By Susan Hanold
As businesses start to shift toward a new normal, ensuring you have the right talent in place becomes even more critical. Don’t wait – now is the time to assess your current hiring strategy. Being informed today can help you be more prepared for tomorrow. This brings us to the recruiting landscape which is part of the talent ecosystem. And talent is at the forefront of all these questions. We’ll discuss 3 factors that can fine-tune your process and ensure you deliver a great candidate experience. Those 3 factors are: Process Assessment, Market Insights, and Candidate Experience.
Evaluate Processes
Review your process today and ensure your workflows are around the candidates – are you texting, providing video interviews, and delivering same-day feedback? Are you seeking a diverse pool of candidates? Are you providing a diverse panel of leaders to interview them? Are you using technology to leverage your processes? The talent market is going from a record low of unemployment to huge unemployment affecting talent availability.
Gone are the days when “ghosting” was the biggest concern when candidates weren’t showing up for screenings or interviews and now it is about shifting from in-person to virtual experiences. Businesses may be in a state of flux that impacts recruiting processes such as the offer process with background screening delays due to court closures and a need to create a process for rehires. With the need to narrow top candidates, this may be an appropriate time to utilize pre-screen assessment questions and a process to prioritize candidates. While many businesses have employees working from home, automating processes is becoming more common such as video interviewing, virtual onboarding and allowing candidates to easily apply via text message. Making your processes seamless to the candidate will impact your businesses brand reputation.
New processes are emerging during this time where recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates are sharing their common experience during these times. Recruiters will need to work this into their plans to allow time for it and plan time to listen. A consideration to train managers on soft skills such as empathy, diversity and virtual interviewing skills could be a differentiator.
Understanding the Talent Environment with Market Insights
Knowing where to find, how to engage, and what to present to top talent to capture their attention can be obtained with the right market insights.
To compete effectively in this environment, companies must embrace data and analytics to facilitate decision-making and focus on hiring the right talent. According to a Gartner study Benchmarking Against Your Peers Part 2, businesses expect to increase the percentage of employees who work remotely. Knowing that overall workplace flexibility is important to your talent pool can affect a business’s position on remote work policies. A disengaged employee is more harmful to a business with one that stays and doesn’t leave.
Depending on your talent pool, including salary information in your job description could alleviate the concern underrepresented talent may have that your business may not be committed to equity and fair pay. Recruiters should be partnering with their compensation leaders to the parameters around offering hazardous pay to essential workers. That’s why salary trends are a great set of data points to offer: in sharing these trends, you’re reinforcing your business’s commitment to keeping pace with them.
Understanding the current talent environment with market insights can directly impact your candidate experience.
Candidate Experience
When it comes to recruitment, even the little things matter. How and where are you connecting with candidates? What makes your business stand above the competition? Take steps to effectively communicate, share your story, and compete in an employer’s market now.
What’s top of mind for candidates is will I be working in a safe environment. Can I trust what the hiring manager is telling me about the work environment, the onboarding steps and the ability to connect with co-workers while following the new COVID health and safety practices. The recruiting process can be stressful to candidates. Companies are addressing the health and safety of its employees and should be a consideration for recruiting steps. Candidates will remember how they are treated during these times.
Companies are going to have to learn to be more flexible with the unpredictability of schedules. The role of the recruiter and hiring managers will have to remember candidates may be working from home. Some companies have policies if a candidate misses an interview then they are automatically removed from the process.
Companies are looking for best practices to improve talent acquisition, improve the candidate experience, and adjust their processes to adapt to the current environment. These are very different work circumstances than what associates have experienced previously. Don’t be deterred by the state of the business market in the past few weeks – it is about looking ahead and having a plan in place to get back up to speed as quickly as possible.
Susan Hanold, Ph.D.
ADP, VP Strategic Advisory Services