions. Recognition doesn’t need to be a gamified competition to earn customer feedback or to gain a picture on the wall as an employee of the month. It can be as simple as a manager offering congratulations to employees at the end of a project. Be encouraging, be positive, and be grateful to your employees for the work they do. Don’t be afraid to fire the toxic element. We’ve all heard stories of (or directly encountered) the bad manager whose toxic presence consistently demeans and oppresses the employees beneath them while presenting a pleasant face to their senior leadership so they’re never the target of institutional ire. In situations like this, one bad employee can result in dramatically increased turnover rates, poor job performance, satisfaction for those under them, and more. Not all turnover is caused by an individual, but if you have a situation where it is, it’s usually worthwhile to let that employee go. As Darcy Jacobsen writes , “No matter how effective they might be at their actual work, an employee who is a bad fit is bad for your culture, and that creates ‘culture debt.’ They will do more damage than good by poisoning the well of your company.” Offer flexibility and keep benefits current. Flexibility and adaptability are the most important qualities in both a worker and a company. Your employees are changing and growing. They’re learning new skills and they’re progressing through the stages of their life’s journey. If you want to keep them on for the long term, you need to change and grow with them. This means being able to continually offer growth in salary and benefits according to their skills and their role. If you hire a junior developer and train them, and assist with their certifications, but fail to increase either their pay or their responsibilities, of course, they’re going to look elsewhere. They want a job befitting their skill level . Additionally, life circumstances can change. An employee you hire while single may meet someone and decide to start a family. Suddenly, paid family leave becomes a priority they didn’t have when you hired them. If you rigidly adhere to the benefits they wanted when they were hired, they’re just as likely to quit and find a new job after raising their baby as they are to stick around. Flexibility in raises, bonuses, benefits, work hours, and working remotely are all great benefits to keep on hand and leverage to keep employees happy. Hire enough people. One of the biggest driving factors in employee dissatisfaction is overwhelming responsibilities. Millions of employees in every industry have experienced, or are currently experiencing, times when an employee leaves or is let go, and rather than hiring a replacement, the company divides their duties among employees already there. For one employee and light duties, this might be fine. When it happens two, three, or five times, it quickly builds up to a point where your employees are burning themselves out working too many hours, too long shifts, and doing too much. With burnout comes, at best, poor job performance. More often, employees leave, often leaving the industry entirely. Maintain adequate staffing; the cost of replacing an entire team is much higher than the cost of keeping your department full. Maintain transparency, accountability, and trust. Fostering an atmosphere of transparency and accountability is important for the modern workforce. In part, this helps with the tip about getting rid of toxic employees; by offering a channel where an employee can make a report (even anonymously) and trust that it will be investigated, you can help give employees a sense that they have some recourse beyond quitting. Transparency works the other way. Holding your managers and your executives responsible, as opposed to hiding information and treating business processes as arcane secrets, builds trust in your management team. This avoids the situation where employees see a company crashing down around them while executives cash out and do nothing about it. Remember, a company is nothing without its employees, so they should be valued. George Dickson says this: “Instead of saying ‘do I have to share this information with the team?’, try, ‘do I have to keep this information from the team?’ If you can’t come up with a solid reason to keep something a secret, you need to question the validity of keeping it behind closed doors, especially when the alternative offers so many benefits.” You don’t need to be transparent with proprietary information, top-level negotiations, or everyone’s salary information. Just be open with information that matters, and that doesn’t need to be kept secret. Build Growth Opportunities into Your Culture to Reduce Employee Turnover Recruiting software company Jobvite President and CEO Dan Finnigan knows the importance of providing growth opportunities for employees in both employee retention and talent attraction.  He says it’s not only for the benefit of employees. It’s also important to the entire company. And he reminds everyone that younger workers, especially, are probably viewing entry-level roles as having a short shelf-life on their career path and will move on regardless, but that shouldn’t keep employers from building a growth culture that attracts the best candidates and treats them well while they are with the company. Twitter’s head of organizational effectiveness & learning, Melissa Daimler, advises employers to provide training and growth opportunities that employees want and need rather than just offering what people in charge want.  It’s important to remember that helping employees reach their career goals builds engagement and loyalty and has a big impact on retention. Include growth offerings such as employee development plans at evaluation time, skills assessments so employees can understand what areas to focus on, and formal assistance with tuition reimbursement. Growth Opportunities Employees Want Do you know what types of growth opportunities your employees want? Collaboration software and services provider PGi’s 2015 Workplace Resolutions survey found that the top five things employees want this year include a raise or promotion, better work/life balance, better technology, being more organized, and continuing education. Forbes contributor and Wolf Management Training founder Victor Lipman explains four types of growth : financial, career, professional, and personal. Financial growth includes more than raises and retirement benefits and encompasses bonus opportunities, recognition for length of service, and financial incentives for goal achievement.  Career growth includes clear career paths and opportunities for advancement and progressively more challenging work. Professional growth includes acquiring new skills, being set up for success to meet sales and productivity goals, and opportunities for “stretch” to explore work beyond current roles. Personal growth opportunities include programs for peer recognition, work/life balance in the work environment, and employee programs for wellness, charitable giving, and volunteering. Conclusion Overall, the number one determining factor in employee turnover is happiness and job satisfaction. Happy, satisfied employees are more loyal, more productive, and better at their jobs. Hiring the right people, keeping a company culture of transparency and teamwork, and recognizing contributions are all powerful ways to keep employees happy, which in turn reduces turnover. If your company wants to grow its team, reach out to us today ! We can help you build the team you need for success.

Anyone can throw a job posting onto a bunch of careers pages and recruit employees. There are more than enough people out there looking for jobs and it’s easy to fill seats with warm bodies. When you want to recruit actual talent, however, and pick up candidates with specialized skills and experience, you need to be a little more strategic with your efforts. This process can be intricate, demanding a strategic approach that takes into account the intricacies of human potential and organizational needs.  In this blog post, we’ll explore the critical steps and strategies for spotting those rare gems – candidates with specialized skills and invaluable attributes. We delve deep into understanding what makes a candidate stand out, how to adjust our lenses to spot potential, and how to strategically position your organization to attract these talents. Whether you’re a startup looking for its next leader or a multinational corporation aiming to bolster its ranks with unparalleled talent, this guide is your comprehensive roadmap. Identify the Skills Necessary for the Role This might sound obvious but bear with us. Before you can spot rare talent in your candidate pool , you need to know what talent you’re looking for. Do you need a rockstar developer? Do you need an entrepreneur with success under their belt? Do you need a project manager to be the unsung hero of your success? Sit down with your department managers and C-levels, and identify the specific skills necessary for your open role. Divide them into four categories: Trainable Skills: These are the skills that you can teach to an otherwise well-qualified candidate on the job. Baseline Skills: These are the skills that are necessary to survive in the role from day one; a candidate should not progress to interviews without them. Selling Points: These are the skills your candidate should have to impress you and make a candidate stand out from the rest of the pack. Excellence Skills: These are the skills and attributes that showcase a truly unique individual who is destined for success in your role. This list allows you to filter down your candidate pool through progressively smaller filters. Your goal is to find someone with Excellent skills, though this is often unrealistic. You may need to be willing to expand the definition of trainable skills to make room for someone with untapped potential for excellence. Try to keep this list to skills and experiences. Posting elements like their location, years of experience, and specific certifications might filter out a candidate who would be excellent if you gave them the chance. After all, someone can know a lot about a subject and never bother to take a certification test, and your ideal candidate might not live in the same country when you find them. Be Specific About Needs in Your Job Posting There are a lot of ways to make your job posting stand out . One of them is to have a small but clear list of requirements. One common mistake that some companies make when drafting job postings is including too many items on their list of requirements. It discourages people who meet most but not all of the requirements from applying, so most of the people who apply are underqualified and overconfident. It’s much better to use the division of skills above to determine what is truly a requirement and what is just nice to have. The ideal would be to add your list of excellent skills to the list of requirements. You may have fewer applicants overall, but they’ll trend closer to the ideal candidate you have in mind. There’s a careful balance you need to strike here. Jennifer Tardy, of Jennifer Tardy Consulting, writes : “Job descriptions with a ton of basic qualifications indicate that the employer truly has no clue what they are seeking, or what it takes to get the job done.” Job postings with far too many requirements are one of the top signs of a poorly organized or poorly managed company. It’s all too easy to write down a huge list of nice-to-have qualifications, only to drive away from the best candidates because of the unrealistic nature of what they’re asking for. To a certain extent, the best way to get around this is simply to question every element. “Does the candidate need this attribute?” Pare your job posting down to the essentials, both to make it more attractive and to bring in the candidates who meet the most important requirements. Use an Applicant Tracking System The use of modern applicant tracking systems is surprisingly contentious. These systems can save a lot of time and energy in your HR team, but they can also accidentally filter otherwise excellent candidates. Kristen Hudson of Jobvite explains the benefits : “Recruiting software can automate many screening functions, search for unusual keywords, and expand searches to include social media tracking and integrations with third-party employment agencies. You can identify unique skills with automated searches. Using social media platforms, the software can look for keywords, behavioral patterns, and even what kind of products and websites interest potential candidates.” On the other hand, automated tools prove to be a double-edged sword. Peter Cappelli explains : “My earlier research found that companies piled on job requirements baked them into the applicant-tracking software that sorted resumes according to binary decisions (yes, it has the keyword; no, it doesn’t), and then found that virtually no applicants met all the criteria.” A good ATS can be tuned to show a percentage match with an array of different hard and soft requirements while using a limited number of essential requirements as filters. A poorly-tuned applicant tracking system, meanwhile, will poorly filter and sort candidates until there aren’t any viable candidates left in the pool. Look for Candidates in Unexpected Places These days, candidates with hard-to-find skills and experience are rarely out searching for a job. They have jobs already, where they’re at least satisfied because their skills and talents are in high demand. Finding the best candidates often means looking for passive candidates and convincing them that the grass is greener on your side of the fence. Thus, one strategy that many companies and organizations are turning to is looking in unexpected places for attributes, rather than defined skills and experience. The FBI is a good example of this. They ran a recruitment campaign called the “Unexpected Agent” campaign, looking for skills and knowledge first while being willing to train their new candidates to become agents. For example, they might look for an art historian to recruit as an agent specializing in forgeries and counterfeits in the art world. An art historian would likely never think to apply for a job at the FBI, but their unique skill set would make for a highly valuable asset. George Anders, the author of The Rare Find, seconds the motion . “Some of the best sports coaches I talked with would go out and get to know other parts of the globe. Or a rural coach would go and learn about talent spotting in Chicago. Hollywood casting directors might go and check out the Iranian film industry.” In other words, be prepared to look further afield for the best in rare talent to suit your needs. Look at industries other than your own, where skills might translate. Look for personality traits over experience. Look at broader geographies and be willing to hire outside of your immediate geographic area, or even your country. Be Willing to Ignore Gaps, Grades, and Past Experience Part of being open to a candidate outside of your industry is being willing to overlook some elements of a traditional resume or CV that would normally be requirements. Three elements, in particular, are worth putting in the “nice to have” bucket, rather than the requirements. Would you hire a college dropout for a high-level role in your company? Perhaps your initial inclination is no. Yet, many of the world’s most brilliant minds, especially in tech, dropped out of college to pursue their passions. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and others all dropped out and became incredible success stories. Educational performance is not necessarily predictive of the attributes that make an individual truly successful in their career. While these tech geniuses dropped out to pursue their inspirations, many others don’t drop out, but rather let school take the back seat while they follow their passion projects. Consider looking not just at educational performance, but at what a candidate has accomplished throughout their education and subsequent career. A candidate who isn’t necessarily a viable option on paper might have developed an app that precisely exhibits the sort of drive and creativity necessary to succeed in your company. Alongside education, the candidate’s experience is often used as a sign of their past successes. Sure, to a certain extent, experience in their field is necessary. All a good candidate really needs, however, is familiarity with the industry. Someone with five years of experience and someone with ten may have comparable performance, and in some cases, long years of experience might simply indicate a candidate who is at risk of falling behind the times. Gaps in work history are another factor that can often be overlooked to find true talent. Sometimes your best, most entrepreneurial spirits have gaps in their employment and education history, from times where they spent years focusing on other projects. Look beyond the surface level and be willing to overlook these elements in favor of attributes that make a candidate more successful. Take a (Controlled) Risk George Anders is a fan of taking risks, but only in the right context. “I met with an art gallery manager who evaluated artists by saying ‘Surprise me’. You can’t hire pilots by asking them to surprise you – that’s not going to make a successful airline.” Risks can be hugely rewarding, in the right circumstances. Taking a risk with a high chance of success makes the potential failure less damaging if it happens. You may, for example, be willing to gamble on a candidate who doesn’t quite meet all of the requirements but shows promise, where the risk of failure is a loss of time and money. Don’t, however, sign a year-long contract with them with no escape clause. Context is important as well. As with the airline example, some roles require strict adherence to education and industry standards. A financial planner who doesn’t adhere to compliance regulations isn’t an asset, they’re a liability. A pilot can’t freestyle their flights. A doctor can’t go with their gut against the tenets of practicing medicine. Make Your Job Attractive Part of spotting the best talent is knowing what those candidates want out of a job. By offering what the best candidates really want, you attract a candidate pool that has the best chance of giving you the people you want to hire. The trick is to offer benefits and perks to your candidates that are truly in demand . What might qualify? The chance to work on big problems facing the industry or the world. A guaranteed ability to focus on real work, not busy work. Flexibility in days and hours; the ability to work when and where work can be done. Tangible support for lives outside of work, such as family leave and paid sick leave. Upward mobility; is the promise of growth and progression in their career. The reason so many of the best candidates never seem to stick with one job for long is because of a lack of progression within their companies. They may get hired on for their abilities, and they may excel in their roles, but if they have nowhere to go, they leave. Hire for Attitude Mark Murphy, the author of Hiring for Attitude, says it best : “It’s not that technical skills aren’t important, but they’re much easier to assess (that’s why attitude, not skills, is the top predictor of a new hire’s success or failure). Virtually every job (from neurosurgeon to engineer to cashier) has tests that can assess technical proficiency. But what those tests don’t assess is an attitude; whether a candidate is motivated to learn new skills, think innovatively, cope with failure, assimilate feedback and coaching, collaborate with teammates, and so forth.” Technical solutions and resumes have a hard time showcasing attitudes; that’s what the interviews are for. Finding a way to assess attitude as it fits with your company culture is essential. You want a candidate with the talent, the desire, the drive, and the attitude to succeed; everything else can be taught over time. Spotting the best talent out of any candidate pool is as much a matter of subjective judgment as it is any individual quality on paper. It’s an acquired skill, and it comes with experience in hiring and observing the results of those hires. Conclusion  Finding the right talent, especially those with specialized skills, goes beyond traditional metrics and requires a more nuanced and strategic approach. Whether it’s looking beyond conventional expectations, embracing the benefits of modern tools, or valuing attitude as much as aptitude, the path to recruiting the best is riddled with innovation and intuition. Ultimately, the goal is not just to fill positions but to enhance the overall value and potential of your organization.  If the task feels daunting or if you’re unsure where to start, we’re here to help. Our staffing services are designed to bridge the gap between employers and rare talent, ensuring that you find the perfect fit every time. Contact us today and let us assist you in spotting and securing that exceptional candidate for your team.

Modern technology allow companies to hire employees from pretty much anywhere in the world. Hiring foreign workers can be difficult due to language barriers, visa requirements, and other issues, but hiring out of state candidates within the United States is much easier. It still presents some unique challenges, however, and navigating those challenges is critical to making the best hiring decision. Here are 10 tips for successfully hiring out of state candidates: 1. Consider Candidate Motivations Anyone considering a position in a city (other than the one where they currently live) has to have some motivation for doing so. Perhaps they visited your city and liked it, and are now looking for a job there . Maybe they don’t like their current situation and want to make a major change. Or, they could have ties to the city, such as friends or family. It’s important to consider these motivations and even discuss them with the candidate. A candidate looking to make a major change may or may not make a good long-term employee if the change doesn’t address what led them to that point. If they’re making a major geographic jump, such as from Florida to Minnesota, weather can be an important consideration they may not quite understand. You’ll also want to be open to discussing the reality of life where you live. A good candidate may not be interested once they learn the realities of the weather, the local culture, or even certain state or local laws. 2. Be Transparent About Salary and Costs One important factor that many job seekers may fail to recognize is that the cost of living can vary dramatically from place to place. Your company’s salary and benefits package may sound great on paper, but if the area your candidate will be living in is much more expensive than they’re used to, it may end up resulting in a drop in salary after living expenses. This is especially true of major cities. The internet is full of cost of living calculators, so your candidates are likely going to have some idea of what they’re in for. Be transparent with those costs, your salary and benefits options, and how your offerings stack up to those of other companies in the area. You may also be able to provide and promote certain kinds of local benefits, like paying for employee passes to local attractions and trails, offering a transportation stipend, or facilities in your office that assist with costs, such as indoor bike storage. These can also help your prospective employees tie into local culture quicker. 3. Streamline Your Interview Process Clinton Brown, the permanent placement lead for Experis, says time is of the essence. “If you want to secure an out of state candidate, you need to move relatively quickly.” The longer your interview process goes, the less a candidate is going to be interested in your company. The issue is relocation. Moving, whether it’s across a city or a state, usually has a strict timetable. Leases need to be managed, rent needs to be paid, moving companies need to be booked in advance, and so on. The greater the delay is in the hiring process , the less a candidate will trust you to have everything ready on the timetable they need. Relocating is stressful, and organization and communication are important. A delayed interview process also increases the chances that your candidate will receive another offer in the meantime. By the time you’ve progressed to the interview stage, another company may have already extended an offer. Remember, you’re not just selling yourself as an employer, you’re selling your city and state as well. 4. Skip (or Finance) the Face-to-Face Whether or not you need a face to face interview can be a critical determining factor for some candidates. Depending on how far away the candidate lives, it may be inconvenient or expensive for them to fly out for an interview. Skipping the face to face interview may be a good idea for everyone involved. If you’re skipping a face to face interview, make use of modern telecommunications to replace it. A phone interview can work, but a video interview over Zoom or Skype is much better. This can also be an indication of how well the employee will fit in if your company is heavy on remote meetings or distributed teams. If you must have an in-person interview , consider financing it. Pay for a plane ticket and a hotel room for the evening, working with the candidate to schedule it appropriately. Alternatively, offer reimbursement, regardless of whether or not they’re hired. The last thing a candidate wants as part of a job interview is a financial burden, especially if they’re on the cusp of moving to a new state. 5. Cover Relocation (or Not) Whether or not your company will cover or assist with their relocation costs can be a deal-breaker for many candidates. This is especially true if your company uses recruiters to find candidates ; a recruiter might not pay attention to the location of a qualified candidate, just to their skills. It’s a huge drain and a disappointment to make it most of the way through the hiring process, only to run into relocation funding as a major issue. Elliot Lasson , an HR expert at the University of Maryland, recommends that you mention to your candidates that you can offer “relocation assistance for highly qualified candidates” – if you’re willing to extend that assistance. If you’re not, make note of that upfront. More importantly, make sure your recruiters understand the situation ahead of time. If a candidate isn’t able to relocate on their dime, they should avoid adding “willing to relocate” to their applications. The best candidates might even list a local address when applying, even if they don’t live there yet, though that means they’re already planning to move to your area regardless. Keep in mind that, due to the nature of the internet, you’re going to receive applications from across the country (and even outside of the country) regardless of your hiring intent. Offering to cover relocation can be a great way to broaden your potential candidate pool and ensure you get the best candidate for any given role. 6. Provide a Resource Package Moving to a new location is difficult for many people. Their social networks, their habits, the stores they frequent; they all need to be adjusted. This means there’s always a transition period. The less at home a candidate feels, the more likely they are to consider the move a failure, and either return to their previous location or move on. You can help contribute to their sense of belonging by providing a sort of onboarding package for your city. Put together a guidebook to your city. Not the usual touristy information you’d give to a visitor, but the insider tips from a resident. Local resources, local meetups, city information, tips for the best groceries, daycares, pet sitters, credit unions, and so on. Geoff Smith of VanderHouwen even recommends expanding the interview into a local tour to point out landmarks, local resources, and personal insight. This more casual style of an interview can give you a deeper insight into the personality of the candidate and their interests, as well as allow you to answer more specific questions that they may have. 7. Be Mindful of External Factors There’s more to a job relocation than just you and the candidate. Keep in mind that there are other factors at play, including entire families. Does your chosen candidate have a spouse they want to bring with them? Are they planning to start a family in their new location? Do they want to settle down, or is this a temporary transition along the way to something more solid? Bill Humbert says: “Avoid asking candidates to make a big decision. Keep asking for small decisions until their relocation is a logical next step. People resist making big decisions without enough information – and asking them to pull up roots and move is a very big decision because it potentially impacts a whole family. Do you tell your candidates in the first conversation that they must move to your town? If so, you are probably making relocation a more difficult issue.” One recommendation is to invite the spouse along for the interview, so they can get their eyes on their potential new home as well. Work to ensure that your candidate and anyone else involved in their decision-making process has adequate information to make the choice. 8. Consider a Delayed Relocation Relocation is the number one hurdle to successfully hiring out of state candidates, especially for highly skilled or high-level positions that require years of experience. The older a candidate is, the more likely they are to have established roots, including children they don’t want to uproot or a spouse’s income they can’t disregard. One possible solution to this problem, recommended by Joe Matar at Brazen , is an extended or delayed relocation. Allow your candidate to work partially or fully remote for a while before a deadline to come into the office. Whether you fly them into the office every other week, or you simply accommodate them working remotely most of the time while they work on the transition, these kinds of accommodations can go a long way. 9. Consider Professional Objections When relocating for a job out of state, candidates are necessarily more concerned about their future in a new area, especially if the cost of living is higher than they’re used to. If your company is owned by a private equity firm, they may be concerned that you’ll be sold out from under them and they’ll be left with nothing. If your job offer is appealing, they’ll look to the future, to see what options they have for growth, or if they’ll have to jump ship in a few years to move to another company. You can help alleviate some of these issues by offering a glimpse at your 10-year plan, to showcase how you anticipate growing and what potential room for career improvement they’ll have within your company. No guarantees, of course – nothing in life is guaranteed – but ensuring that you have a plan that they can find a place in can make them feel a lot better about making the move. Some issues can’t be handwaved away, of course. If your firm is owned by private equity, it’s simply the nature of the beast that they’ll have to consider the inherent uncertainty. It might be a sign that they aren’t a good fit, as well, since that’s just how your company operates. 10. Consider Remote Workers We mentioned this in part above, with a delayed remote start, but why not consider a fully remote position ? The modern workforce is better and better at taking advantage of technological tools to assist their remote work. Whether it’s teleconferencing, casual channels like Slack, or online productivity tools for collaboration, the experience level and utilization rate of these tools is growing every year. The pandemic in 2020 is also leading to millions of workers (and thousands of companies) realizing they can survive much more remote than they thought they could. While this may entail some shift in the way your company works, remote work is a good option for out of state candidates who aren’t able to relocate. It’s also a good option for companies located in a high cost of living area, who can’t offer competitive packages that entice a relocation. Remote work definitely has challenges of its own. That’s why we discussed the topic in greater detail in another post . Remote work is an excellent choice when it works, though it’s not always an option. Your IT network admin needs hands on the machines they oversee, for example. You may also need to offer remote work as an option for existing employees when you start hiring others remotely, to avoid jealousy and other issues. Hiring out of state candidates who are at the top of the talent pool is a great choice for many companies. Broader horizons and the power of the internet make it more than feasible; it’s almost essential. Your competitors are likely hiring from out of state, so you should get to it as well. Conclusion Hiring out of state candidates offers a plethora of advantages and opportunities for both your company and the potential employees. By embracing the diversity and skills brought by candidates from different regions, you can significantly enhance your team’s capabilities and perspectives. The key lies in navigating the unique challenges this process presents, from considering candidate motivations to offering relocation assistance and embracing remote work possibilities. As we’ve explored, each step in this journey requires careful consideration and a strategic approach to ensure a smooth transition for your new hires. Whether it’s understanding their motivations, being transparent about salary and costs, streamlining the interview process, or offering a comprehensive resource package, every action you take sets the stage for a successful and mutually beneficial relationship. Now, it’s your turn to take the leap forward. If you’re ready to expand your team’s horizons and hire top-tier out-of-state talent, we’re here to help. Let’s work together to find the perfect candidates who align with your company’s vision and goals.  Reach out to us for help hiring your new team members. It’s time to broaden your team’s landscape and usher in a new era of growth and success.

The modern workplace is a very different environment than it was even ten years ago, let alone in the 70s or 80s. Back then, job perks like retirement benefits, healthcare, and the near-guarantee of a long-term career were all it took to attract top candidates. These days, you need to offer more tangible job perks to attract some of the most highly-qualified applicants. What Aren’t Considered Benefits There are a few entries on every list like this that come up time and again, but for this post, we won’t consider them benefits for engineering careers. Most employers who are looking to hire engineers include baseline benefits such as: A competitive salary Healthcare benefits A retirement fund Since most competing companies are offering these same benefits for engineering positions, it’s tough to call them benefits. You aren’t standing out if you are offering the same healthcare and retirement plans, except in the sense that your candidates might ask themselves what else you aren’t offering if those are your primary selling points. So, what do you need to offer to make your position stand out? Here are some of the best job perks and benefits that engineers will find interesting. A Good Company Reputation Some engineers get into the field out of a cynical drive to make money. Most, though, have grander aspirations. They want to solve big problems, make the world a better place, or leave their mark on something fantastic. They want to work for a company that has a grand reputation. Moreover, your reputation needs to precede you. A Glassdoor survey interviewed several engineers, and one had this to say : “If your company isn’t attractive on its own because of its technology and engineering culture, I probably won’t be interested in working there. Hearing about your company from a recruiter – rather than because of something amazing you’ve built – simply cements that disinterest.” This can be a challenge for small companies, but it’s entirely possible to build such a reputation. It just means you need to spend some time building a strong employer brand . Work on Big Problems Engineers typically become engineers because they like working on large, challenging problems. Millennials and Gen Z candidates, in particular, don’t want to be a cog in another corporate machine; they want to feel like they’re tangibly contributing to solving large problems . Those problems may be problems in their local community, in their chosen industry, or globally. You don’t have to dedicate your firm to fighting world hunger, but a humanitarian or technological issue in your city or state can be plenty big enough. The problems your company is working to solve don’t necessarily need to be humanitarian by nature. Humanitarian problems can even be a detriment to companies who aren’t prepared for these challenges. Very few of your candidates will believe a family business from Nebraska can solve world hunger or eradicate a disease. Many more will be interested in simply solving complex technological problems. The Receptionist agrees and says: “Remember that the work doesn’t need to be humanitarian to be appealing. It just needs to be challenging, and solve a real problem for customers.” Talented engineers enjoy going to work in the morning to solve complex problems with elegant solutions. A Focus on Actual Work Engineers are a part of a subset of workers who need concentration to be effective. Some roles in a company require short bursts of actual work completing individual tasks, such as customer support. Engineers, architects, and those C-levels who guide the company from the top down tend to want more time “alone with their thoughts” so to speak. This is a combination of several factors, including workplace culture, the office environment, and the responsibilities of a role. Large problems require large solutions, and engineers like to focus when they work. Interruptions can be devastating to productivity. Dr. Gloria Mark, associate professor at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California Irvine, says this : “The good news is that most interrupted work is resumed on the same day – 81.9 percent – and it was resumed, on average, in 23 minutes and 15 seconds, which I guess is not that long. But the bad news is, when you’re interrupted, you don’t immediately go back to the task you were doing before you were interrupted. There are about two intervening tasks before you go back to your original task, so it takes more effort to reorient back to the original task.” A 23-minute delay might not seem like much in an 8-hour day, but when there are half a dozen meetings, a dozen phone calls, urgent emails, daily task alerts, and all manner of other interruptions throughout the week, it can add up to large amounts of time for your engineers to continually return to the important work they want to be doing. When your engineer comes to work today, what will they be expected to do? Are they spending time in their office, thinking about deep problems and working on ways to solve them? Or are they attending meetings with their coworkers and managers, constantly answering the phone to assists their coworkers and writing status reports that nobody is going to read? What can you offer, tangibly, that allows and promotes a focus on actual work? Consider benefits such as a closed office rather than a cubicle or open office design, a limit on weekly meetings and routine interruptions, and a dedicated focus on specific tasks. Your engineers should not be pulling double duty as system monitors, maintenance techs, or service people. Let them focus on their tasks. Flexible Hours and Work From Home Policies The year 2020 has taught thousands of companies the value of allowing their employees to work from home. The global pandemic has also demonstrated to millions of people that they’re capable of working from home – and taught some hard lessons to many businesses that aren’t. It takes a specific kind of person to work from home successfully, and yes, not all roles can be performed remotely. Most engineers, though, can often benefit from the flexibility of working from home. Data aggregated by Apollo Technical has this to say : “Several studies over the past few months show productivity while working remotely from home is better than working in an office setting. On average, those who work from home spend 10 minutes less a day being unproductive, work one more day a week, and are 47% more productive.” This ties back, in part, to the interruptions mentioned above. When every phone call, every manager sticking their head in the door, and every meeting costs a third of an hour of productivity (if not more), it’s easy to see how an environment without those things can be a much more productive one. Managing a remote workforce certainly has its challenges . Some employees either suffer from isolation, have a limited ability to set up a home office, or lack the technology to perform their tasks remotely. That’s why you need to do more than just allow for work from home; you need to support it. Provide technology, subsidize purchases for a home office (like a proper desk and chair), and avoid overbearing time tracking or monitoring software that discourages flexible work. Education and Student Loan Assistance The cost of an engineering degree from an average institution ranges from $11,000 to $55,000 per year for a degree that can take four years (for a Bachelor’s degree), six years (for Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees), or longer. That means many of your engineers are coming to you six figures in debt. A competitive salary helps, but often, an excellent benefit is loan assistance. Tuitions are increasing every year, and that financial burden is shaping the entire futures of an entire generation of students. An increasing number of companies are offering some form of loan assistance. From Inc, “About 8 percent of employers offer student loan repayment assistance in 2019, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. That’s up from 4 percent in 2018 and 3 percent in 2015.” Given the overall cost of an employee, adding on some level of loan assistance or repayment isn’t all that much. And, if it feels unfair to those who have paid off their loans or didn’t have any in the first place, you can offer tuition reimbursement for employees who want to continue education or training on their own time. Family Leave Many amongst the younger generations are hesitant to start families, primarily due to the uncertainty of their careers and the repeated global recessions causing financial instability. While a stable career helps, these people also want progressive policies in terms of family leave. In America, the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 specifies companies must offer 12 weeks of unpaid leave annually for mothers of newborns, but it only applies to companies with over 50 employees and is only for mothers. Paternity leave is often neglected. Even still, those numbers pale in comparison to other countries around the world, which offer longer leaves, equal leave time for mothers and fathers, and paid leave instead of unpaid leave . Offering paid leave (for a longer duration, and for both parents) is an incredible benefit. In fact, it’s one of the most coveted benefits of all . Parents want to spend time with their children as they grow and develop. Allowing your engineers paid leave, plus flexible hours and work from home opportunities, encourages both company loyalty and a healthy family. Customized Benefits Perhaps one of the biggest benefits you can offer your engineers is flexibility. Some of your candidates might not want to work from home. Some of them don’t need a transportation stipend, or family leave, or a paid gym membership. The list of benefits you have to offer might not, in reality, be all that beneficial to them. In these instances, a highly qualified candidate might not see your benefits as benefits, so you need the flexibility to offer them what they want. Maybe they want the ability to take the occasional sabbatical. Maybe they want life insurance. Maybe they want stipends to cover transportation and daily chores. Maybe they want mental health support, or perhaps they want stock options in the company. Some employees prefer to work while they travel once a year. The list of potential benefits is huge and varied. No one company can offer all of them to everyone, but you can offer what an individual wants to that individual. Offering the ability to negotiate a customized benefits package for each new employee can be very attractive. New engineers with specific desires might not be able to find what they want out of most companies, but your flexibility can attract them to you. The only caveat here is to ensure that existing employees can negotiate their benefits as their own needs and desires change. A new hire with a new benefit can make other employees jealous, and it can cause issues within the workplace, as well as job dissatisfaction. Never adopt the position of “you didn’t negotiate for it, so you can’t have it.” Always be open to adjusting benefits packages to the changing needs of your employees. Otherwise, they’re going to be more likely to jump ship for a company that better fits their needs. Hire with Intent to Train A common problem in the modern job market is the job listing with too many requirements and too little compensation. Employers want to hire extremely talented and educated candidates for a pittance , and an increasing number of candidates are no longer going to accept that kind of treatment. These days, it’s important to remember that a candidate doesn’t need to be perfect. Someone who meets 80% of your requirements can easily be trained to meet the rest. Pare down what is truly required, and count on your employees to grow into their positions. Overall, the list of benefits you can offer to your engineers is large and varied. Everyone has different needs and desires, so offering a generous benefits package – or a customizable package – is the best option. Beyond that, though, always remember that your engineers want to feel part of something bigger. They want to work on complex problems and solve issues with their communities, industries, or the world at large. Facilitate that desire to fuel their passion and get the most out of the best engineers.

We’ve written a lot about how to hire the perfect candidate for any given role in your company. A lot of that process involves starting with a large pool, narrowing it down through progressively steeper requirements, and then finally arriving at your chosen candidate. What happens to those who make it most of the way through the process, but ultimately don’t get the job? You have to reject them, but you have to do it the right way.  I wrote this blog post to answer, “what is the best way to politely reject a job candidate?” So let’s first cover how you should NOT reject a candidate.  What Happens When You Reject a Candidate Incorrectly Before we get into how to politely and tactfully reject a candidate, let’s talk about how the process can go wrong. One of the worst things you can do is simply ghost the candidate. Cutting them from your roster, not contacting them to tell them they didn’t get the job, and ignoring all attempts at communication is a terrible way to do it. Another mistake many companies make is waiting too long before informing a candidate about their rejection. Many people who are applying to these positions are trying to find one quickly, which is difficult to see as the company in charge of reviewing candidates. To the candidates, whether or not they get the job can be the foundation of major decisions moving forward. The longer you leave them hanging, the worse they’ll feel about it. Many companies also make the mistake of beating around the bush. Candidates want a firm answer – something to the point so that they can move on to the next phase of their job hunt. It’s fine to explain why they didn’t get the job, but if your rejection letter is too lengthy, you could be wasting your time that is better spent elsewhere (not to mention the candidate’s time). Why do you want to avoid these mistakes? Several reasons. First, the candidate you choose might not work out. If you need to go back to the drawing board, the natural first place to look for their replacement is the list of candidates who almost made it the first time around. If you leave those candidates on bad terms, they’re less likely to want to work for you after all, and you’ll have to dig even deeper, or worse, start the hiring process over again. There’s also the possibility that another role will open up, and a candidate who made it to the last rounds of interviews is a great choice to fill that role. If you cut communications or otherwise burn that bridge, that candidate will be less interested in working with you. Again, you’ll have to go back to the start of the process or settle for a less qualified candidate. June Javelosa, from HireRabbit , also recommends soliciting feedback from rejected candidates. “Candidates, even the rejected ones, can give you a lot of feedback about your hiring process. They can tell you which areas they found difficulty in and how you can improve on those. Asking for feedback gives the impression that you still value their opinion even if you’re not hiring them. The impression he or she takes away may affect other potential candidates for your jobs. Candidates do talk and often, like birds, flock together to pursue an employer of choice.” According to Kelly Services 95% of candidates are more likely to apply again if they had a positive candidate experience the first time. 97% of candidates who had a positive experience would refer others to apply. 88% of candidates with a positive experience would increase their purchase with the company. 55% of candidates with a positive experience would tell their social networks about that positive experience. As you have probably already figured out, it feels bad to be the one to reject a candidate. Doing the right way minimizes hard feelings and makes it easier for everyone involved. Tips for Politely Rejecting a Candidate When it comes time to reject a candidate, you have to decide how you’re going to do it. Establishing a process for rejections allows you to minimize the emotional impact of the rejection, leverage it into possible future value, and keep a relationship with a candidate alive. First, you need to pick a method of communication. Different channels have different pros and cons when it comes to rejecting a candidate. Email is good for your early filtering. Most applicant tracking systems have either their in-house templates for rejection emails or the ability to create one. It’s easy enough to find email templates to base yours on. On the other hand, an email can feel impersonal or cold and can be poor at incentivizing continued communication with the candidate. Phone calls. A phone call is a more personal means of delivering a rejection, and it allows your hiring manager to leverage their charisma and tone of voice to portray a considerate and thoughtful rejection. It also allows you to follow up with additional recommendations, opportunities, or offers, if you have them on hand. Remember, though, that there’s still some distance between a phone call, and it can be more stressful for your hiring manager, especially if they have to call dozens of candidates in a row. Video messaging. Sending a customized video is a sort of a cross between an email and a phone call. You can leverage tone of voice, as well as visual presentation, to soften the blow of the rejection via video. It’s not real-time, so your hiring manager doesn’t need to worry about answering questions immediately. You can still offer additional opportunities through video as well. On the other hand, video can be complicated to produce if you don’t have a process already established for it. In-person meetings. An in-person meeting to reject a candidate is very rare and can be dangerous because an in-person meeting often means a meeting to sign paperwork for a hire. It can augment the emotional distress of a candidate to find they came into the office only to be rejected. This is only a viable option for very high-power roles, or for cases where you have an immediate secondary offer you’re willing to extend. Once you have your communications channel pinned down, you have to work out what to write or say. We have some tips for that as well. Personalize your message. At the very least, when writing a rejection email, personalize the name and pronouns of the recipient in the template. In general, the deeper into the hiring process a candidate makes, the more personalized their rejection should be. So how can you personalize such a rejection? Mention something they did well or a reason they were in consideration as long as they were. Offer a piece of advice they can use in future interviews. Consider linking them up with another recruiter who can get them elsewhere. Candidates will remember the results more than the communication, so leaving them with some level of value will help maintain a positive impression of your overall brand. Make sure to avoid anything that can be construed as discriminatory. Susan at The Balance Careers says: “Make sure the applicant cannot misconstrue the words you use or find evidence of unlawful discrimination. For example, you may be tempted to tell the applicant that you have decided that you have candidates who are more qualified for the job. The candidate could well ask you to detail the differences. Why go there?” There are a lot of different ways a stray comment can be leveraged into a lawsuit in the right circumstances . Even if you have no outward bias and didn’t intend to be discriminatory, you can be found at fault, and a lawsuit can be devastating even if you win it. Give honest, useful feedback. As part of personalizing your rejection message, offer some precise feedback the candidate can use in future interviews, either with your company or with another. While you can’t speak for every company, you can point out things they did that left a bad impression. If they interviewed perfectly, but simply weren’t qualified for the job, you can give them guidance on perhaps applying for jobs they are more qualified for. Encourage Candidates to Apply to Other Positions If you liked a candidate enough that they made it to the final rounds of your interview and hiring process, but they didn’t quite make the cut, that means they had something that fit with your company. You can, then, encourage them to apply to other roles within your company. There are several ways to do this. You can refer them back to your careers page and point out a specific role they can apply for, and offer to forward their information to the manager in charge of that segment of hiring. You can simply offer a general “you’re a good culture fit and have the skills, but we don’t have room for you right now, but if you would like to apply for another role, we can then consider you for internal transitions later.” You can also just tell them they were close to being hired, and that if a similar role opens up, they will be at the top of the list if they apply. Just make sure that if you extend this kind of offer, you’re not doing it just to be nice. If they do apply later, and they don’t make it through a second time, it leaves a bad taste in their minds. They’ll lose faith in you personally, in your company in general, and perhaps even more. “If you know they will never fit in successfully at your organization, don’t go making a point of telling them to apply for other roles in the future. While it may make you feel better to say so right now, the reality of them applying again isn’t practical.” – Social Talent . Connect with a rejected candidate on LinkedIn. If the candidate is talented and promising and if you want to keep them as an active part of your candidate pool, you may want to link up with them on social media. LinkedIn is generally the most appropriate social network to use for professional networking. That, combined with your applicant tracking system keeping them active in your pool, allows you to call on them specifically if a job opens up in the future. Ask for feedback on your hiring process. As mentioned above, it’s usually a good idea to solicit feedback about your hiring process. You can do this in your rejection message, or you can send it as a follow-up email later. A simple survey or open feedback form for comments can help you streamline your process for the next time around. Deliver your rejection as soon as possible. Remember that the longer you leave a candidate hanging, the worse it will feel for them when they get that rejection. Yes, sometimes there are delays in decision-making, but you can explain those. Be respectful of the time and effort the candidate has put into their part of the hiring process, and free them up to pursue other leads as soon as possible. Following Up with Rejected Candidates In addition to keeping a candidate active in your ATS, and connecting with them on LinkedIn, you should consider other ways to keep your relationship with a talented candidate alive. Some ideas include: Invite the candidate to job fairs and other events you’re either participating in or hosting, to give them more opportunities they might not otherwise have known about. Watch what they post on social media and, where relevant, leave positive comments and encouragement. If you know a new job will be opening up, reach out early to see if they’re still interested in a role with your company, or if they’ve settled into a new job since. All in all, as long as you keep your connection alive, you should be able to tap that candidate as a future employee if they’re still available. At the very least, by showing interest in their progress and being supportive of their ongoing career, you can build a positive impression of your company. That impression can go a long way, both towards encouraging that candidate’s future and in building a positive reputation as a good company to apply to among other candidates. Conclusion  Concluding, the art of rejecting a job candidate is a delicate process that, if handled with care, can maintain a positive relationship and keep the door open for future opportunities. By avoiding ghosting, providing timely feedback, personalizing messages, and giving clear and helpful guidance, employers can ensure a respectful and constructive rejection experience.  Encouraging candidates to apply for other positions, connecting on LinkedIn, and requesting feedback further strengthen potential future connections. It’s about closing one chapter with grace, leaving the potential for future stories with your company untarnished and full of possibility. Do you need help building your team? Contact us today to learn how we can help you hire the teammates you need.

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