Search Results

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

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

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

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

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.