Talent Acquisition Excellence July 2023

THE GIG IS UP: A RECRUITER’S GUIDE TO RISK REDUCTION

- Joy Henry, Head of Sterling’s Technology and Business Services group

On the Cover

Articles

10 What Hourly Job Seekers Want From High-Volume Hiring

Enhancing candidate experience and attracting top talent

- Matt Parkin, Business Development Lead, FindWRK

15 How To Lose A Candidate In 10 Days

Foolproof ways for employers to avoid getting dumped by the class of 2023

- Christy Spilka, Vice President, Global Head of Talent Acquisition, iCIMS

The Gig Is Up: A Recruiter’s Guide To Risk Reduction

Overcoming the challenges of hiring and onboarding gig workers and contingent employees

- Joy Henry, Head of Sterling’s Technology and Business Services group

49 The ‘Zero Visibility’ Problem In Global Recruitment

Gaining visibility into global HR and talent acquisition

- Lenna Thompson, Head of Client Services, RAMP.Global

The State of High-volume and Hourly Hiring 2023

Essential Strategies for Essential Workers

High-Volume Hiring Is Here To Stay. Here’s How You Can Do It Better

Learn how successful teams achieve their high-volume hiring goals and how you can reach yours too

- Doug Leonard, Co-Founder and CEO, Clovers

Improving Candidate Experience In High-Volume Hiring

7 essential steps for success

- Brett Farmiloe, Founder and CEO, Terkel.io

End Game: 5 Talent Acquisition Trends That Prove The Apocalypse Is Nigh

Learn how recruitment tech has fallen on its SaaS, leading to diminishing returns and increasing commoditization

- Jim Durbin, Managing Principal, Respondable

Top Picks 12 18 54 61

Grow Fast But Smart: How To Hire For A High-Growth Organization

Effective strategies to thrive in high-growth mode while hiring top talent

- Hari Kolam, Co-Founder and CEO, Findem

Editorial Purpose

Our mission is to promote personal and professional development based on constructive values, sound ethics, and timeless principles.

Excellence Publications

Debbie McGrath CEO, HR.com - Publisher

Dawn Jeffers VP, Sales

Sue Kelley Director (Product, Marketing, and Research)

Babitha Balakrishnan and Deepa Damodaran Excellence Publications Managers and Editors

Talent Acquisition Excellence Team

Matt Charney Editor-in-Chief

Deepa Damodaran Editor

Nataraj Ramesh Design and Layout (Digital Magazine)

Vibha Kini Magazine (Online Version)

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Matt Charney Editor-in-Chief, Talent Acquisition Excellence

High Volume and Hourly Hiring in the Post-Pandemic World

Forall the work-related changes wrought overnight at the onset of the Pandemic, beginning on that fateful day when we left our offices (mostly) for the last time, winding up our final Zoom free meetings and chocking back a coda of crappy communal coffee (ugh), one still stands out as perhaps the most underrated- and maybe, the most profound.

Virtual work was always a thing, at least at companies enlightened enough to understand that lower capital costs, a global talent pool and (at the time) a hell of a competitive culture differentiator.

Similarly, Zoom instantly became a verb, but maybe only because magically, the need to Xerox anything ended more or less overnight, and also, because the virtual meeting market was already so entrenched even Microsoft had time to roll out a copycat catch-up play.

The most profound change instead came from us finally defining that thing that we all thought about but never really said. But somehow, in the middle of the discourse about the new virtual working order was this recurring theme of “essential” and “non essential” workers. And for the first time, many of us were forced to realize that the knowledge economy is essentially non-essential (ergo, this post).

That the executive and professional positions we sourced and recruited for in the fierce competition for the finite pool of talent, no quotation marks needed, were not actually a business imperative but instead, someone dispensable to how business gets done, even when it’s anything but.

Essential workers, unlike, say, management consultants or content marketers, are the overwhelming majority of active workforce participants (before and after COVID), and are the foundation upon which the bottom line and the global economy are built. Without essential workers, fires would go unchecked, crimes unsolved, and patients untreated.

Goods couldn’t move from warehouses to big rigs to your front door without them, nor could you go to a store instead. You could no longer buy groceries or go out to eat.

The list of essentials that essential workers provide us is essentially infinite, which is why, while we were trying sourdough starters, ordering DoorDash and reveling in an unending yet mandatory period of working exclusively in sweats, those essential workers were, you know, essentially working. Non-essential workers? Like we ever had a real job other than occupying our little niche of late-stage capitalism.

Non-essential workers, of course, bristled at the suggestion that the delivery guy, the bus driver, or the gas station attendant were somehow more important, more essential, to the continuity of the economy than they were.

Early career professionals, inculcated with the idea that they were somehow a coveted and irreplaceable human capital commodity, were shocked when the realization finally hit that no one really needs a social media marketing coordinator or a talent sourcer when the end is nigh. They will, however, need mechanics, waiters and fulfillment specialists, at least until the moment of Rapture.

The fact is that workers have always been bifurcated into the essential and non essential, between those that do and those who “manage” or “consult” or “recruit” or whatever their title infers they really do, which is often really little.

And in TA, we have long had a bias against essential workers, who we see as disposable and interchangeable cogs, and those random, high-paying roles that require a lot of high-touch hiring and even more process complexity.

The roles that we spend the most time and resources on, as a rule, are the most non-essential - and the most critical of headcount (and a majority of hires) are often seen as more process issues than real people imperatives. Anyone can recruit for positions whose only requirements are a pulse and the ability to lift 50 pounds, was (and is) seen as somehow less than, even though it’s never enough.

This divide, of course, is best understood by the more entrenched lexicon; essential workers are most commonly categorized as “hourly” or “high volume,” and hiring those workers remains relatively esoteric and marginal in the world of corporate TA, despite the lessons learned during the downturn.

Of course, some changes persist - namely, that after millions of hourly workers lost their jobs in the first few months of the

pandemic while the majority of white-collar workers enjoyed government-subsidized job and income protections, in addition to the thrill of working in slippers, a profound reversal has taken place.

As almost any recruiter can tell you, the hiring landscape for the types of reqs that keep internal TA teams employed continue to lag in terms of recovery; layoffs of teams with thousands of highly paid, and once highly recruited workers dominate headlines, often directly above the more boring ones about historically low unemployment and unprecedented numbers of open jobs that remain infilled in their millions.

That’s because, as mixed as the TA outlook may be, the truth is that for high volume and hourly hiring, the demand has never been greater - and meeting that demand has never been more, well, essential.

That’s why I’m so excited about this month’s issue of Talent Acquisition Excellence. It’s all about the current state, and future direction, of high volume and hourly hiring - from unveiling the findings of our latest annual HR.com high volume state of the industry report to insights and analysis from some of the experts and leaders influencing how high volume hiring happens today - and shaping what the future of high volume recruitment looks like tomorrow, too.

The answer is, in short, that the future of recruiting and the future of high volume are the same. Because TA goes where the jobs are - and for the foreseeable future, those jobs, and ours, are on the front lines, not in the back office. Which is why this issue - both the magazine and the high concept - is so important.

You could even say they’re “essential.”

Happy hunting.

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This monthly interactive learning experience captures key metrics, actionable items and keeps you focused on developing yourself and corporation as top leaders in the Talent Acquisition space.

Talent Acquisition Virtual Events

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Join almost 55,000 HR.com members with a similar interest and focus on staffing and recruiting topics with one of the four staffing related online communities: Contract Workforce and Talent Exchanges, Online Staffing and Sourcing, Recruitment Process Outsourcing, or Quality of Hire. Share content and download research reports, blogs, and articles, network, and “follow” peers and have them “follow” you in a social network platform to communicate regularly and stay on top of the latest updates. This well established Community is an invaluable resource for any HR professional or manager.

The Gig Is Up: A Recruiter’s Guide To Risk Reduction

Overcoming the challenges of hiring and onboarding gig workers and contingent employees

By Joy Henry, Sterling

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 36% of US workers could be classified as freelancers or independent workers and, at its current rate of expansion, more than half of the workforce will be part of the US gig economy by 2027. With the rise of the gig economy and contingent work opportunities plus more remote work options, workers across the world have been re-evaluating how, where, and when they want to work. Because there are more employment choices than ever before, organizations in all industries and regions have been facing a variety of hiring challenges and risks which need to be addressed differently than in the past.

In addition, as a high volume of candidates enter the gig and contingent workforce, gig platforms and companies seeking non-traditional talent are diligently looking for more

efficient ways to improve the onboarding process and reduce friction to meet their hiring goals – while maintaining trust and safety in the workplace.

Hiring and Onboarding Challenges in the Gig Economy

One way gig and contingent job seekers differ from full-time employees is their expectation of real-time onboarding; ideally, they want to begin working for an organization that same day. Because of today’s candidate mindset, employing this type of workforce to represent your brand relies heavily on a quick - yet customizedonboarding experience.

Candidate drop-off rates can be almost as high as 85%, according to our latest industry report, Hiring Reimagined. Most candidates who considered dropping out of the onboarding process thought the experience was too complicated,

including having issues with the background screening process, and too many touchpoints.

For employers, 60% report that they can’t find enough qualified candidates for the roles they need to fill, according to that same report which included responses from more than 350 HR professionals whose job includes onboarding gig workers and hiring contingent and freelance workers. The findings indicated that hiring this category of workers is more complicated than hiring traditional workers.

These perspectives should compel gig platforms and companies seeking non-traditional workers to streamline and accelerate the hiring and onboarding process. By doing so, they may be able to help avoid losing quality workers in the race for talent.

The Gig and Contingent Job Seeker Mindset

It may be tempting to think that pay is the main driver for gig workers, but our survey found that there are several factors that matter even more to job candidates seeking gig or contingent work. Safety and trust in the workplace, along with flexibility, rated highest – both ranked highly by 66% of the job seekers surveyed.

As an employer, you need to know that you have: trustworthy people representing your brand; your workers need to know they are safe as they work on behalf of your brand; and the end customer needs to know that they can trust the workers delivering your

services. Trust and safety teams looking to overcome onboarding challenges should make sure to align their hiring and onboarding processes to best meet the expectations of today and tomorrow’s job seekers.

A Modern Onboarding Process

Screening high volumes of contingent and gig workers can be more challenging than traditional processes because it usually has to be done at scale. In many cases, businesses are already deploying workforce platforms to manage contingent and gig workers; platforms which should also be leveraged for all aspects of hiring and onboarding. If so, it is imperative for companies to integrate with

a background screening partner that can enrich their platform’s candidate data to create a user-friendly, fast-to-hire model.

The best background screening partners today allow employers to set up customized workflows to reduce turnaround times. Even better, these workflows can be automated so that human touch is not always needed.

API (Application Programming Interface) integrations can add an additional layer of automation to advance candidates’ record information and communication between databases, minimizing the need for manual review while helping expedite the onboarding process and reducing candidate drop-off.

A mobile, responsive experience is a necessity due to the immediacy of the gig hiring process, as candidates are typically completing background checks via mobile devices. The process must be optimized for all mobile device applications so both candidates and gig companies can view results from the background screening and quickly proceed with the onboarding process. A robust candidate hub can save time and keep candidates engaged throughout the process via SMS notifications and alerts.

Gig Work’s Impact on the Future of Hiring

Gig work is driving the future of what background screening might look like across other industries in just five to ten years. The

efficiencies that are driven inside of the gig market are helping to develop what the future of background screening will look like for all companies. In this next evolution of hiring, it’s important to have the right strategies, technologies, and processes in place to streamline onboarding and improve hiring practices.

Sterling is not a law firm. This publication is for informational purposes only and nothing contained in it should be construed as legal advice. We expressly disclaim any warranty or responsibility for damages arising from this information. We encourage you to consult with legal counsel regarding your specific needs. We do not undertake any duty to update previously posted materials.

Joy Henry is the Head of Sterling’s Technology and Business Services group, where she holds responsibility for the P&L of the financial services, retail, gig, staffing, diligence, technology, media, entertainment, and hospitality practice areas of the business. Joy joined Sterling in 2013 and previously held the position of general manager of the financial and business services practice area. Prior to Sterling, Joy spent over a decade at Dow Jones/News Corp serving in various roles across the organization.

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What Hourly Job Seekers Want From High-Volume Hiring

Enhancing candidate experience and attracting top talent

By Matt Parkin, FindWRK

In the realm of hourly and high-volume hiring, employers often find themselves fixated on the quantity of applicants and the number of roles they must fill. Technological advancements have revolutionized the hiring process, introducing efficiency but sometimes sacrificing the essential human connection. To attract and retain top talent, it is crucial to recognize that not every hourly worker is the same and to understand their unique needs and frustrations.

Addressing Candidate Frustrations in Hourly Hiring

Our recent hourly workforce report highlights data-driven insights directly from job seekers. These insights can help address job seeker concerns and differentiate your employer brand. The top frustrations from candidates include a lack of communication from employers,

slow or complex application processes, and the redundant task of entering the same data repeatedly.

While slow processes may not seem like an issue, they are. The report found that 64% of hourly job seekers are looking for work because they are unemployed, and often take the first job offer they receive. This highlights the urgency employers need to move with to scoop up talent before the competition. Addressing these concerns is vital to building meaningful relationships and creating a positive candidate experience.

Learning Why Hourly Employees Come and Go

Job seekers consider various factors when choosing one job over another, and it’s crucial for employers to understand these motivators. Career growth opportunities, fair

compensation, and scheduling flexibility consistently rank among the top considerations for candidates in the hourly job market. By showcasing a clear path for advancement, offering competitive pay, and providing flexibility in scheduling, employers can stand out and attract the best-fit candidates.

Moreover, understanding why job seekers leave their roles is equally important. Management, compensation, and company culture play significant roles in their decisions to seek new opportunities. Creating an environment that fosters strong leadership, offers fair and attractive compensation packages, and cultivates a positive workplace culture filled with recognition can significantly impact employee retention in the hourly workforce. Job seekers assess management from the first interaction, so remember that first impressions matter.

Enhancing the Candidate Experience

Job seekers have provided valuable insights on how employers can enhance their candidate experience and streamline the job search process. Incorporating wages in job postings provides transparency and helps applicants make informed decisions. This was the top request from job seekers when asked how employers can improve their candidate experience. Simple gestures like sending a receipt of application and communicating clear next steps demonstrate respect and engagement with candidates. Additionally, concise job postings

and a fast and user-friendly application process are highly valued by candidates. Balancing compassion with technology is key when it comes to creating a successful candidate experience that will differentiate you as an employer of choice.

Moving Forward

While it’s easy to get caught up in vanity metrics like the applicant volume, it’s important to not forget what matters most when it comes to talent acquisition – the talent. Leverage technology to bring efficiencies to your hourly and high volume hiring, without sacrificing the human connection. By listening to job seekers and addressing their suggestions,

employers can transform their hiring process into a more inclusive, efficient, and rewarding experience for all involved.

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Matt Parkin is the Business Development Lead at FindWRK.

High-Volume Hiring Is Here To Stay. Here’s How You Can Do It Better.

Learn how successful teams achieve their high-volume hiring goals and how you can reach yours too

By Doug Leonard, Clovers

Talent acquisition teams that engage in high-volume and hourly hiring are used to getting a lot done fast. And with the state of high-volume hiring today, it doesn’t look like they’ll be slowing down any time soon.

New to high-volume and hourly hiring? Or looking to adjust your current approach? Keep reading because high-volume hiring is here to stay.

In this article, we’re digging into high-volume and hourly hiring. We’ll cover what it is, how successful teams manage it, and how you can up your game too.

Before we get started,

Let’s clarify a few things before we tackle the state of high-volume hiring today.

What’s High-volume Hiring?

High-volume hiring is getting a lot of people hired in a short amount of time. You’re looking for hourly workers or staff to fill gaps for a season or two.

How Is High-volume Hiring Different from Traditional Hiring?

When you’re looking to hire long-term or salaried employees, the process is more involved. First, a

candidate applies for a job. They get pulled into an ATS. They’ll wait to hear from a recruiter. A screening interview takes place, then more interviews, and sometimes even more. There are assessments, internal conversations, offers, counter-offers, then onboarding. Basically, it takes a lot of time. Usually weeks or months.

On the other hand, high-volume hiring can get done in just a few hours or days. A candidate applies, moves through a brief hiring process, and can be hired the same day. Candidates usually interact with automation or artificial intelligence (AI) to get through screening, assessments, or initial interview questions. Once hiring teams decide to hire an applicant, AI can pick back up with a condensed onboarding process. The process is standardized, streamlined, and scalable.

Who Does High-volume Hiring?

Companies looking to meet seasonal demands will do high-volume hiring. Organizations that see periods of rapid growth, are opening new locations, or are making up for turnover will also need to engage a high-volume hiring strategy.

Retail, hospitality, entertainment, trade, construction, and healthcare are industries that most often do high-volume and hourly hiring. Companies that hire gig workers or independent contractors might do high-volume hiring too.

What Are the Most Common Challenges of High-volume Hiring?

High-volume hiring risks losing the human touch. Consistent employer branding might suffer too.

Most commonly, recruiters need help with the large number of applications. They either don’t have enough qualified applicants or enough time to review each profile.

Candidate dropout and poor candidate experience are also issues that hiring teams face. Guiding a hiring process that’s both fast and candidate-friendly is a constant balancing act.

High-volume Hiring Today (and into the Future)

The State of High-Volume and Hourly Hiring 2023 report says that 89% of companies doing high-volume hiring expect to keep doing so for at least the next two years. Almost half of those organizations also plan to increase their high-volume hiring budgets.

If you’re someone engaged with high-volume hiring and you don’t already have a clear strategy, it’s time to start building one. This part of your recruiting pie is not going anywhere—it’s only growing larger.

How successful teams approach high-volume hiring

In the face of challenges, the most successful hiring teams have these three things in common: strategy, outsourced support, and trackable metrics.

They have a strategy

Per The State of High-Volume and Hourly Hiring 2022 report, teams who met their hiring goals were five times more likely to have a defined strategy. They have a standardized, scalable process and a clear “ideal candidate” profile.

They outsource

Successful high-volume hiring teams also outsource at least part of their recruitment process. They take advantage of job boards, staffing agencies, or recruitment organizations.

They track metrics

Effective high-volume hiring teams are four times more likely to have transparent metrics. They’re measuring time to hire, attrition rates, and quality of hire. And they regularly update stakeholders.

How You Can Do it Better

Are you in a place where you need to start doing high-volume hiring? Or do you want to tweak your current process? Here are a few ways to start improving today:

1. Get the right tech

Automation is your friend. Take time-consuming tasks and let the software support you as much as possible. Recruiting solutions can help you track open roles, screen potential candidates, quickly review applications, and automate candidate nurtures.

Incorporate chatbots. SHRM reports that 65% of candidates will drop out if conversational AI isn’t used to streamline the hiring process.

High-Volume Hiring Is Here To Stay. Here’s How You Can Do It Better.

High-Volume Hiring Is Here To Stay. Here’s How You Can Do It Better.

Make sure, too, that your hiring platform has mobile capabilities. For an efficient, positive experience, candidates need to be able to apply and onboard on their smartphones.

2. Consider outsourcing

Staffing agencies, temp agencies, or job boards like Indeed or Monster can help with high-volume recruitment and advertising.

Recruitment process outsourcing organizations (RPOs) like Cielo can also help deliver a seamless hiring experience. RPOs support all steps of the hiring process, from sourcing to onboarding.

3. Improve the candidate experience

Make it easy for candidates to navigate your hiring process. User-friendly hiring tools will make them less likely to drop out. On top of that, clearly define job titles and responsibilities. Be transparent about compensation.

When building a high-volume hiring strategy, know who your candidates are. Hourly workers, gig workers, and independent contractors will appreciate quick follow-up and seamless tech.

Consider learning more about Gen Z’s habits and preferences too. 1 in 5 Gen Z workers are hourly workers, which means they’ll make up a good portion of your applicants. And if you’re sourcing candidates from previously untapped talent pools, like formerly incarcerated workers, take some time to learn what they’ll need from your hiring process.

4. Prioritize inclusion

Even when hiring at scale, it’s still important to promote inclusive hiring. Know that rapid hiring is even more susceptible to bias than traditional hiring, so educate your hiring team on the importance of diversity and inclusion.

Make sure your job descriptions are free of exclusionary language. Blind resume reviews, skills assessments, and data-backed decision-making help combat bias too.

5. Track analytics

Use metrics to get a clear picture of your high-volume hiring process. Good data will help identify your strengths and weaknesses.

At a minimum, keep track of these data points: source of hire, conversion rates, diversity metrics, and sourcing effectiveness rates. Take what you know, optimize your hiring process, and grow.

What’s Next?

High-volume and hourly hiring is becoming more common and more important, so learn how to do it quickly, and do it well. Examine your current processes and see where you can adjust to become more successful.

Want to learn more? Check out LinkedIn’s Tactical Guide to High-Volume Hiring, listen to the High Volume Hiring Podcast for tips, news, and interviews, or download the HR Research Institute’s state of hourly and high-volume hiring infographic to share with others.

Doug Leonard is Co.Founder and CEO at Clovers. Doug is a trusted leader in the recruitment industry (and just a really great human) working toward shaping a more inclusive and human-first hiring process for both candidates and companies.

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How To Lose A Candidate In 10 Days

Foolproof ways for employers to avoid getting dumped by the class of 2023

By Christy Spilka, iCIMS

The job search is in full force for recent college graduates. They’ve worked hard for their degree –during a pandemic – and are looking to enter a professional relationship with your company.

In fact, iCIMS’ recent survey found more than a third (35%) are looking for a long-term career path and a place they can grow well into the future.

Don’t start shopping for rings just yet though. Just because they’re looking for a commitment doesn’t mean that getting these new graduates to fall in love with your company will be an easy feat. According to our Class of 2023 Report, this incoming crop of talent isn’t taking any chances after years of “unprecedented changes,” and they’re taking matters into their own hands with a new rulebook for their entry-level job search.

Just like in the movie “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” you’ll find that with a little bit of effort (or lack thereof), it’s easy to make even the most dedicated candidates run in the opposite direction. As your company opens the doors to the Class of 2023 and fills your entry-level openings, be sure to take a page from Kate Hudson’s book. Below are some ways you might be losing out on Gen Z talent in ten days or less, guaranteed (and steps you can take to avoid getting dumped):

Day 1: Leave Salary Ranges Out of Your Job Postings.

After a turbulent few years, entry-level talent literally can’t afford any more surprises. College seniors (43%) even admitted that they wouldn’t apply for a job if the salary range wasn’t included in the job posting. If you are looking to hire entry-level talent, it’s up to you to be transparent throughout the candidate experience when it comes to salary. This also means going beyond the baseline.

Salary shouldn’t be buried in a long-winded job description. Bring the salary front and center so it can’t be missed. Lack of transparency about salary is a dealbreaker for Gen Z, so check your postings to ensure the salary is easy to find.

Day 2: Keep Them in the Dark Throughout the Hiring Experience.

The interview process is infamous for being exhausting and anxiety-inducing for many candidates. However, expectations for the interview process for the Class of 2023 are pretty high, with two-thirds expecting the entire process, from application to offer, to take about only three weeks. Recruiters, on the other hand, know that this may be unrealistic. Keep your candidates engaged before they grow impatient. Send them regular updates throughout the process, even via text, so they know that their candidacy is still top of mind. The less you leave them in the dark during the process, the more likely they’ll be to stay in it to win it.

Breaking up is hard to do. Well, maybe not that hard.

Day 3: Use Outdated, Irrelevant Content to Promote Your Open Roles and Culture.

Gen Z is the first digitally native generation, so it makes sense that this generation would use social media to advance their careers. According to the report, half of Gen Z job seekers use social media apps like Tik Tok to learn about a company’s culture. No, you don’t need to learn the latest dance trend, but you can (and should) leverage this medium to give a better glimpse into what you have to offer. Companies like Uber create employee video testimonials to attract early career candidates, helping to peel back the corporate curtain and show graduates what working there is all about. Rather than long-winded job descriptions, candidates can

watch videos on your career site and get an employee perspective from real team members to learn more about your company and the role.

2023 might still seem a little high, it’s important to have transparent conversations upfront about salary expectations and salary ranges to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Day 5: Provide a Benefits Package They Can Refuse.

While Gen Z does expect a higher salary, the truth is that salary is not the end-all, be-all. Aside from this, recent graduates want an employer that will champion their quality of life holistically. This includes benefits for financial, physical and mental wellness. College students revealed the top benefits they are seeking are: Bonuses or overtime pay for working more hours than contracted (50%), 401(k)/401(k) matching (42%), financial advisory programs (34%) and student loan repayment programs (28%).

Day 4:

Offer a Non-competitive Salary. They might be fresh out of college, but that doesn’t mean the Class of 2023 won’t be looking for a competitive offer. Recent grads expect an average salary of nearly $66,500, over $8,000 more than employers expect to pay entry-level candidates. You may think this is an overreach, but the reality is that college grads have actually tempered their expectations as they prepare to enter a more turbulent economy. Last year, 2022 grads expected a starting salary of more than $70,000. While salary expectations for the Class of

Day 6: Drag Out the Interview Process.

Where do you draw the line in the number of interviews in a hiring process? According to Americans, the ideal number of interviews for a job is three. Anything more, and you might risk your candidate becoming frustrated with the process, and even possibly losing interest in moving forward. When interviewing your candidate, make the most of their time. Ensure that every interviewer has a purpose in the interview process for the role you’re filling. Also, try to consolidate interviews where you can, without overwhelming the candidate with too many people on the line. Respect their time, and they’ll respect yours.

Day 7: Demonstrate Your Commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Through Words, Not Actions.

This incoming class of talent is part of a generation that is composed 50% of people of color, and only two-thirds identify as exclusively heterosexual. As they search for their first employer, the Class of 2023 wants to work for a company as diverse as they are with a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. But this will require true action on your company’s part, not just promises. When evaluating a company’s commitment to DEI, 2023 college seniors are looking for: diversity showcased during the hiring/interview process (46%), diversity represented in employee pictures on your career site, social media pages, etc. (46%), employee-led groups aimed at fostering DEI (45%) and diversity among company leaders (43%).

Day 8: Expect a Seasoned Professional Right Out of College.

We’ve all seen that job opening before. You know, the one expecting six years of experience for an entry-level role? The reality is that internships alone aren’t cutting it for entry-level jobs anymore. In fact, almost 90% of HR pros said they require entry-level candidates to have some experience — with 26% expecting three or more years’ experience and 21% reporting that it can’t come from internships. While every role requires a

different level of experience, employers must evaluate what experience is truly necessary to succeed in the role. If the bar is set too high, you might risk out on top talent with an ability to grow their career with you.

Day 9: Deprioritize Mental Health.

Expectations around mental health support at work remain a consistent trend, with more than 40% of this year’s graduating class expecting their employer to support their mental health and participate in open conversations. Aside from managers having regular conversations about mental health with their team members, more than half (54%) of college seniors value flexible work hours as a top perk.

Day 10: Don’t Invest in Their Career Growth.

Gen Z has been through the ringer the last several years, with college experiences upended and internships canceled. Now, the one thing they are craving –and need – the most from their first job is stability. The majority (65%) of college seniors care about how long they stay with an employer, and more than a third (35%) are looking for a long-term career path and a place they can grow well into the future. Give the Class of 2023 a sense of stability by having regular, open conversations around career growth with them so they can see what a future with your organization could look like. This starts with the hiring process. Talk with candidates about career

mobility and how this role can help them shape their careers.

If you’ve reached day 10 and followed all of the steps, your Gen Z candidate should be long gone by now. But that’s not how the story ended for Matthew McConaughey, right?

In all seriousness, as easy as it is to have Gen Z running for the hills, it’s just as easy to take the necessary steps to attract this generation of candidates and win the race for entry-level talent. Avoid making these mistakes, and you’ll soon find that your relationship with Gen Z will be better than those in any movie.

Christy Spilka is the Vice President, Global Head of Talent Acquisition, at iCIMS. Spilka is responsible for leading the global talent acquisition strategy and team, ensuring that iCIMS has the right people on the right teams to achieve business success. Spilka also serves as the board president of the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP), continuing to partner with talent professionals around the globe to advance talent acquisition. With more than 20 years of experience, Spilka is a passionate and avid supporter of providing top-notch talent experiences.

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Improving Candidate Experience In High Volume Hiring

7 essential steps for success

By Brett Farmiloe, Terkel.io

To help you enhance the candidate experience during high-volume hiring, we gathered insights from HR professionals and business leaders. From utilizing holistic ATS software to actively networking and nurturing relationships, here are the top seven strategies shared by these experts on optimizing the candidate experience and its impact on hiring outcomes and employer brand.

● Utilize Holistic ATS Software

● Lead with Pay Transparency

● Leverage Automated Resume Screening

● Create Candidate Status Page

● Reach Out to Passive Candidates

● Implement Game-Based Aptitude Tests

● Actively Network and Nurture Relationships

Utilize Holistic ATS Software

As we expand our workforce to support our long-term growth plans, we focused on reinventing our hiring approach with the use of a holistic applicant tracking system (ATS) software to streamline our applicant sourcing, assessment, and screening.

By utilizing an all-inclusive applicant tracking software, our hiring managers could easily manage job postings, interview schedules, application status, and offer letters in one platform - cutting our average hiring process by half. While candidates are always kept up-to-date on the progress of their applications.

We were able to create a solid talent pipeline of potential candidates for future hiring. For example, we could instantly identify past candidates who were turned down in the past but are more suited for new roles and call them back to apply for these jobs.

As a result, we were able to ensure a smooth HR workflow, encourage better communication with candidates, and create a strong workforce amidst the post-pandemic situation.

Lead with Pay Transparency

For our team, optimizing candidate experience means leading with transparency in our recruiting. Pay transparency is key to this, and for any state in which we are recruiting (not just those that require it by law), we will provide an approved, defined compensation range and bonus structure at the beginning of our dialogue to ensure it meets the candidate’s expectations.

In high-volume recruiting, we need to be mindful of both the candidate’s and the hiring manager’s time. As such, we create a simple application process (no uploading of your resume only to have to manually enter the same information) and outline with the candidate the interview stages and which parties will be involved, while holding ourselves accountable to a service level to provide the candidate with status updates.

These efforts have improved the efficiency of our interviews dramatically, reduced candidate falloff, and improved our time-to-fill, while increasing our talent pipeline and candidate referrals.

Suki Bajaj, Managing Director, QuickHR

Rich Miller, Talent Acquisition Manager, U.S. LawShield®

Leverage Automated Resume Screening

As someone responsible for hiring in our organization, I can share that we optimize candidate experience during high-volume hiring by leveraging automated resume screening such as CVViZ.

In one particular recruitment drive where we had a high volume of applicants, we realized its importance as it allowed us to expedite the screening process and ensure that each candidate received timely feedback. With CVViZ, we could efficiently assess each candidate’s qualifications and relevance to the position, providing an unbiased shortlist of candidates.

This strategy drastically reduced our time-to-hire and enhanced the candidates’ overall experience, reflecting positively on our employer brand. It demonstrated our commitment to efficiency and consideration for candidates’ time, thereby enhancing our reputation as an employer of choice.

Create a Candidate Status Page

As an HR startup founder who is also the primary hiring manager, I needed a way to let the candidates know exactly where they are in the hiring cycle without making the experience clunky for both parties.

That is why we created the candidate status page—a page that is unique for each candidate that they can access anytime they want and check exactly where they are and what the next step of the hiring process is. This saved me a lot of time as I don’t have to provide status updates anymore, and the candidates can rest assured that they will be notified about the next stage, no matter what it is.

Haya Subhan, General Manager, First Aid at Work Course

Gordana Sretenovic, Co-founder, Workello

Reach Out to Passive Candidates

Proactively reaching out to passive candidates via text is a great way to improve the candidate experience. Candidates are more receptive when you reach out to them first, instead of making them smash the apply button hundreds of times on a job board.

My average candidate reply rate to book an interview was three hours. I texted candidates instead of emailing this time, with all replying within nine minutes. Fast forward four days later and five of the seven candidates interviewed were hired. This quick turnaround cut recruiting admin time by 50%, reduced time to hire by 30%, and helped strengthen the candidate experience and employer brand.

Actively Network and Nurture Relationships

When hiring for niche profiles where the talent pool is limited and the best performers are often not actively seeking job opportunities, we took a unique approach. We mapped out the entire talent universe within our target range and identified the top talent we wanted to attract.

We began by reaching out to these individuals on professional platforms like LinkedIn, establishing connections, and engaging in conversations to showcase the exciting developments within our company. We provided updates on our organization’s vision, invited them to consultation calls with our team members, and even arranged in-person meetings when possible.

By actively networking and nurturing relationships with these passive candidates, we were able to generate interest and convert their curiosity into a genuine desire to join our organization.

Matt Parkin, Business Development Lead, FindWRK

Sanya Nagpal, Head, Human Resources, Leena AI

Implement Game-Based Aptitude Tests

For high-volume graduate-level recruitment, we have historically relied on traditional aptitude tests when shortlisting candidates. However, we have recently switched to game-based aptitude tests instead.

Overall, the candidate experience has improved significantly, and we are seeing far fewer dropouts. Candidates also appear to be completing the assessments more quickly, often on the same day they receive them, rather than several days later.

When speaking with candidates, they express positive feedback about the experience, finding the games both unique and enjoyable. From an employer branding perspective, candidates suggest that the games give our company a more innovative feel, which they find particularly attractive.

I strongly recommend swapping traditional aptitude assessments for game-based tools whenever possible, especially for emerging talent recruitment, as these populations are likely to enjoy game-based assessments the most.

Brett Farmiloe is the Founder and CEO – and currently CHRO - of Terkel. io. Brett is a strategic human resource management (SHRM) Influencer and has also been a keynote speaker at several state SHRM conferences around the topic of employee engagement.

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Chloe Yarwood, HR Manager, Test Partnership

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Bridging

How

By Cobi Collins, Director, Talexes

Debunking the Top 5 Myths About International Hiring

By Talent

Acquisition Team,

G-P

Quicker than quick serve:

How McDonald’s cut hourly time to hire by 60% and created an experience candidates love.

By Josh Zywien, Chief Marketing Officer, Paradox

The HR Research Institute, powered by HR.com, the world’s largest social network for Human Resources professionals, is a key part of our mandate to inform and educate today’s HR professionals. Over the past three years, the HR Research Institute has produced more than 85 exclusive primary research and state of the industry reports, along with corresponding infographics in many cases, based on the surveys of thousands of HR professionals. Each research report highlights current HR trends, benchmarks, and industry best practices. HR Research Institute Reports and Infographics are available online, and always free, at www.hr.com/featuredresearch

The State of High-volume and Hourly Hiring 2023

Essential Strategies for Essential Workers

In early June 2023, recruiters found themselves in a paradoxical situation. The technology industry faces layoffs, while the hospitality and healthcare sectors suffer due to labor shortages. Rising unemployment discontent contrasts with robust job growth. Traditional recruiters are losing their jobs, yet high-volume recruitment is growing. This report highlights the paradoxes and contradictions in talent acquisition (TA) that is both fascinating and unsettling at the same time.

Despite 24,000 layoffs in employment services, the U.S. economy added a remarkable 339,000 jobs in May, creating a TA paradox. High-volume and hourly hiring exist in an alternate reality, where time-to-hire and average tenure are measured in hours or days. Competitive advantage is determined by factors such as hourly wages and benefits like healthcare and tuition subsidies. This hiring approach differs from salaried recruitment, where specialized skills are assumed to be crucial.

While recruiters of white-collar positions struggle to find work in a tight job market, those managing high-volume and hourly recruitment experience business prosperity. Hourly worker demand is historically steadier and less volatile than whitecollar recruiting, indicating a potential future for recruitment. The future of hiring might resemble the standardized, automated, scalable, and selfsustainable methods used in hiring hourly workers today.

Research indicates that this is an opportune time for high-volume hiring, particularly in retail, hospitality, and healthcare, as employer demand outpaces the shrinking hourly workforce. The report provides insights into the state of highvolume and hourly hiring based on a global survey of HR practitioners and hiring leaders. It explores the challenges faced when hiring hourly talent and uncovers opportunities in the evolving world of work.

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Survey conducted by: Sponsored by:

By leveraging the knowledge and expertise of this global cohort, the report aims to shed light on the actual state of high-volume and hourly hiring, addressing the underserved market compared to corporate TA. It presents an opportunity for reimagining and redefining how hiring functions, and TA, can thrive.

Given below are the key findings from the report:

Usage Rates of High-volume Hiring

Finding: The need for high-volume hiring isn’t going away any time soon

Of the organizations that are engaged in highvolume recruitment at present, in the past or are planning to do so in the future, the vast majority

(89%) plan to engage in high-volume recruitment over the next two years. Of these, more than 6 in 10 plan to rely on in-house resources and a quarter plan to outsource at least part of the task. Organizations looking to manage this process inhouse must have efficient and scalable processes to handle the large volume of applicants, resumes and interview schedules. This requires the right tools and strategies to be in place, backed by careful planning to make sure the right candidates are selected and hired efficiently.

Finding: Over two-fifths of organizations planning to engage in high-volume recruitment over the next two years expect an increase in the TA budget

We asked respondents who expect to engage in high-volume recruitment over the next two years if the process is supported by the organizational budget. In two-fifths of organizations, there is an expected increase in the TA budget, with about a tenth expecting a high increase (11%) and a third expecting a small increase (32%). About a third (34%) expect the budget to remain the same.

HR professionals striving to win top leadership buy-in to increase TA budget must focus on making a business case on how important recruiting is to the overall success of the organizations, how successful the recruitment strategy has been in the past few years, the volume of applicants needed, and the associated costs of leaving positions unfilled. This requires a comprehensive understanding of recruitment metrics and analytics to back the claims with numbers.

How do you expect your talent acquisition (TA) team's high-volume recruiting budget to change in the next two years compared to the current budget?

(select the one that best applies)

We do not specifically budget for high-volume recruiting

Editor’s Note: In the original data, 8% of respondents stated that they “Don’t know ” We removed those responses and recalculated, so this only shows percentages for those that indicated that they know how the budget is likely to change over the next two years.

One in ten organizations do not budget

Outsourcing High-volume Hiring

Finding: Almost half of organizations engaged in high-volume recruitment at present or past have outsourced some part of the recruitment to one or more other entities

To what degree do organizations outsource highvolume recruiting? We found that the number of

organizations that handle high-volume recruitment internally or outsource it to staffing or recruitment process outsourcing firms are almost split in half. Just over half (54%) of respondents say they never outsource high-volume recruitment and just under half (46%) say they outsource some part of highvolume recruitment sometimes (39%) or always (7%).

Finding: Organizations that outsource high-volume recruitment have various choices of partners

What kind of external agencies, services or partners do the organizations that outsource highvolume recruitment utilize? More than 6 in 10 use staffing agencies for high-volume recruitment. Half (53%) use job boards (e.g., Indeed), and two-fifths rely on temp agencies and recruitment process outsourcing organizations.

There are some key differences between these agencies and services. Staffing agencies often act as a finder—they source, pre-screen and introduce the candidate to the hiring managers. A recruitment process outsourcing organization (RPO), on the other hand, acts as a recruitment

expert to handle the complete or specific part of recruitment based on the company’s requirements. RPOs generally handle identifying, sourcing, screening, shortlisting, interviewing, and onboarding candidates for jobs.

Job boards offer organizations the ability to advertise jobs, but the hiring process is often handled by the organization.

What determines the choice of these partners and agencies? Common factors include the roles for which hiring needs to be done, the degree of involvement the organization wants in the recruitment process, and the budget available for high-volume recruitment.

What external agencies, services or par tners do you use for high-volume recruiting? (select all that apply)

When turning to external par tners, agencies for high-volume recruiting

Editor’s Note: In the original data, 4% of respondents stated that they “don’t know ” We removed those responses and recalculated, so this only shows percentages for those who answered the question.

The Effectiveness of High-volume Hiring

Finding: Just 23% strongly agree their organization is effective at high-volume recruitment

How effectively do organizations source and onboard candidates in the high-volume

recruitment process? That depends on how we interpret the data. On one hand, two-thirds of respondents either strongly agree or agree that their organization is effective at high-volume recruitment. On the other hand, 23% strongly agree with this assertion, indicating there’s considerable room for improvement in most organizations.

To learn more, we invite you to download and read the research report today:

Read the Research Report

Bridging the Leadership Gap

How to find leaders from within

Cobi Collins, Talexes

Preparing Your Management-level Workforce

The retirement of the baby boomer generation will leave companies searching for new leaders to fill the knowledge and experience gap. Leveraging HR resources, such as talent assessments, can help prepare your organization for this seismic shift.

Building a Stronger Future: Assessing Internal Talent to Identify Next-Gen Leaders

Employment Assessment

tools, particularly

those that match people to jobs, can help organizations identify and groom individuals, who possess the right skills, knowledge, and cultural fit required for success in management positions in their unique organization, thereby reducing the risks associated with external hires.

The success of any organization is highly dependent on its leadership. Effective leaders inspire, motivate, and guide their teams toward achieving shared goals. As organizations prepare for the retirement of their current leadership teams, they must identify and develop the next generation of leaders to ensure continued success. One of the best ways to achieve this is by assessing talent within the organization and using assessment tools to identify leadership candidates.

Assessing internal talent provides a wealth of benefits to organizations, including the ability to identify and groom individuals, who possess the right skills, knowledge, and cultural fit required for success in management positions. This approach helps organizations lower their spending on recruitment and onboarding costs, and reduce the risks associated with external hires.

The 2020 LinkedIn Global Talent Trends report found that 63% of talent acquisition professionals believe internal recruiting accelerates the hiring process, while 69% believe it speeds up new hire productivity.

Common benefits include reduced recruitment costs, improved retention, faster time-to-fill, higher productivity, and reduced training costs.

Fast-track Existing Talent to Leadership Roles with Assessment Insights

To identify the right talent within the organization,

it is essential to conduct assessments that measure core attributes. Talexes offers a range of assessments that can help organizations identify talent gaps and provide insight into individual strengths and development areas. These assessments can also be used to provide employees with feedback on their performance and identify areas for improvement.

Baby boomers are retiring, and younger workers are changing jobs.

This turnover in positions means upheaval of small businesses’ ownership and larger companies’ leaders. Planning ahead helps a company survive this turmoil—and possibly even thrive relative to their less-prepared competitors.

- Forbes, Succession Planning for the High Turnover Economy.

Through a combination of assessments, interviews, and performance reviews, organizations can identify individuals with the necessary skills and experience to succeed in management positions. Many organizations are surprised to learn about existing talent that can be fast-tracked into leadership roles. By gaining deep insights, you can quickly and easily develop existing talent.

Assessments provide insight into individual strengths and areas for growth, allowing organizations to create tailored plans that address skill gaps and identify needed resources. These plans may include training programs, mentorship, and coaching to help new leaders grow their skills and the necessary confidence for success. HR talent assessments provide an objective and reliable way to evaluate candidates’ potential and readiness for these positions.

Person-to-Job Fit Assessments Are Key to Preparing Employees for Leadership Positions

Once your organization has identified the right internal candidates for promotion, preparing them for success becomes the primary focus. Prepping future leaders requires a holistic approach that combines assessment, training, and mentorship.

Using assessments to uncover core leadership strengths, skills, and potential, create selfawareness, and build confidence among employees, allows your organization to create tailored development plans.

According to Leadership and Organization Development Journal, mentorship is a critical component of preparing future leaders (Punsiri K. and Liang N., 2022). Experienced managers can provide guidance, feedback, and support to employees to help them develop the skills and knowledge required for success in leadership roles. Upskilling is another critical component of preparing future leaders. Organizations can invest in training programs that provide employees with the skills-training and knowledge resources required to succeed in their roles.

The job matching technology from a modern employee assessment can help identify potential leaders, build confidence, understand their leadership style, and provide them with insights into how they may adapt their approach to meet the needs of their team. This knowledge can help improve relationships with team members, improve communication, and increase team performance. to effectively move executive priorities forward.

Ideal succession planning is a series of steps or phases of gradual change in control. A good plan will have waypoints in time where responsibilities shift from the old leader to the new leader.

- Kevin Strait, Anzen Legal Group

Expect Better Outcomes with Better Information

With minimal time and financial investment, midsized organizations can maintain a competitive edge. By investing in future leaders early on and from within, unique organizational culture is preserved, recruitment costs are reduced, and a smooth transition of leadership is ensured. Cognitive ability and personality are 13% more predictive of job performance than experience and education. If you’re not using assessments, you can’t be prepared for the future of work. We must be able to uncover hidden talents, know who can and will do the work today, and who can be trained for tomorrow. It is important to understand that people and circumstances are complex and adaptable, boxed-in labels don’t allow for all the potential within, and past performance is not a guarantee of future success. However, cognitive style or reasoning ability and core behavioral traits are successful predictive indicators. Only validated, and normed, multimeasure assessments provide the most accurate and predictive information for job performance success long-term.

Hope is not a plan (TED Magazine 2023). Don’t wait for an emergency, instead mind the gap today with Talexes Assessments to thrive into the future.

Collins is Master Workforce Strategist of Strategic Accounts Director at Talexes. Cobi has provided organizations with real-people strategies for more than 25 years. Enabling business owners and leaders to solve people problems for good by becoming talent magnets and destination employers at the top of their game. To amplify their business strategies and achieve their ultimate goals, she enables them to select, keep, and lead superstars better than their competitors.

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Cobi

Debunking the Top 5 Myths About International Hiring

Talent Acquisition Team, G-P

AG-P session at the recent Talent Summit uncovered an interesting revelation. During their interactive talk on expanding businesses through global hiring, Suzanne McVey and David O’Reilly asked their audience what was the first thing that came to mind when considering international hiring.

The answers revolved around concerns rather with words like “expensive,” “complicated,” “risky,” and “stressful” peppering the feedback. It is true, international hiring can be all of those above words –when companies take the traditional approach to hiring internationally.

For starters, incorporating and registering your business in a new country is complicated, expensive, and time-consuming as it comes with a long list of boxes to tick. In order to ensure compliance,

you will have to find a local payroll provider, accountants, lawyers, and HR advisors. Then, depending on which country you are expanding to, it can take up to six months — not to mention several thousands of dollars — to successfully set up your new entity. Luckily, there are alternative solutions that completely combat these headaches.

Over a decade ago, G-P created the Employer of Record (EOR) category to help companies expand and hire global teams in minutes, not months — risk-free. As we continue to build the most flexible and powerful, end-to-end global employment solution, we are constantly helping our customers overcome common misconceptions regarding international hiring.

With this in mind, let us take a closer look at the top five myths of global hiring.

Myth #1: Expanding Globally Consumes Too Much Time

Few companies have the time, resources, or bandwidth to navigate the choppy waters of international hiring. Taking the traditional route can be expensive and complex, damaging your in-house team’s time.

In fact, this realization led G-P CEO Nicole Sahin to invent the EOR industry in 2012. Coming from a background where expanding abroad meant anywhere up to and beyond six months, Sahin created an antidote to the time and cost-consuming problem. Thanks to G-P’s worldwide entities, Sahin’s vision of democratizing access to global jobs via the digital world enables companies to hire anyone, anywhere, within minutes. Now, building a global team is not a maybe but a must-have core strategy for every business.

Myth #2: There Is Too Much Risk Involved

Naturally, expanding internationally comes with inevitable risks. These come in many forms, such as international tax liabilities, rates and codes, along with new labor regulations.

However, a global employment solution like ours handles all this for you. G-P’s entities take on all aspects of compliance and manage back-office operations through our industry-leading technology and local HR experts. What this means for companies looking to expand beyond borders is that partnering with an Employer of Record is not risky.

In fact, it is actually a far less risky means to grow and expand your business.

Myth #3: The Process Is Far Too Expensive

Setting up an entity abroad is not only a timeconsuming venture but also an expensive one. It is essential to realize that the costs associated with establishing an entity go far beyond the initial setup. For example, companies will need a physical address to receive a tax ID in their target country.

Naturally, office space is expensive when considering rates, insurance, heating, lighting, rent, etc. Then, there are the additional expenses of equipping the office with desks, chairs, phones, and computers. And that is just related to office space. There are multiple other costs to consider like local taxes, government fees, benefits, visa expenses, etc.

In contrast, building an everywhere workforce through the power of remote work is a decentralized approach that mitigates costs and saves money.

Myth #4: All in All, it Is just Too Stressful to Manage

There is a lot to think about when you are expanding globally — employers need to stay up to date with international business requirements, employment laws, visa reforms, financial obligations, and exchange rates. This added responsibility can be a major hurdle for your company’s growth making the entire process feel like a second job on top of your actual day-to-day workload.

Global employment platforms are built to complement your operations no matter where they occur — ensuring none of the administrative tasks steal your focus

Global employment platforms are built to complement your operations no matter where they occur — ensuring none of the administrative tasks steal your focus.

Overall, working with a global employment platform reduces stress by saving you the hassle of:

● Setting up in-country subsidiaries and registering with numerous local tax authorities

● Opening in-country bank accounts

● Vetting and hiring local attorneys, finance coordinators, and payroll companies

● Designing international employee onboarding programs

Myth #5: Finding Skilled International Talent Is Difficult

Surprisingly, one of the hesitations holding companies back from hiring internationally is the fear that the quality of talent will not meet their standards. Of the myths discussed so far, this is the easiest to debunk. Tapping into a global talent pool grants companies access to diverse, experienced, and skilled candidates.

As more and more workers take advantage of the opportunities available through the global marketplace, hubs of top-tier talent across all industries are starting to emerge in every corner of the globe. We can help you connect with this rising wave of talent pools.

Part of our mission at G-P is to help companies hire the best talent by stepping outside of their local markets and exploring different regions to quickly identify their ideal candidate. Through GP Meridian Recruit™, for instance, we are working to help companies gain access to an unrivaled selection of

recruiting specialists to find talent based on their unique hiring requirements.

More than that, companies backboned by a global workforce will naturally enrich their culture. This has many positives; for example, a study by Deloitte indicates that inclusive companies are twice as likely to meet or exceed financial targets, three times more likely to be high performing, and eight times more likely to achieve better business outcomes. In other words, in the age of global remote work, having a truly diverse workforce benefits your organization and drives innovation.

The Everywhere Workforce Is Waiting for You

Remote work has democratized opportunity for workers worldwide, and creating an opportunity-centric workforce is no longer hamstrung by geography. Do not let the misconceptions of global hiring hold you back. Take advantage of this diverse global talent pool by partnering with G-P.

Our industry-leading, global employment solution reduces the friction and hassle of global expansion at every touch point. We provide everything you need to find, hire and manage, onboard and pay, and manage global employees and contractors – with just one login and one global partner.

To learn more about our #1 SaaS-based Global Employment Platform™, request a proposal today

How Compass Group Drives More Qualified Applicants from Their Job Advertising

Hiring at One of the World's Largest Companies

Compass Group is the largest contract food service company in the world. They employ and engage with more than 600,000 employees across industries like hospitality, healthcare, manufacturing, energy, and transportation in 44 countries. Their 17,000 current job openings are primarily hourly, frontline roles like line cooks, drivers, housekeepers, nursing aides, customer service, retail associates, and laborers.

To hit their high-volume recruiting goals, their talent acquisition team is responsible for driving a large pipeline of qualified talent that hiring managers can hire from. They are responsible for providing candidates across various job types, industries, and locations. Their relatively small team is also responsible for a large number of job openings per recruiter.

High-volume, Small Team, High-tech

Compass Group’s talent acquisition team wanted to increase their flow of qualified applicants and convert more hires from their job advertising spend. The team was shocked when they learned that on average 95% of the job seeker traffic from job advertising does not submit a job application.

They needed to drive more applicants and hires

from their job advertising, but how could they do it with a relatively small team and operating at their high-volume scale?

Fully Automated, Recurring and Highly Relevant Engagement

Compass Group VP of Talent Acquisition Shay Johnson implemented Dalia’s automated job remarketing to convert more job advertising traffic into qualified applicants and hires. It immediately engages visiting job seekers to capture their contact information and then remarkets relevant jobs via SMS and email.

Dalia is fully automated and sends tens of thousands of email and text message job alerts with Compass Group’s latest jobs every day. Engaging and converting this new group of highqualified, passive talent has transformed Compass Group’s hiring.

Fig 1 - Compass Group immediately engages job advertising traffic to capture job seekers' contact info for remarketing.

More High-quality Applicants at a Lower Cost

When Compass Group began to use Dalia to remarket their jobs they were able to increase applicant volume and quality while lowering costs. “Dalia has been a game changer for a business with our hiring scale,” says Shay.

Dalia became Compass Group’s #2 source of volume, second only to Indeed where they were investing most of their budget. “Dalia delivered a 21% increase in hires from all of our external sources,” says Shay.

Dalia also became Compass Group’s #1 source of applicant quality. That is because the job seekers who abandoned the job application process were much more likely to convert into hires than someone being engaged for the first time. “The candidates who apply through Dalia are 44% more

likely to be hired than those from our other highvolume sources,” says Shay.

These factors lowered Compass Group’s overall cost-per-hire. Their TA team has been able to drive higher quality applicants, which convert to hires at a much higher rate than standard job advertising.

About Dalia

Get more qualified applicants from your job advertising with automated job remarketing. Dalia immediately engages career site visitors and turns them into qualified applicants over time with scalable, highly relevant, and fully automated SMS & email remarketing. Dalia is a top source of qualified applicants, increases job advertising ROI, and lower cost-per-hire by 50%. Learn why Ryder, Shake Shack, BJC Healthcare, Compass Group, and PeopleReady rely on Dalia at www.dalia.co

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Fig 2: Dalia automatically sends hundreds of thousands of SMS job alerts per week on behalf of Compass Group.

Fig 3: Dalia also sends tens of thousands of emails with Compass Group's newest jobs to convert more applicants and hires.

Get more qualified applicants from your job advertising with remarketing

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"Dalia delivers qualified applicants who get hired, at a cost-per-hire that's 50% less than Indeed."

Chris Klassen Director of Talent Engagement

PeopleReady

Trusted by top hiring teams

Quicker than quick serve: How McDonald’s cut

hourly

time to hire by 60% and created an experience

candidates love.

OK, so picture this.

It’s Monday morning and you’re an hourly employee at a local restaurant working a shift you don’t love, with no opportunity to grow. You’re heading home from work and stop in at your local McDonald’s for dinner at 10 pm. You pull into the drive-thru and see a sign posted on the window advertising hourly management positions.

Usually, you’d ignore it. After all, applying to jobs is a headache. But this one’s different:

Ready for something new? Text HEYOLIVIA to 38000 to apply in minutes and start this week.

Intrigued, you pull out your phone and start a text conversation. You’re not redirected to some clunky career site. You don’t have to create a username or password.

You just reply to a series of simple prompts and questions from a friendly, conversational assistant named Olivia.

Intrigued, you pull out your phone and start a text conversation. You’re not redirected to some clunky career site. You don’t have to create a username or password.

You just reply to a series of simple prompts and questions from a friendly, conversational assistant named Olivia.

By the time you pickup your food from the drive-thru window a couple minutes later, you have a video interview automatically scheduled for tomorrow morning.

And by the next day, you have a job offer sent to your phone — all through the same text conversation that started your application. With one tap, you accept the job and you’re starting on Monday.

A vision for a simpler way to hire hourly.

This may sound like a pipe dream, but for the largest franchise in the world, it’s not. This is exactly what hourly recruiting has looked like at thousands of McDonald’s restaurants since the company launched McHire with Paradox in 2019.

As the decade turned, the conversational AI platform began boosting high-volume hiring for McDonald’s and its franchisees every year. And as Alexa Morse, McDonald’s director of workforce planning and talent acquisition, recently shared in a case study with The Josh Bersin Company, the results they’ve seen have been transformational.

“We’re ensuring candidates are constantly engaged rather than having to wait for a hiring manager to respond, or wait for an interview to get scheduled,” Morse told Bersin. “For hiring managers, it gives them hours back in the week to be able to focus on restaurant operations, employees, and customers.”

Exactly how big of an impact is conversational AI having for McDonald’s restaurants’ recruiting and hiring?

95% of candidates rate their experience positively — a massive improvement over candidate satisfaction scores with other hiring software.

Time-to-hire has been reduced by 60% — meaning McDonald’s is narrowing the candidate pool and extending offers faster than most other employers.

In other words, it’s the Holy Grail for day to day hourly hiring.

McHire is faster and easier for hiring managers who don’t often have field recruiting support, saving them hours every week with automation. And candidates love it — which is crucial in an industry where job applicants are also often a company’s customers.

Even in tough job markets, hourly hiring doesn’t

I love this story.

I love this story.

I still remember the frustration I felt 20 years ago applying to local restaurants on my college campus… and never hearing back. Even today, as I drive around my town and see “Now Hiring” signs everywhere, there are days it feels like we haven’t made much progress.

I still remember the frustration I felt 20 years ago applying to local restaurants on my college campus… and never hearing back. Even today, as I drive around my town and see “Now Hiring” signs everywhere, there are days it feels like we haven’t made much progress.

But we have.

But we have.

And McDonald’s is proving that real transformation — and a complete rethink of how hiring can and should be done — can deliver real, powerful results.

And McDonald’s is proving that real transformation — and a complete rethink of how hiring can and should be done — can deliver real, powerful results.

“Numerous industries are facing uncertainty with staffing, a situation that has been exacerbated in 2021 with rapid changes in the labor market,” the Bersin team writes in the case study. “However, McHire’s capabilities for speed and simplicity have helped McDonald’s restaurants hire faster and at higher volumes than ever before.”

“Numerous industries are facing uncertainty with staffing, a situation that has been exacerbated in 2021 with rapid changes in the labor market,” the Bersin team writes in the case study. “However, McHire’s capabilities for speed and simplicity have helped McDonald’s restaurants hire faster and at higher volumes than ever before.”

I’ve worked in HR technology for quite awhile and I’ve never seen an hourly hiring market as challenging as the one we’re in. And yet, despite all those challenges, there are ways to work around them — to create an advantage where none seem obvious.

I’ve worked in HR technology for quite awhile and I’ve never seen an hourly hiring market as challenging as the one we’re in. And yet, despite all those challenges, there are ways to work around them — to create an advantage where none seem obvious.

Josh Zywien, Chief Marketing Officer of Paradox, is responsible for driving the company’s brand, digital, and experiential marketing efforts, while also supporting sales enablement and product marketing. Josh is passionate about helping companies better communicate their story — who they are, what they believe, and how they help a particular market solve real, meaningful challenges.

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The ‘Zero Visibility’ Problem In Global Recruitment

Gaining visibility into global HR and talent acquisition

By Lenna Thompson, RAMP.Global

Organizations rely on regular communication, consistency and cohesion, but for global companies, this can be a major challenge.

With thousands of people in different regions across the globe all managing their own priorities, knowing how a particular department is running in the far reaches of Hong Kong or South Africa can almost seem irrelevant.

For the HR department especially, this is a big problem.

HR and talent acquisition (TA) teams need to have visibility over where they’re hiring, who they’re hiring, how much it’s costing them, what staffing agencies they’re working with and how the recruitment process is carried out across the globe.

This seems like a difficult ask when there’s likely entirely different onboarding processes, D&I strategies and upskilling programs in different regions. Even the way talent is brought on board will vary drastically within the same company.

But it’s not impossible to gain visibility and it’s crucial if companies wish to stand out as competitive employers in the war for talent.

The Zero Visibility Problem

Most global HR and TA teams suffer from the ‘zero visibility’ problem; they have next to no oversight of how teams are managed at locations across the world. This presents a number of risks relating to diversity and inclusion practices:

Regulation

D&I strategies and ESG regulations are really ramping up. How can global organizations ensure they’re meeting all the regulatory requirements without visibility of the hiring process and without knowledge of diversity and inclusion protocols employed by the staffing agencies they hire?

Litigation

The number of legal cases is growing when it comes to poor recruitment practices. If global organizations face the zero visibility problem over who they hire, they may be exposing themselves to litigious risk as employees demand fairer practices.

Brand reputation

Finally, a major problem with poor recruitment practices is being seen as a bad employer. In such a competitive job market, brand reputation is so important. Without visibility, brands might be exposed to poor employer reputation in a number of markets, and the media may get a hold of that information first.

The ‘Zero Visibility’ Problem In Global Recruitment

Analysis of Quality and Quantity

The HR and TA teams – like all departments – are often judged by numbers. Whether we like it or not, cost, locations, employee ratios, gender pay gap etc are all very important figures that the HR team will need to present to the board.

Accuracy is key. Gaining visibility of that data at the touch of a button is essential.

Additionally, as you would expect, a huge part of HR does not involve numbers. Interviews, engagement, candidate and supplier experience, employer brand, company culture, just to name a few, all fall under this bracket, and are much harder to understand on a global level without visibility and communication.

Often, HR teams fall in the data camp – everything must be quantified – or the qualitative camp – HR is about people, not numbers. The reality is that both aspects are important: one for communicating to the wider business the success of the department, and the other for the actual success of HR and recruitment.

Crucially, how can businesses reduce the risks they’re exposed to from zero visibility and how can HR teams improve both the qualitative and quantitative sides of their roles?

Step one: Data

It may come as no surprise that data is essential here. It’s revolutionizing other departments, but HR and recruitment are not utilizing it to its full advantage. You can’t identify issues, streamline strategies or create a cohesive report for the wider business without data. Fortunately, there are now tools for HR leaders that will put all of the data from global operations into one simple platform. By aggregating global data, HR and TA teams can have complete visibility over staffing agencies, their costs, workforce planning and so on.

Having visibility over data is the first step but then, leaders need to focus on the less tangible deliverables of HR and recruitment.

Step two: Communication

The second step requires a little more work, but is made ten times easier with a complete data overview.

Now you’ve gained visibility, you can see where issues need fixing and what regional areas need to be re-evaluated or realigned to the global strategy. This is done through clear communication across all channels and requires involvement from procurement.

When everyone is fully aligned to the global strategy and clear on who has what responsibility, HR, procurement and staffing agencies globally can jump into action.

Step three: Going beyond visibility

Not only does fixing the zero visibility problem fix other wider issues in HR and recruitment, but with greater visibility, the door of possibilities has been unlocked.

You know where you stand as a company, but you don’t know where you could be. Data can also help talent teams find the best staffing agencies in the perfect locations for their organization. For example, you might need data scientists. Who you hire depends on the time to hire, how much you want to spend, the quality of the hire and how many data scientists you need.

Instead of selecting a location to hire in based on office location, or even one that you’ve conducted a small amount of research into, technology now has the power to show you which location has the most affordable salaries and staffing agencies, the best data scientists, the quickest time to hire or the least amount of competition for roles.

The zero visibility problem doesn’t just present a threat to your global HR strategy – it holds you back from realizing the full potential of global recruitment operations too.

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End Game: 5 Talent Acquisition Trends That Prove The Apocalypse Is Nigh

Learn how recruitment tech has fallen on its SaaS, leading to diminishing returns and increasing commoditization

By Jim Durbin, Respondable

Part 1

5 TA Trends for the End of the World

Predictions are hard, because, you know, no one can see into the future, as much as all the “thought leaders” out there would try to convince you otherwise. Trends, however, are easy; this is why they have long been a mainstay of mediocre recruiting-related content because trends don’t require empirical evidence or even domain expertise.

Predictions are time bound; they either come true by a certain date, or they don’t. Trends, however, eventually show up because they’re simultaneously revisionist history and speculative fiction, and the past, as they say, is prologue. The only way to forecast the future is to look at the past - and because everything is cyclical, finding a trend is simply finding a narrative through line.

So, this is my rereading of history, as it were; this trend post is, I’ve got to warn you, a bit cynical,

perhaps a tad too dark and maybe, even a little depressing. But so too is this industry and this profession. And if you’ve been in this business for as long as I have, well, you’re going to become something of a cynic - which is one of the core competencies of great recruiting, I’m convinced.

While this is a trends post, I’ll start with a prediction: there’s a really good chance you’re not going to even finish reading this post, because, as I said, it’s not exactly light reading, and it’s almost 4,000 words, or 3,950 words longer than the average American’s attention span.

Editor’s note: Jim is right. This post is basically a friggin’ novel so we’re serializing it into two parts.

I have liberally sprinkled some jokes and pop culture references throughout to keep things interesting, but even that little bit of levity doesn’t make what I genuinely see as the impending trends shaping TA any less depressing.

The silver lining is, it’s not too late for us to change. The bad news is, we never do.

While masked in sarcasm, these are serious thoughts. If you’ve been following the Singularity cult for a while, you’ll recognize many of them. You’ll be surprised, and hopefully, a little scared.

Kind of like recruiting, really.

Trend #1: The Software Industry Has Reached Negative Returns

Software just isn’t worth it anymore. We’re not talking about the financials, which are following the typical boom and bust cycle of bubbles inflated by zero-interest money. We’re talking about implementation and customer service teams that don’t understand the difference between a client using their software and a client using their software to do their job.

Software in the last forty years has brought amazing productivity to the US workforce. From Excel to banking apps, the use of software has changed the way we do business and led to cheery slogans like, “Software is eating the world.”

Automation and seamless integration with the back end made us faster, automated dull processes, shrunk the time to create reports and pull data, and gave us insights that we could never have dreamed were possible.

And then, it didn’t. I’m not sure when I first noticed the problem. I’ve used software to run a small business at a price that made me competitive with larger firms in recruiting and marketing for the better part of twenty years. Almost every time I picked up a software, my work product improved. I even trained others in using platforms and apps, reaching over 10,000 people who have paid me cash money to show them how to use Facebook, Google, Myspace, Twitter, LinkedIn and more.

The challenge is that with those 10,000 people, almost none of what I taught stayed with them. 60-90 minutes of live interaction resembled more

of a dancing monkey show than real learning. In contrast, when I was paid to sit with one person for a few hours a week over a period of months, their skills, confidence, and ability skyrocketed. They learned how to use software to do their job faster and better, which then gave them time to become an expert in all areas of their job. Software plus time and training made them superheroes.

But what of the others? What about the standard corporate spreadsheets and word processing software that has been in use my whole career? Is it better? I remember shifting from Google-backed corporate software to Outlook and finding myself lost trying to find the search bar. It was absurd. By definition, I am one of the most prolific software trainers in recruiting. How could I not find the search bar? Why is my screen so small? Am I just getting old?

No to all of those things. I would pivot from Outlook to far more complex software where I once again smoothly got to work. What happened? The constant new versions of software have so many features, you find yourself yearning for the simplicity of the early crypto wallets. If someone like me, who loves learning, testing, and serving as a case study for UI improvements doesn’t understand a new software, how is someone who is picking it up for the first time supposed to be successful?

The answer is they aren’t. When you run the analytics on any major software, from Salesforce to Marketo to LinkedIn Recruiter - you find a large portion of your licenses are either poorly used or not used at all. Think 50% never log in after training under used. Go check for yourself. Very few power users do the majority of the real work and many of them are mindlessly pounding away at the keys like rats in a cage getting a pellet.

Developers will tell you it’s not their fault. They surf to a menu, or pull up a hidden list of features, or show you how to do your job the way they built the software. They have an excuse every time something didn’t work. You did it wrong. That’ ’s not how we built it!

You could call this bad requirements gathering, but the challenge is deeper. Software is asked to do too many complex tasks because there is a belief that you can track the data. Have you ever heard, “ If it’s not in the system, it didn’t happen.” That’s in 1984. I think it’s in the back of the book.

Humans can’t easily add their daily tasks in a way that generates the promised benefits. If they did, data scientists wouldn’t spend 90% of their time cleaning up spreadsheets, and people like me wouldn’t say, “it’s directionally accurate, but l wouldn’t say it’s right?”

And that is the demarcation line where software returns go negative.

Human beings don’t have the time and patience to learn every new bit of software and every change that occurs. Assuming the software never breaks or malfunctions, humans still can’t figure out how to use the software correctly in the time they have before going back to their jobs.

And we all know it. We just don’t say it, because those who buy software don’t want to hear that their multi-million dollar purchase was a waste.

There is no way to slow down. No company can afford to take a month to six weeks to train every user on every software. They need productivity gains and they need it now! We bought new software, and the beatings will continue until my dashboard is green and I can report on greater efficiency in my department!

You’ve all heard those commands. And you’ve also seen every employee using software complain that it’s dogshit, with the exception of the one person who knows just enough to be seen as the expert.

What sane CEO would buy into this paradigm? Other than all of them, who have worked through the golden age of software and assume that 2-10X productivity is baked in, just the way it was when you switched from pencils in a ledger to a spreadsheet or when you no longer had to buy your sales reps the new Thomas

Guide to drive around Los Angeles because they have maps on their phones.

The SaaS industry has been a source of growth and media attention for over two decades The beauty of subscription software is the cost of additional licenses is near zero, allowing software companies to scale quickly and profitably.

That time is coming to an end, as VCs pull back and the warnings of a SaaS winter are broadcast in Slack and discord channels across the country. Is anyone concerned? Is there anyone in the trenches who bemoans the lack of software innovation from yet another startup?

No. Software is now considered yet another thing that just doesn’t work. And as we all know, you can’t automate something correctly unless you have perfected it. But let’s not attack the software companies where ping pong tables are considered culture. Let’s put the blame where it belongs, on human Agency,

Trend 2: The Death of Competence in Humans

I have some competent friends. They can sail a boat, butcher a hog, con a ship, splint a leg, give orders, take orders, work on cars, cook a meal, comfort the afflicted, and I’ve probably stolen enough from Heinlein for you to get the point.

The ability to get through the basics of life and do all the things that every human civilization has done since the dawn of time is now at risk. We don’t have enough competent people.

Heinlein sniffed at specialization - he wrote that it was for insects. In a complex word where every job is being dissected to determine how much automation could be applied to your role, we have trained entire generations to be good at only one thing. It’s cheaper that way. You hire people for expert ability, teach them to stay in their lane, and never give them the opportunity to even ask what their impact is besides hitting a KPI that somehow aggregates across the company to show you really are going to do well in your Q3 report.

When I interview people, I have the hardest time getting them to explain why they perform tasks a certain way. Many say, “this is how we do it,” which if you trace it back, has so many vestigial tails that Jared Diamond could write a whole new book your college-aged son can quote back to you incorrectly. My favorite is the hiring manager who always threw away the first resume in a printed stack of resumes because they assumed it was bad luck. In reality, it was from watching their trainer throw away the fax cover page because that was once a thing!

These behavioral remnants are everywhere. Human beings are doing things in corporations that they don’t understand because they were taught it was important and then those things are automated. It hurts my heart to see it.

This isn’t a new problem. I was once tasked with auditing an admin department that had grown from 3 to 10 people when the sales floor had grown from 20 to 50. I would sit with each person and assess their workload, then take over one report that they hated doing. I’d learn the report, take it over, distribute it to

the right people, and then, I’d stop. I’d stop delivering the report, and then wait for anyone to complain. No one ever did. In a short time, I took over 50% of all reporting and was “doing it.” Then for fun, I created a new report. Every executive demanded a copy, and it was very popular. It was a map of our sales reps with stars in each of their cities. I went with stars over bullseyes because our people were “stars.” I thought dollar signs were a bit too much.

These admins didn’t know why they were doing their jobs. No one ever told them, and they just did as they were instructed with no sense of whether it was important. The problem now? All of us are admins. Everyone needs the new TPS, in the new format, and although Office Space has entered cult status, we built a workforce who thinks completion of a task is what makes the company go. We have no clue how most of what we›re working on impacts the company. If we did, we’d rise up Braveheart style. I missed my dad’s funeral for work and three months after I leave, no one remembers the sacrifice. That has to hurt your heart a little.

It’s not that humans are dumb. Don’t let anyone dismiss half the population so easily. It reminds me of the stories of young boys struggling at math, who could calculate batting percentages in their heads on the fly while pretending that nasty Big League chew was spitting tobacco. It wasn’t a matter of competence or intelligence. It was a lack of caring.

Companies demand deterministic data to feed their analytics machines, but it’s very rare to take the time to use that data for anything but improving the reports. Do you know how many times I’ve seen people crow about more of something because it showed progress?

You do this long enough to a human, they become a machine. Then they’re replaced by a machine, only to find out that copying a dull human makes you a dull machine.

We have killed competence by demanding people act like machines, so we can gather data on them to replace them. Then it surprised Pikachu when the process fails catastrophically.

Let me show you something human. I’ll admit a fault so that I trust myself more.

I have a bad habit of accidentally insulting people. For example, I often write that Human Resources employees don’t understand data. The #1 response on the board, the survey says, is “I look at

spreadsheets all day!” Let me say that again. “I get data, I look at spreadsheets all day!”

You can’t see it, but your finance director is trying to hold back a laugh. It’s okay though. Their kid just taught them to use Magic Erase on their new Android phone and my notification alerts just told me your finance team proudly added photo-editing to their list of skills on LinkedIn. Finance may know data, but their fancy houses are just down the street from the glass quarry if you know what I mean.

Competence is one thing you cannot teach. It has to be earned. It takes time. It takes the right mindset and the right environment. And most important, it can be destroyed with mindless tasks and interruptions like notifications on your phone, laptop, and iPad that ring simultaneously because the new version released automatic syncing when not ENOUGH of you were manually doing it on your own.

Maybe it is the fault of the software. Or Canada. Let’s Blame Canada and stream some more videos while we work because pretty soon, the machines are going to go all Sorcerer’s Apprentice on your workflow.

Jim Durbin is the Managing Principal of Respondable, a recruitment consulting agency in Dallas. TX. With over 20 years of experience in improving talent acquisition, he›s worked in all four major categories of recruiting, pushing the boundaries of better hiring and better technology. He›s been known as the Indeed Whisperer, the Social Media Headhunter, and just a guy in the Stetson. His background includes digital and social marketing, programmatic advertising, headhunting, AI, media, and technology. He›s trained over 10,000 recruiters to be better sourcers, and currently is engaged in developing the next generation of recruitment marketers.

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Grow Fast But Smart: How To Hire For A High-Growth Organization

Effective strategies to thrive in high-growth mode while hiring top talent

By Hari Kolam, Findem

The pressures of successful hiring are intense enough, but everything becomes exceedingly more complicated and the stakes are higher when you are hiring for a business in high-growth mode.

When companies start scaling rapidly, more is on the line for talent acquisition and your hiring strategy has to scale accordingly.

Technology moves from a valuable tool to an utter necessity to keep pace and ensure you are not sacrificing quality as you face high-demand conditions. It’s also imperative to outline a plan and set some hiring patterns from the start, which can be adapted, as needed, as you start growing and scaling your hiring process.

Not all talent professionals have experienced the variables and disruption that come with hiring at rapid speed, but chances are they will at some point due to new funding, an M&A, a market surge or a staffing deficit.

There are a multitude of strategies that can be put into play to hire fast yet smart. These are three that can be put into practice quickly when preparing for that surge.

Build a Modern Talent Acquisition Ecosystem

Talent acquisition ecosystems are multi-channel, go-to-market strategies that enable organizations to identify, develop, nurture and retain top talent at scale. When executed well, they power the top of the talent funnel, making it possible to deliver continuous, well-balanced pipelines.

According to talent leader Brett Coin, former vice president of talent acquisition at Okta, talent acquisition ecosystems can be successful in shifting conventional recruiting practices from an individual process to a more holistic one. Back in the day, it used to be that recruiters would get a req, ferret out candidates, fill the position and get paid for that win, essentially being rewarded for “winning alone.” This approach is both highly inefficient and leaves little room for scale. The best recruiters end up keeping candidates to themselves and that ends up being a losing proposition for the hiring managers, the company and the candidates.

The talent acquisition ecosystem flourishes in a culture of recruiting that goes beyond the recruiting team. By involving and enabling partners, employees and even candidates to recruit, talent acquisition efforts scale beyond the results of a single person

or even a talent team and support the company’s fast-growth mode.

In a modern talent acquisition ecosystem, a variety of stakeholders, technologies and strategies work in cohesion to build at-the-ready talent pools that allow them to scale during boom times. Talent pools become extremely important to remain connected to qualified, diverse talent for times of high growth. Think of them as a parking lot for highly qualified talent that you would hire today, but for some reason, the timing doesn’t work.

The key to developing a talent acquisition ecosystem that enables you to quickly scale when in high-growth mode is to have a winning-as-a team culture where everyone works toward the common goal of making the best hires and bringing the highest value to the company. For example, according to Coin, the talent team starts by identifying roles that they’ve hired for over and over, which is approximately 70%. Recruiting teams agree to enter their qualified, ready-later candidates into a shared space to be nurtured for future needs.

Always recruiting and candidate nurturing are the keys to building a successful talent ecosystem. The most successful nurturing involves forming an emotional connection between the candidate and the company, so it needs to go beyond an email or two. Involving hiring managers, leaders and employees in the nurturing process can be a powerful way to foster talent pool engagement. When you have a warm bench of highly qualified and highly diverse talent at the ready, hiring for high growth becomes drastically easier.

Tap into Tech to Diversify Your Funnel

For companies building back after a hiring slowdown or experiencing skyrocketing growth, now is a good time to put processes and strategies in place to move the needle on diversity. When you’re hiring for just a handful of roles, it’s difficult to make a significant impact on diversity, but the opportunity grows when you’re hiring hundreds of new employees.

Reaching diversity goals starts with being intentional about ensuring you have high-quality, diverse candidates in your funnel to broaden the type of talent you are ultimately introducing into the company. Your entire funnel must be diverse, not just the individuals in it, to pre-empt any bias from creeping in.

From top to bottom, technology and data are powerful tools to help further diversify the funnel and avoid bias that gets introduced when diversity becomes a recruiter-by-recruiter decision. Without taking a data-driven approach to ensure your pipeline is well represented, there is a strong likelihood that bias will occur due to manual processes.

The best practice here is to use analytics to benchmark and assess diversity ratios (gender, ethnicity, veterans, etc.) for each stage of the hiring funnel, then continuously monitor the funnel to see where diversity decreases as candidates move through the pipeline. Analytics can clearly tell you at which stages in the hiring process you are losing diverse candidates so you can take meaningful steps to resolve the issues at hand. Your data may show that your pipeline diversity is dropping off after pre-screening or when an offer is made, and each of these scenarios will require a different type of remediation.

Also, don’t be resistant to piloting newer sourcing and recruiting technologies to see if they can help bring more people into the funnel. See what each recruiter can accomplish with different tech tools that are relevant to their positions and measure their impact. In working toward diversifying your workforce whether in growth mode or not, data should always be a guiding light.

Nail the Candidate Experience

Candidate engagement process is always super critical, but it becomes high stakes when you have the tall task of hiring at scale. There’s little more defeating than to see highly qualified candidates falling out of the funnel before reaching the interview phase. Industry data shows 60% of job seekers have had a bad candidate experience and 72% of those

candidates shared it with others, so not only does delivering a poor experience put you in jeopardy of losing a good candidate, but it also could cost you in future hires.

One of the most effective ways to engage candidates is to design a personalized candidate outreach campaign and hit it with the right cadence. When hiring en masse, it’s entirely too labor intensive to do this all manually, but there are a number of tools that will automate a majority of the process and generative AI integrations that can help with the personalization. A successful approach typically involves a combination of automation, AI and customized reach-outs. Because it’s such a critical juncture in the hiring process, you don’t want to completely remove the human touch.

Using a combination of personal emails, texts and automated campaigns allows you to keep in frequent touch with candidates with personalized messages, and automated engagement tools will show you the response rates so you can hone those messages. Messages can be automatically sent at a certain cadence, with three typically being the magic number.

It’s still very important to have a personal touch, though, especially because you want candidates to have a quality experience, feel as if they’ve been set up for success and be ambassadors. Even if they’re not ultimately hired, they can be added to your ready-later pool and re-engaged when the right job-candidate fit comes up.

Hari Kolam is Co-Founder and CEO of Findem.

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