recruiting Archives

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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How To Get Candidate Flow Like a Boss

by Kristen Seidle | Jan 18, 2023 | Blog, recruiting

Fix Your Job Ads

Want 10-30% more candidates quickly? Fix your job ads. Kat Kibben is the world’s foremost expert on writing job posts and she laid out how to re-write your job posts in the Pivot2First . It’s not hard, and the payoff is literally now and forever.

Adjust your budget.

Getting candidates from job boards is getting more straightforward, but it may take a bigger budget. First, the market is competitive, and costs are going up, despite all the talk of recession. Programmatic platforms like Pando and job boards like Indeed are making it possible to budget by applicant. But if you are budgeted for clicks, paying for applicants may be a bit of a sticker shock. Best to overcome this and get the right budget so you can get enough candidate flow to succeed.

Treat Every Candidate like they are Precious

Because, well, they are. Indeed will charge you for every applicant. Don’t let that spending go to waste by not engaging every candidate. Try to have a conversation via text message with every candidate who applies. First, you’ll be able to identify unresponsive candidates quickly (and ask Indeed to replace them for free). Second, you can cut up the time it takes to get enough candidates into the hiring process from weeks to in some cases the same day!

Stop Turning off the Spigot

Turn on the ads, we’re hiring. Turn them off, we’ve stopped. This is a great way to save a little money now, but if you are doing it right, you’ll want to constantly be building a community of people interested in working for your company. Just lower your budget, but never stop recruiting.

Re-engage and re-engage and re-engage…

People who applied in the past should account for 20-30% of your candidate flow. The best way to re-engage? Texting. Here’s why: you’ve already paid to get the application. The only cost you have is a text message! You might even be able to speed up the hiring because you already have the applicant in your ATS.

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Speed Wins in Recruiting, Every Time – Kyle Roed on Pivot2First Ep. 7

by Ana SerVaas | May 5, 2022 | Blog, Hiring, Podcast, recruiting

Speed Wins in Recruiting, and when it comes down to it, not all HR professionals recruit at the ideal speed. Mike Seidle and Kyle Roed discuss recruiting strategies CEOs can bring back to their team to get ahead in the competition for talent.

What are the most common out-of-date practices you see out there?

There are a lot of people who still manage people with 40-year-old processes. Examples range from attendance policies to recruiting. However, the world is speeding up, and the expectations of our employees, applicants, candidates, and hiring processes need to get faster. Speed wins in recruiting, every time. Even if an employer comes out with a great job, but there’s a prolonged part of the process, or there are people who halt progress, it makes it hard to hire great people.

Policies and culture can also be stuck in the past. Instead of flyers in the breakroom or 50-page handbooks, people want to access information on-demand from their devices. Moreover, today’s employees want a company with a social media presence they can be proud of, inclusive, and willing to change, listen, and confront issues society-at-large faces these days.

Another issue companies face is a low application completion rate and even HR resistance to change for fear of not being compliant. Applying for a job should be as easy as buying something online. Most of the time, today’s applicants are willing to invest more time in a lengthy application only if they have built some rapport with a business. 1-click applications help counteract this issue. All HR needs to start the recruiting process is an applicant’s resume, and applicants can fill out an extended application after the first phone screen or an onsite interview.

What should CEOs be asking about their Recruiting practices?

In business, we talk a lot about sales and customer experience funnels. It’s the same in recruiting; it’s a funnel and an experience. The product is your company, and you’re trying to get someone to buy into it. It’s the same KPIs as sales, skewed slightly for HR.

Candidate Experience: Can a candidate apply easily and go through the hiring process smoothly? Having a fast candidate experience is a competitive edge. You’ll win the war for talent if you can do this regularly.
Quality of Hire: Can we keep hires? What’s the new hire turnover rate? Companies should have sound structures to select candidates. Yet, businesses need to be agile enough to adapt to changes and talent acquisition strategies that enable them to make good decisions in hiring.
Candidate Flow: How many candidates are we funneling? How many candidates does it take to hire one person? Recruiting is a unique skill in HR; not all HR professionals are adept at recruiting, and your best recruiter might not be an HR professional within your organization.
Market development: Who are we reaching out to? Are there other groups/demographics we’re not reaching out to? Organizations with more diversity, equity, and inclusion have a diversity of thought, and they have intensional, inclusive cultures that allow those ideas to bubble up. This is the right thing to do, but it’s good for business too.

Learn more about Kyle

Kyle Roed is the Vice President of Global HR at CPM Companies, Cofounder of DisruptHR, and host of the “Rebel Human Resources” podcast. He fell into HR and fell in love with everything about people practices. In his almost 20 years in HR, he’s discovered that things in HR are ripe for innovation and has sought to challenge the way the HR community thinks about the world of work.

Transformational Book: In a professional context, Good to Great; has been a true north since college.

Favorite Movie: Shawshank Redemption; it’s a great story of triumph.

Rebel HR Podcast: Everything innovation in the people space www.rebelhumanresources.com

Kyle’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyle-roed

Learn more about Mike and PivotCX:

Mike’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/indymike/

Pivot2First Podcast

PivotCX

Rosey on What the C Suite Needs to Know about recruiting in 2022

by Ana SerVaas | Apr 12, 2022 | Blog, Hiring, Podcast, recruiting

Pivot to First explores topics and ideas with the goal of turning hiring into a competitive advantage. In this episode, Mike speaks with Rosey Nathan. In addition to being a podcaster extraordinaire based out of New Zealand, she is a Recruitment Partner with Customise Talent Group. You can also find her work as Career & Whole Human Mentor for Rosey on Recruitment and Career. She also has a varied background in Sales, Management, and recruiting in SaaS, FinTech, and other industries.

In this edition we explore:

What makes a happy workforce and what benefits does it bring to a company.
Explaining Employee Engagement in 3 words.
The recruiting hurdles employers are facing in the current market.
Some reasons why candidates’ counteroffers have increased up to 40%
How can candidates avoid pitfalls when looking for a new job.
Tips for happy recruiting in 2022
Fixing employers’ candidate flow problem via speed of engagement.
Rosey’s reading, movie, and TV recommendations.

Rosey Nathan on the web https://linktr.ee/roseyhercareer

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.

Workforce: Rethinking Talent Models

by Dominic Antonio | Mar 22, 2022 | Blog, Hiring, recruiting

Originally published by

Deloitte Insights

Not only have workforce demographics changed over the last 30 years—collectively making the workforce older and more diverse—but the very social contract between employers and employees has altered dramatically as well. Organizations now have a broad continuum of options for finding workers, from hiring traditional full-time employees to availing themselves of managed services and outsourcing, independent contractors, gig workers, and crowdsourcing. These newer workforce types are available to solve problems, get work done, and help leaders build more flexible and nimble organizations (figure 2). Alternative workers are growing in number; currently, 35 percent of the US workforce is in supplemental, temporary, project, or contract-based work. This percentage is growing as well—for example, the freelance workforce is growing faster than the total workforce, up 8.1 percent compared to 2.6 percent of all employees.

As labor-sourcing options increase, it opens up the possibility for more efficiency and creativity in composing an organization’s workforce. But with more options often comes more complexity. Employers should not only consider how roles are crafted when pairing humans with machines, but also the arrangement of their human workforce and what type(s) of employment are best suited to obtain the creativity, passion, and skill sets needed for the work at hand. Orchestrating this complex use of different workforce segments might require new models. It could fundamentally change our view of the employee life cycle from the traditional “attract, develop, and retain” model to one where the key questions are how organizations should access, curate, and engage workforces of all types (see the sidebar, “Beyond the employee life cycle”).

Organizations have an opportunity to optimize the organizational benefits of each type of talent relationship while also providing meaningful and engaging options for a wide variety of worker needs and motivations. However, making the most of the opportunity could require a complete rethinking of talent models in a way that allows organizations to carefully match people’s motivations and skills with the organization’s work needs.

Access. How do you tap into capabilities and skills across your enterprise and the broader ecosystem? This includes sourcing from internal and external talent marketplaces and leveraging and mobilizing on- and off-balance sheet talent.

Curate. How do you provide employees—ecosystem talent—and teams with the broadest and most meaningful range of development? This includes work experiences that are integrated into the flow of their work, careers, and personal lives.

Engage. How do you interact with and support your workforces, business teams, and partners to build compelling relationships? This includes multidirectional careers in, across, and outside of the enterprise; and for business leaders and teams, providing insights to improve productivity and impact while taking advantage of new ways of teaming and working.

Imagine being able to engage your applicants within five minutes of application, then engaged in human-to-human interaction starting in seconds. PivotCX can make this process happen. See our 90-second video explaining how PivotCX can help you get to the right talent fast so you can Pick First.

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