9 Rules to Beat Zoom Fatigue

9 Rules to Beat Zoom Fatigue

Well, if you haven’t figured it out yet, Zoom isn’t going away. Neither is Google Meet, MS Teams, WebEx and about a million other ways to conference online. Podcasts, webcasts, and livestreams are all really great ways to get your message out. Since we’re all stuck doing a lot more video conference meetings, here are a few great tips to master the media that I’ve learned the hard way.

Let’s start with the elephant in the room. Most people feel like doing video conferences is mentally taxing and tiring.

Well, it turns out that is.

Here’s an article that makes the science of Zoom Fatigue pretty approachable: Dealing with Zoom Fatigue – https://leadership.garden/zoom-fatigue/

The takeaway? Zoom Fatigue is real and there are some steps you can take to make those days where you’re on camera five plus hours a day less mentally taxing.

Here are some ways I’ve found to make video conferencing less fatiguing: 

Setting Up Your Stage

First off you don’t have to invest a lot – just find a quiet enough place with a background that works.

Background

Three Rules:

No windows or bright lights

Light sources in the background will confuse the camera and will cause the camera to darken the subject (you) or cause issues with color.

No grids/plaid, pattern backgrounds

Grids, stripes, plaid and repetitive patterns can cause moire, which are repetitive details that exceed the camera sensor resolution causing a strange-looking wavy pattern.

Be clean

If you are going to have a wall behind you, make sure it is clean because scuffs and smudges will really show on camera.

Clothing

Aside from appropriate and inappropriate, there is one thing to worry about: moire. Stripes, checks, plaids, and dots can all cause a very distracting moire effect on the camera. I keep a solid blue shirt in the closet at work for days when I’m not camera-ready.

Equipment

Cameras and Lighting

Usually, bad cameras are a lighting problem in disguise. Good lighting is the secret to making cameras work well. Especially cheap cameras like the one in your laptop. If your camera looks grainy, crank up the light and you’ll be amazed how much better it works. A good ring or diffused desktop light can make you look 10-15 years younger by removing all the shadows from the wrinkles, battle scars, nicks and other accumulated wear and tear on your face.

Use Your Phone

Believe it or not, the camera in you mobile phone is probably about 10,000x better than the webcam in your computer. Why? Well, the face camera on your phone is probably capable of at least HD-quality recording and has AI video processing to automatically deal with light, white balance, and about 500 other thing that can ruin a video. If you have an iPhone and a Mac, you can use your iPhone as a webcam. If you are on Android, IruinCam and DroidCam let you do the same thing.

Sound

If you follow these three rules, you’ll solve 90% of audio problems before you have them:

Never use the mic in a Bluetooth device.

Don’t use the mic in any Bluetooth device. Here’s the story: Bluetooth has a ton of modes. The one that almost every headset, earbuds, or pods uses when you turn the mic on is “headset mode” where you get low-quality mono sound from the speakers, and the mic is set to a low bit rate, which makes you sound REALLY BAD. Use a different mic than your Bluetooth headset, and your Bluetooth headphones will work.

Get a Good Enough™ microphone.

Don’t panic. A good enough mic is $40-$70 including all the wiring, a boom arm, a shock mount and all the hardware. There’s a reason why in front of every great podcaster is a pretty good mic. I use Tonor’s Q9, Tonor TC40 or a Blue Snowball depending on where I’m working from.

Don’t pound on the table.

If you talk with your hands, chances are you also inadvertently bump into things. When you bump the table where the camera is, it shakes. Even worse, if the mic isn’t shock mounted, that little tap tap tap will sound like a cannon.

Candidate Engagement is a Decaying Asset

Candidate Engagement is a Decaying Asset

At PivotCX we understand the intrinsic value of engagement in the realm of recruiting. It’s not just a buzzword; it’s a lifeline that connects you with your future employees, your organization’s internal customers, and the driving force behind your success. Engagement is more than just a fleeting interaction; it’s the bedrock upon which lasting relationships are built.

Imagine engagement as a precious asset, one that depreciates over time if not nurtured. But fear not, for we are here to help you not only preserve but enhance that value. We believe in engaging faster, engaging longer, and, most importantly, engaging better.

Why is engagement crucial, you ask? Well, your future employees are the heartbeat of your organization, the potential workforce that will shape your future. At PivotCX, we treat them with the utmost respect, considering them not merely as candidates but as valued customers. Our technology is meticulously designed to cater to their needs, ensuring a seamless journey through your recruitment process.

Our platform doesn’t just create lists; it crafts relationships. We guide your prospects through your funnel, nurturing and managing these connections, transforming them into the future talent that will drive your organization forward. But remember, like any valuable asset, these relationships demand consistent maintenance and development.

Maintaining these relationships isn’t just about data hygiene; it’s about investing energy and effort into moving the needle of engagement. We understand that relationships without active engagement are like objects at rest. Just as in physics, it takes significant energy to set these relationships in motion. That investment of energy into relationships is what we excel at, propelling your recruiting and hiring journey forward.

Let’s face the truth: if engagement isn’t initiated, you’re back to square one. Think of it as rebuilding a cherished relationship from scratch. Consider the consequences: customer churn, sluggish sales, and your top talent walking away just when you need them the most. It’s a scenario no organization wants to face.

Your candidates today are the employees of tomorrow. The databases of engagement we help you create are the future human capital of your organization. Just like a historic building, if not properly maintained, they lose their charm and value. At Pivotcx, we ensure that your investment in these relationships is not only preserved but amplified.

So, let’s engage, not just for today, but for a future where your organization thrives, where your best talent is retained, and where every engagement translates into an opportunity for growth. Together, we will shape a future where your recruiting endeavors are not just efficient but deeply human and profoundly impactful. Welcome to the future of recruiting with PivotCX where humanengagement transforms into enduring success!

Quick Thought: Job Seekers are Scarce

Quick Thought: Job Seekers are Scarce

Just a quick thought:

Business = Process + People + Assets

If a business is really the sum of the people executing a process using company assets, then maybe it’s time to think harder about the people part of the equation.

People are now the scarce part of the story. It hasn’t been that way in most of our lifetimes. It will be, at least until 2046 when the US DOL says the labor market will start expanding again.

Recruiting Short Staffed

Recruiting Short Staffed

In today’s job market, there is a significant talent shortage, and many companies are finding it challenging to recruit the right candidates. This issue is further compounded by the fact that most recruiting teams are understaffed, making finding and hiring qualified candidates even more difficult.

To put it into perspective, imagine if your customer service team were taking 3-4 weeks to follow up with customers. You would quickly realize that you need more customer service representatives to handle the increasing workload. You might even consider bringing in an outsourced call center to help manage the influx of customer inquiries.

Similarly, if your sales team was taking two weeks to follow up on a lead, you would likely hire more BDRs and sales reps to help speed up the sales process. In some cases, you might even consider outsourcing your sales efforts to an agency.

Given the urgency of these situations, it’s essential to look at recruiting emergencies in the same way. Companies need to take swift action to address their talent needs and ensure that they have the resources and support necessary to find and attract top candidates in today’s competitive job market.

If you can’t help being short-staffed, then you still don’t have to settle for 1-2 week turnaround times. With a communications hub like PivotCX your recruiters can be engaging with 3x the number of candidates as before. Make sure your recruiters have the right tools, and they’ll be able to meet their goals. 

5 Ways PivotCX Improves Recruiter Productivity

5 Ways PivotCX Improves Recruiter Productivity

Recruiting is a challenging task that requires a lot of time and effort to find the right candidates for a position. Recruiters often struggle with managing their workload and meeting the hiring targets on time. In this blog post, we will discuss five ways to improve recruiter productivity and streamline the hiring process.

1. Measure Response Time

Response time is a critical factor in candidate experience, and it can significantly impact the hiring process. Measuring response time for Candidate Development Representatives (CDRs), recruiters, and candidates can help recruiters to identify areas for improvement. A quick response time can create a positive impression and enhance the candidate’s interest in the company. On the other hand, a delayed response can lead to a negative experience and may result in the candidate accepting another job offer.

2. Measure Engagement Rates

Engagement rates can help recruiters to determine how many candidates are actively engaged in the hiring process. It is essential to track how many candidates have had a human-to-human conversation with the recruiting team. Measuring engagement rates can help recruiters identify areas of improvement and adjust their recruitment strategy accordingly.

3. Find Out Time to Offer

The time taken to make an offer to a candidate is critical in the hiring process. It is essential to determine how long it takes to move a candidate from the application stage to the offer stage. This information can help recruiters to identify bottlenecks in the hiring process and improve the time-to-hire metric. As 90% of candidates take the first job they are offered, it is vital to ensure that the company can make an offer quickly to secure the best candidates.

4. Secret Shop Your Hiring Process

Secret shopping your hiring process can help recruiters to identify areas for improvement and provide a better candidate experience. Recruiters can find their job on different platforms and apply under different names to test the application process. They can then evaluate how easy it was to apply, whether everything worked, and whether candidates were able to complete the application process. After applying, they can measure how long it takes until a recruiter contacts them and how long it takes until they have a human-to-human conversation.

5. Add CDRs to Your Team

Adding Candidate Development Representatives (CDRs) to the recruitment team can help to improve productivity and streamline the hiring process. CDRs can be responsible for making contact with candidates and ensuring that they do not fall through the cracks. This responsibility can free up recruiters to focus on building relationships with candidates and hiring managers. This approach can help to ensure that candidates are not lost during the hiring process due to lack of communication.

Conclusion

Improving recruiter productivity is critical to the success of any recruitment team. Measuring response time, engagement rates, and time-to-offer can help recruiters to identify areas for improvement. Secret shopping the hiring process can help to identify friction points and provide a better candidate experience. Adding CDRs to the team can help to streamline the hiring process. By implementing these five strategies, recruiters can improve productivity and meet their hiring targets on time.

Speed Up Recruiting with Dynamic Lists

PivotCX is excited to announce our dynamic lists feature!

We already let users sort candidates by all sorts of filters such as location, job title, or application date. Now you can save those filters and use them to make dynamic lists.

Let’s say you have a list of candidates from Indianapolis, IN. Whenever a candidate meets the criteria for the list (for example, they live in Indianapolis, IN), they are automatically included in the list. The moment they no longer meet it, (their city is no longer Indianapolis), then they are removed from the list.

Learn more about how to make and use dynamic lists here: (insert link to help article).

There are all sorts of ways to use dynamic lists in your recruiting communications. Here are 4 simple ways you can start using dynamic lists today:

 

  1. Re-engage with Past Applicants – create a list of past applicants to a particular position and have it update automatically every time someone applies for that position. If ever the position opens up, you’ll have ready-to-go an up-to-date list of everyone who has applied to it in the past.
  2. Use for Job Fairs – Create a dynamic of list of everyone who has visited you at your job fair. As they fill out your your apply form at the booth, they’ll be added to your list in real-time. Then you can send everyone from the list a quick follow-up message after the job fair, thanking them for coming and inviting them to apply online.
  3. Send location-specific messages to candidates or employees – Pivot lets recruiters filter contacts by almost everything: from the job they applied to, to where they’re located. Make a dynamic of list of everyone from a particular location and then send them timely messages pertinent to them.
  4. Follow up with Interviews – make a dynamic list of everyone who hasn’t scheduled an interview yet. Then regularly schedule out messages with your calendly link to them to invite them to interview. You’ll then start to see less ghosting and more interviews on your calendar.

The Math of Candidate Quality

The Math of Candidate Quality

One of the most misunderstood concepts in recruiting is candidate quality. When you deal with a small number of candidates, it’s easy to think finding great people is easy. As you scale your recruiting efforts up, something surprising happens:

When I get more applicants, the quality goes down! I have to do a lot more work to find interesting and hireable people.

Unfortunately, recruiting is subject to the Law of Large Numbers. The law of large numbers states the larger the sample size, the more the results will trend toward their expected value.

Consider this:

10 applications 4 qualified, 40% Quality

100 applications 14 qualified, 14% Quality

1000 applications, 132 qualified, 13.2% Quality

10,000 applications 1,290 qualified 12.9% Quality

When you only have a few candidates, things can look unnaturally easy. As you get more candidates, you see the quality decrease. But you know what? That’s ok. It’s how math will always work. The more you scale up, the more accurate your measure of quality will actually be.

Ok, so what is a quality candidate, anyway?

The standard way to measure that is simply to figure out what percentage of candidates are actually qualified:

A better way to measure quality

Around 30-40% of candidates will never engage with your recruiting efforts. Whether you call, text, or use smoke signals doesn’t matter. They will simply not respond. We believe the best measure is the percentage of qualified and engaged candidates. Here’s the math:

This is hard to measure if you don’t have a communications hub like Pivot. But when you do, you can analyze your candidate sources for the number of engaged candidates they supply… and you’ll be surprised by the difference between sources. Ultimately, there is one inescapable rule:

You cannot hire people you cannot talk to.

Recruiting Shouldn’t Be an Emergency.

Recruiting Shouldn’t Be an Emergency.

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)

Eat Your TOFU ( Top of Funnel)

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%.

Recruit Smarter, Not Harder! How to Make Technology Do the Heavy Lifting

Recruit Smarter, Not Harder! How to Make Technology Do the Heavy Lifting

We all know that recruiting can be daunting, especially when you have a large pool of candidates to choose from. However, with the right technology, you can recruit smarter, not harder, while maintaining the human touch.

 1. Identifying the Right Tools for Your Team

One of the most critical steps in making technology work for you is identifying the right tools for your organization. Many different software programs and platforms are available to help streamline the recruitment process. These tools can help you sort through resumes, schedule interviews, and even conduct initial screenings.

2. Reaching the Right Audience

Another critical factor in using technology to recruit smarter is ensuring that your job postings reach the right audience. By using targeted job boards and social media platforms, you can increase the visibility of your job postings and attract more qualified candidates.

3. Keep it human 

Finally, it is essential to remember that while technology can be a valuable resource, it should never replace the human touch in recruitment. Make sure you are still taking the time to interview candidates and get to know them personally.

By following these tips, you can make technology work for you and recruit smarter, not harder!