Mike Seidle, Author at PivotCX by Daxtra

Recruiting Shouldn’t Be an Emergency.

by Mike Seidle | Jul 6, 2023 | Blog, recruiting

If you feel like making hires is always done in fire drill fashion, you are not alone. It’s especially hard to recruit well when you are small or you are not a hyper-growth startup. If you think about it, the reason recruiting feels like an emergency is simple:

Since we don’t hire every day, we don’t give it every-day priority.

Rule 1: Always be recruiting.

Rule 2: See rule #1.

The single biggest recruiting mistake is stopping. Why is it a mistake to stop recruiting?

• It takes lead time to restart the recruiting engine. It takes time to push buttons, refresh content, and post jobs.

• It costs money to restart the engine. You’ll have to sponsor jobs to get candidates quickly.

• You will not build a talent community,which further increases future recruiting costs.

• Managers will retain poor performers because they don’t have confidence there will be a new person quickly.

• You’ll fail to exploit opportunity if you can’t staff up quickly.

You don’t have to have every job in the company posted all the time. There are reasonable limits. But you should always be recruiting for positions like:

Sales, Engineering, Production (people who make the product, provide service or bill hours), and Administrative Support

So, what do you do if someone applies and you just can’t hire them? It’s easy:

“That position is filled. Would it be OK if I reached out to you if the job opens in the future?”

Most candidates will happily say, “Yes,” and when you do go to make a hire, you’ll have people you can reach out to start the process immediately.

Eat Your TOFU ( Top of Funnel)

by Mike Seidle | Jun 29, 2023 | Blog, recruiting

We get to look at a lot of recruiting pipelines. There’s a pretty consistent pattern:

There’s not a lot of engagement at the top of the funnel. When there is, it’s usually a chatbot that is putting candidates on hold for a few weeks until recruiters have time to work on the req.

Early pipeline engagement doesn’t happen on a schedule, and if we really want to make hires, it requires almost instant attention. Applicants just aren’t going to wait for recruiters who are stacked up with interviews, hiring manager calls, onboarding, and team meetings to call next week. In fact, this alone is a great reason to look at the SDR model:

What if someone was able to get to talent within a few minutes?

What if that person kept driving the pipeline for the recruiters? How many qualified candidates would get away?

Well, we’ve been doing this for two years. Pivot Live is a team of live humans that hook up to your inbound and outbound recruiting funnel and engage quickly. Every time. (Our human conversational recruiting specialists engage in an average of 5 minutes and four seconds after candidates apply or respond to the outreach).

The results? Well, Gartner’s SDR study wasn’t far off:

We generally increase the number of candidates who make it to an interview by 65%.

We reduce the advertising cost per candidate by an average of 50%.

Recruiting Takes a Lesson from Wartime Logistics

by Mike Seidle | Mar 21, 2023 | Blog, recruiting

One of the most often misunderstood aspects of fighting wars is the importance of logistics. You can’t fight for long without food, fuel, ammunition, and replacement troops.

In warfighting, logistics are pretty much everything. General Dwight D. Eisenhower put it best, “You will not find it difficult to prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily because of logistics.”

We save the accolades for brilliant tactics and strategy. Tactics and strategies, however, were assured success by boring, old logistics. In WW2, for example, only 3 in 10 US soldiers actually served in a combat role. The rest were truck drivers, deckhands, mechanics, radio operators, and a myriad of other support roles which might have never seen the front line. And yet their contribution decisively won the war.

Ok, so why does this matter in the talent acquisition world?

No CEO ever got accolades for incredible recruiting. Their bonuses are based on their profits which they can quickly pad to look better by cutting costs and laying people off. They have little incentive to improve recruiting processes or repurpose existing personnel rather than lay them off. Such measures might stave off shareholder pressure, but it won’t build a long-term successful business.

In business, we hand out accolades for brilliant marketing, winning sales, and shiny products. We don’t hand out the accolades for hiring the people that make all of the success happen. And yet every winning company recruits well. They know when to recruit and when not to, how to recruit, and how to keep and train up the people they have.

Now that we are in the talent shortage that all the academics predicted would happen (even without COVID), maybe it’s time to re-evaluate how to succeed. Maybe it’s time for CEOs and COOs to start looking at Talent Acquisition, Recruiting, or whatever you call hiring people as the best way to create winning business strategies. Success comes with consistency, and you won’t achieve that without a strong backbone to support the people in your company.

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Think Hiring Woes Are due Entirely to a Lack of Candidates? New Report Suggests Real Issue is Sluggish Response to Applicants

by Mike Seidle | Apr 6, 2022 | Blog, recruiting

INDIANAPOLIS (April 6, 2022) – – Regardless of who you talk to, employers are having a terrible time finding qualified people to fill open positions, citing more jobs than candidates. However, a new report published by PivotCX and JobSync suggests the issue is not simply a lack of candidates, it’s the slow response time to jobseekers who often wait weeks for a response to online applications. A simple change in strategy, responding to candidates via text within minutes of applying, can lead to a monumental shift in hiring success.

The recruiting benchmark report, 2022 Best-in-Class Candidate Engagement, tracked 500,000 job candidates in seven key industries obtained through job board applications to understand the impact of SMS text responses on candidate engagement. The biggest finding: by immediately connecting with applicants via text increased engagement—human-to-human conversations—by as much as 70 percent. The majority of jobseekers reached a live recruiter within 10 minutes of applying.

“That is a gamechanger for employers and candidates,” says Mike Seidle, PivotCX co-founder and CTO. “This near real-time engagement gives employers the opportunity to have the first pick of the best candidates. The majority of people accept the first offer so the sooner an employer can connect with interested candidates the better. For candidates, they get the immediate gratification of a human response instead of sitting in the dark for weeks wondering where their application is in the hiring process.”

The study analyzed the impact of SMS text across key industries, including education, health care, manufacturing, warehousing, personal care, trucking, and technology. The increase in engagement was about 60 percent across the board, with the highest engagement rate coming in education, with 70.1 percent of candidates responding to the text.

Another key takeaway is how quickly candidates responded to the initial text from the company recruiting. This ranged from a few seconds to several minutes based on industry. For example, healthcare, technology, and trucking candidates had an average response time to a text of around four minutes. Personal care candidates—hair stylists, cosmetologists and barbers—typically responded within 10.5 minutes.

Jobseekers’ rapid response to text messages is a clear message the days of waiting games are over, says Leah Daniels, chief commercial officer at JobSync. “Ninety-three percent of U.S. workers have smart phones and about 70 percent are using them to apply for jobs. Once they’ve put their hand in the air by applying on a job board, they’re ready to be acknowledged and engage with recruiters. In response, recruiters need to respond in real time and start moving people through the hiring process. Those who can deliver the immediate gratification within minutes of receiving an application, will have a huge advantage over other employers,” Daniels says.

PivotCX and JobSync conducted the study in part because of the profound difficulties recruiters face in accessing and connecting with applicants. For a variety of reasons, people don’t respond to phone calls or emails, frustrating recruiters.

Says Seidle, “Recruiters have to engage with as many candidates as they can as quickly as they can. To do that, they have to use the preferred method of communication, texting. Ninety percent of people open a text message within three minutes. Compare that to email where only 20 percent are opened. A simple change in strategy will accelerate the hiring cycle time from an average of 42 days to less than seven and increase the productivity of recruiters exponentially.”

Click here for a complete summary of the 2022 Best-in-Class Candidate Engagement recruiting benchmark report.

About PivotCX

PivotCX’ candidate engagement platform accelerates candidate flow and human-to-human conversations that empower recruiters to make better hires faster through live SMS texting. At the same time, PivotCX replaces the long, opaque hiring process for jobseekers with immediate, personalized gratification upon applying for a job, enabling them to land a desired job quickly and with confidence and transparency in the process. PivotCX’ platform integrates with many ATS, CRM, and HRIS systems as well as job boards, social media, and career websites, and enables automated and person-to-person conversations via text, email and voice. Data collection and thoughtfully designed, information-laden dashboards complete the SaaS solution that’s quickly becoming the go-to tool for recruiters. Learn more about PivotCX here.

About JobSync

JobSync empowers talent acquisition professionals to get more quality candidates from their existing solutions be emulating the ATS application process directly on job sites, creating a seamless direct apply experience for applicants, doubling the candidate volume. JobSync automates the data connections in the talent acquisition providing integrated direct apply solutions, job distribution, and seamless integrations between job boards ecosystem, ATS, and other systems used by recruiters. JobSync’s solution reduces friction for candidates, recruiters, employers, and vendors. Learn more about JobSync and how the company improves the efficiency of talent acquisition teams here.

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Media Contact: Melanie Lux, 803-331-4794 or press@pivotcx.io

Find out: PivotCX helps your company respond with a live person in seconds to candidate inquiries.

Want to learn more about how PivotCX can improve your applicant flow? Request a demo.

Podcast: Creating Valuable Solutions in Tech

by Mike Seidle | Feb 22, 2022 | Podcast, recruiting, Tech

This podcast interview focuses what product innovation and creating valuable solutions should be really all about and how complacency can kick-in silently and give you a slap in the face. The guest is Mike Seidle, Co-founder and CTO at PivotCX.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

The importance to start paying attention to the early signals from customers that you are on the wrong track instead of listening to your own stories.
How shifting focus from selling “cost savings” to “giving your customers a position of advantage in the eyes of their customers” can be the difference from having no traction to winning 8 out 10 deals.
Why we often think we are smarter than everybody else – and why that doesn’t help at all.
How small ideas can mean the difference between having 10 users and 10000 – and how to find them.