The Future of Work Needs Flexible HR Technology: A Look inside Recruiterbox

 

Image courtesy of Recruiterbox

Image courtesy of Recruiterbox

 

Campaign/FTC disclosure: This is a sponsored product review. I will receive compensation for this post. I only work with companies I feel have great products, services and offerings. In accordance with my blog disclosure statement, I will only work with and showcase products, events and/or companies I believe my readers will benefit from.  I am not formally employed by Recruiterbox. All thoughts and viewpoints are created and written by me. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.

I have long discussed the perils of ill-implemented HR Technology. I have also discussed the necessity for HR Technology that can grow and bend with the whims of the business.

As someone who worked in Talent Acquisition for virtually her  entire HR career, I know the pain points  when it comes to Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) all too well. I have lived through everything from ridiculous error reports for minor input mistakes to larger-than-life SaaS solutions that consistently overpromised and under-delivered in the way of ease of use.

As both a former HR practitioner and now as a business owner/analyst assisting companies with making technology decisions for their businesses, I have often wondered why technology that has been designed to streamline the hiring process has instead made hiring more difficult for everyone involved.

Let me be fair…we have evolved.

In fairness, it probably wasn’t the intention of the founders of several of the applicant tracking systems we know to deliberately make recruiters’ and hiring managers’ jobs harder with their creation.

If we look at the ATS historically, there was a time when ERP systems were the best, new products on the market for tracking the steps of candidates and hires. ERP systems weren’t necessarily ideal, but they got the job done – albeit in an excruciatingly painful manner.

We evolved with Software-As-A-Service solutions – understanding that the nature of how business and work gets accomplished was changing to a more on-demand and flexible approach. This approach continues to be at the forefront of what is needed from the ATS whether you are an enterprise company or a small business.

The Workforce is changing.

The workforce is a mix of Millennials, Boomers, Gen X, Gen Z and even some Traditionalists. It is a mashup of full-time, part-time, freelancers, temporary, remote workers and per diem employees. With a mix of all of these demographics funneling into companies of all sizes, it is an absolute necessity that companies have an ATS that is dynamic enough to capture all of the information available to us, malleable enough to change workflows, users and processes on the fly, and easy enough to use – that even the least tech savvy employees in your organization will enjoy using it.

Meet Recruiterbox

I had the pleasure of chatting with the one of the three co-founders of Recruiterbox, Raj ShethRecruiterbox is a 5 year-old, self-funded recruiting software company that doesn’t try to be anything more than what it is intended to be and that is a seamless, easy-to-use technology that makes hiring a productive activity.

During my demo with Raj, he summed up the reasoning for why Recruiterbox exists as follows: “Traditional HR software is cumbersome and built for process – not for productivity.” He went on to explain that so much of what we do takes place in email, yet there is no way to draw from this data source.

As a former recruiter, I can attest to how many resumes and discussions took place in my email. In return, I had the task of figuring out how to properly document those conversations in the ATS.

Raj and his team have gone to great lengths to see that productivity, communication, and user experience are the cornerstones to this software.

How do I know?

I put my super user hat on and spent the past week and a half utilizing their free trial to test the capabilities of this software.

RB Social Footprint

Social Footprint Screen

Here are some features that really resonated with me:

  • Truly configurable workflows. The first thing you do when creating a new opening in Recruiterbox is to design your workflow. They give you three delivered workflow stages that you can edit to suit your needs. I appreciated this feature, because different openings call for different steps towards the hire at times. With this workflow editing option, Recruiterbox is giving you, the organization the power back to make changes to your hiring process as needed. I did not need to log-in to a different portal to make my changes nor did I need extensive training to learn how to configure the workflow. Everything in Recruiterbox is extremely intuitive.
  • No more post- job fair or compliance nightmares. When you sign-up for Recruiterbox you get a company-branded email that allows people to apply to your company with one email. When the candidate sends their resume to this email, it automatically loads their resume in the system. You as the recruiter or coordinator can assign the candidate as you see fit thereafter.  If you don’t like this option, you can also batch upload resumes via zip file into the system. This is a nice feature if you like a paperless process like me.
  • Capture the candidates you find on the web with one click. Recruiterbox has a Google Plug-in that allows you to pull in candidates into their “Prospecting” dashboard. You know those candidates that you happen upon during a Boolean or LinkedIn search? You can capture their name, email, phone number, referral source, and resume with this plug-in. Minimal parsing makes for 100% successful execution every time.
  • Want to know where your candidates hang out on the web? Recruiterbox captures each candidate’s social footprint so you can see how they present themselves across all social platforms.
  • Interview scheduling made easy with a dose of video. In Recruiterbox, you can easily schedule everything from a phone screening to a Skype Interview. You have the option of confirming your interviews or you can send prospective schedules to candidates for them to confirm their acceptance of the designated timeslot. Two clicks from within Recruiterbox allow you to launch Skype when you have installed the Skype plugin on your desktop.

 

Application form configuration screen

Application form configuration screen

The list of positive attributes to this system is endless. As we speak they are working  launching an improved and robust reporting and analytics module. As you well know, I have a penchant for companies who are relentless about improving their product  through good data.

If you are a company of 1-1000 employees and in the market for a new ATS, Recruiterbox is worth your attention.  You will find the pricing to be reasonable and  the value immense.

For a free demo, click here to sign-up or watch their video demo.

Need more convincing? Read a case study from one of their clients, Beauty Brands here.

Bonus: Get a free copy of Co-Founder, Raj Sheth’s  E-Book prePARE: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Hiring. Click here to download.

Five Hiring Crimes Your Talent Acquisition Team Is Committing

Courtesy of Unsplash.com

Courtesy of Unsplash.com

I’ve been talking a lot about where HR is headed this year, which is important so we can prepare ourselves appropriately. However, what about now? What can we fix right now? It has occurred to me that there are some basic precepts in Talent Acquisition (TA) that practitioners are not tending to. This advice emanates from conversations I have had with several jobseekers about their hiring experiences of late. If you are doing committing any of these hiring crimes, please fix it immediately.

  • Asking the candidate for information in bits and pieces. Every company has necessary information they need in order to make a formal offer. In case you were unaware, candidates are as busy as you are. They don’t have time to be going back and forth with you about what you need. Create a checklist or some sort of system for the jobs you hire for to ensure you account for all of the items you need to collect from a prospective hire. To commit this crime is to annoy your candidate and to give the impression that your company works haphazard manner.
  • Not allowing your new hires to give adequate notice. If the candidate has to wait several weeks to get through your pre-hire process, you can wait the two to three weeks they need to give their current employer adequate notice of their departure. If you expect it from your people, you should expect others need to do the same for the companies they are employed by as well.
  • Telling prospective hires to give notice before you have fully vetted them. No one has time to be putting in notice with their current employer prior to you vetting them or officially offering them a position- only to be told the position is no longer being offered to them. This is a crime, because you never know what can come up during your pre-offer process to prevent you from hiring them. Will you help them find a new job if it turns out you can’t hire them? Probably not. It is never advisable to say anything to a current employer, until a prospective hire is fully vetted and given an official offer letter. Make sure your TA people aren’t telling candidates to do this.
  • Ridiculously long applications. When’s the last time you looked at your application? Do you really need to know things like: when a person was divorced or where a deceased family member lived? These examples are just a few of the growing list of ridiculous questions asked on applications. Unless you are a federal, state or civil service agency, you should not have a 50 page application. Even within those agencies, there are often times redundancies in terms of information they solicit during the hiring process. Some advice, take a look at your application and gather only the information you absolutely need to make both a legal and practical hire.
  • Requiring candidates to incur costs in advance of their employment. A candidate I know was recently asked to send passport photos to her prospective employer (which was previously made available to the employer and lost.) The loss of the photos caused this person to have to purchase a new set of photos and pay for overnight delivery to a state agency. This was a burdensome cost for the candidate. My advice to employers is: you require it, you pay for it. Many candidates are in tough financial spots and cannot afford to pay a dollar more than what it may cost them to get to the interview and back. Do your best to eliminate economic and financial hurdles for them to overcome while trying to become employed by your company.

These are just a few instances in which the actions of your Talent Acquisition staff could be undermining your hiring efforts. I provide this advice not to point the finger, but to shed light on an area where we need to do better as a discipline. When I worked as a Talent Acquisition Specialist, my focus was to put the right people to work as quickly as possible. As a TA Specialist or Recruiter, you have to be dedicated to making every step in the hiring process as painless as possible. You make it so by letting people know what they can expect and removing unnecessary hurdles from their path to becoming an employee.

For more insights on this topic, click here to hop over to “The Aristocracy of HR” You Tube Channel.

Five Essential Qualities For Today’s Recruiter

 

Image courtesy of Flickr.com

 

Yesterday, I was on a show called: Drive Thru HR with two of my friends/colleagues (check out the replay here).  We had the chance to discuss what we see as necessary qualities for today’s Recruiters and Talent Acquisition professionals. There’s no question that there has been a shift from when I started over 10 years ago. If you speak to the average jobseeker (and this includes candidates internal to your organization) – that shift isn’t exactly a positive one. It appears that as technology improved the quality of Recruitment has decreased. The opposite should be true; but alas it isn’t and people are fed-up.

I have a few friends in the market looking for new work. As such, I have become the go-to gal for all ridiculous Recruiter stories and antics. While I am rarely shocked, I am often disappointed. For this reason, I am listing the essential qualities that I believe make a Recruiter successful.

1) Jobseeker Advocacy- I am always stunned by the Recruiter that doesn’t get that it is their job to advocate for their candidates. It may be a sore spot for me, because I worked in staffing once upon a time- where everything from your paycheck to your performance depended on your ability to find talent and get them working as soon as possible. Hiring managers look to the TA professional or Recruiter for guidance on  the candidate landscape and market. As a Recruiter, it is not only your job to snatch up the best candidates; but it is also your job to advocate for the ones that have the potential to be a great hires. You’re probably thinking- well doesn’t everyone have potential? The answer is “it depends”. However, there are times when the hiring manager wants what they want and despite their stubbornness you have to be courageous enough to advocate for your people; so your qualified applicants have a fair chance at being evaluated. I have advocated for candidates that were not necessarily the hiring managers first choice; but they were the best qualified and it turned out beautifully.

2) Understanding the Need– Too often, I hear about Recruiters engaging jobseekers without fully understanding the job they are recruiting for. Not only does it make the recruiter look ridiculous, but it is also a poor reflection on the company. How can you expect the candidate to get excited when you can’t answer basic questions about the position? Last I checked, the first thing a recruiter needs to do is to sit with the hiring manager and understand what they need . The next step is to do your own independent research about the position to add to what you already know. The moral of the story here is: know what you’re recruiting for and stop trying to herd jobseekers like you would cats.

3) Humility– We have all been in a position to look for new employment at one point or another. The Recruitment Process is not the place for a power trip. Often times, people are at their lowest when they are coming in for an interview- especially at the entry-level. Anything you can do to make them feel at ease-so they can put their best foot forward is advisable. Treat candidates as you would want to be treated.

4) Setting Expectations-  Recruiters are busy. Nobody gets that more than I do. That being said, help yourself and the candidate by letting them know what to expect in the beginning-so they don’t have to constantly bug you for status updates. If you do this and there are still complaints, you can at least rest easy at night knowing you attempted to provide some guidance to your candidates for what they should expect during the hiring process. If candidates know what to expect they will be less inclined to stalk you for answers.

5) Get Out There- I don’t care how much Social Recruiting you do- it is no substitution for getting out of the office and out to events to meet with potential candidates. In my previous life, I was often the only Recruiter willing to go to events, job fairs and the like. Some of my co-workers were reluctant to do so relying only on internet sourcing to fill positions. To each their own, but it is almost blasphemous to be a Recruiter and not want to be out and about networking.  Step away from the screen and get out to an event. It allows people to connect with you in person rather than the normal channel of applying online.

We all get busy or forget to follow-up from time-to-time. However, these should not be the defining a whole industry such as Recruitment. As with any job, the focus for Recruiters should be to deliver a consistent and quality experience. Your reputation and your company’s reputation depends on it.

 

 

 

 

“I am Revolutionizing HR”- Social Data and The Entelo Advantage

 

 

 

 

 

Only in the last few years has the amount of social data begun to scale, allowing data-driven individuals to begin to search for hiring trends. Within this social data, there are strong indicators of when a top performer is about to “come to market,” or pursue their next career opportunity. As a result, it’ll be the job of tomorrow’s recruiter to figure out how to leverage big data and predictive analytics to find the right candidates when they aren’t yet actively looking.

 

The majority of recruiters lack the time to gather all public data on each of these professionals. They lack the ability to run multivariate regressions needed to identify the one in 200,000 professionals who are both qualified for and open to a new opportunity. These recruiters will need a tool to do these things for them. Until now, no one’s done a good job of building one.

 

That’s why we’ve built Entelo. It takes the average recruiter a half-hour to manually collect all available information on just one candidate. Entelo does all this work for you, providing the most comprehensive view of talent available and saving you from hours of research. Entelo Search includes rich profiles of over 30 million candidates, each filled with data from social sites such as Github, Dribbble, Quora, Twitter, and more.

 

Entelo also uses this wealth of data to help recruiters identify those candidates who are about to change jobs, using our first-of-its-kind More Likely To Move™ filter. Our proprietary algorithm analyzes over 70 variables indicative of upcoming career changes to tell you the right candidate to speak with at the right time. We track everything from layoff announcements and M&A activity to length of time at current company and social profile activity. When a candidate is flagged as More Likely To Move™, they have a 30% likelihood of changing jobs in the next 90 days.

 

We feel we’ve only scratched the surface of what this data can do to help HR professionals build great teams. We launched Entelo Diversity in April, which helps you find candidates whose social profiles indicate a high probability of meeting specific gender, race or military experience requirements. It’s our hope that this latest element of our algorithm will help companies of all sizes reap the benefits of building strong, diverse teams. Studies show that a more diverse workforce is more creative, more productive and less likely to turn over.

 

We’d love to show you and your organization how Entelo can help you hit your hiring goals and build a great team. For your free demo of the Entelo platform, visit www.entelo.com/demo.

 

Author Biography

Kyle Paice runs the Entelo Marketing Team. Previously, he was the Head of Marketing for RentJuice, a real estate software company that was acquired by Zillow. Before RentJuice, Kyle built inbound marketing software as a Product Manager at HubSpot, and consulted to investment banks and other financial services institutions with Deloitte. He has a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from Boston College.

 

The Push and Pull of Recruitment

Image courtesy of PushandPullsigns.com

 

Hello HR Aristocrats! Today you can find me on the iCims Hire Expectations Institute blog with a brand new article called: ” The Push and Pull of Recruitment”. iCims is a strategic partner of my business Talent Think Innovations, LLC and a supporter of “The Aristocracy of HR”. This article is the first of many collaborations you will see with iCims and I in the future.

FTC Disclosure: I received compensation for writing this article listed below as one of the services I offer my clients. I only work with companies I feel have great products, services and offerings. In accordance with my blog disclosure statement, I will only work with and showcase products and/or companies I believe my readers will benefit from. iCims is an ATS provider and I have either reviewed or used their product personally. I have not made any absolute statements about its functionality but endorse the capabilities I have personally observed.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commissions 16 CFR, Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.

Here’s a snippet of the post: 

“The Push and Pull of Recruitment”

Those of you that have been in recruitment long enough remember a day when we used to be able to post to a job board or two and receive a bevy of resumes. I’m talking posting jobs before we had to pray that anyone would be interested in our opportunities. A lot has changed since that time, and yet I can be assured that every month of every new year there will be some focus on the methods we utilize to attract candidates.

Some say we need to focus more heavily on big data and analytics. Others say attracting top talent is near impossible because we are experiencing a talent shortage. Whatever your opinion on the subject, I think we can all agree that spending your recruitment budget on job board advertising alone is probably not going to cut it that much longer. We are looking at a new frontier of the modern workforce- where a specific and targeted mix of advertising is utilized to get the word out about open positions.

Along with the specific and targeted mix of advertising is a continued emphasis on company’s having a consistent and attractive digital presence.

What does this mean?

It simply means that organizations need to become clear about who they are and what value proposition they are offering candidates for joining their company. In the past, the candidate-employer relationship was guided by what the employer wanted and most experts urged candidates to yield to the company’s wants rather than encouraging them to fulfill their own wants and needs read the rest of the post here.

Want to boost your brand recognition in collaboration with The Aristocracy of HR? Click here for more on our content writing services.

What’s a Recruiter To Do?

 When all attempts have been made to influence a marketable and enticing job posting- what more can a recruiter do? When all efforts have been put forth to amplify the reach of said posting to garner the best and brightest candidates- what is left? If recruiters have sourced and prescreened their hearts out to find the diamonds in the rough, what more could you want?

I ask some basic but nevertheless important questions that most recruiters have asked themselves every day. It tells a story that not many people understand but recruiters do. How much more can one human being do to ensure a hire comes of a vacancy when all follow-up with the hiring manager has been attempted, all viable candidates have been evaluated, screened and sent for further consideration?

What more can a recruiter do when in return for their diligence there is silence or worse yet a plan “b” that doesn’t involve giving a chance to any of those candidates you fought so hard to woo in an effort to fill a position?

Herein lies the gap between a good recruiter’s intentions and efforts and the importance the company places on candidate experience. There are more shenanigans, politics and red-tape than any jobseeker can comprehend when it comes to hiring in some companies. It isn’t as cut and dry as you post a job, you receive candidates, all qualified candidates receive an interview, and the best candidate is chosen. This is an ideal situation that is rarely reality and also substantiated by the bevy of candidate stories and complaints about the consistently misguided hiring processes experienced in trying to become gainfully employed in our current economy.

I think people more or less understand how embarrassing and stressful it can be for a recruiter when you want to do right by your candidates, but you have no updates so you dodge a phone call. Even worse, is when the update isn’t one that is easy to convey like the company already knows who they want but the recruiter has been directed to keep their otherwise viable applicant pool on life support until the company figures out what they want to do.

The moral of the story is- through navigating politics, doing your job and perhaps leaving your candidates with an inkling that you took their candidacy seriously- recruiters have many moving targets to contend with. In my experience, recruitment has never been merely about placing someone in a job.  However, more than ever you need to be able to understand the needs of the business, as well as business motivations; all while keeping in the balance your candidate relationships and if applicable compliance obligations.

Circumstances in business are always subject to change, but it is nonetheless difficult for those who are charged with being the face and/or ambassador of the company brand- when your hiring process is marred by disingenuous practices.

If all of what I just described is a clean succession of processes in your organization, congratulations!  You probably work for the minority of companies that genuinely takes all of this seriously and have found ways to mitigate these circumstances. As for the rest of you that are nodding your heads as you read this, keep up the good fight. I salute you!

What are some of those sticky situations you have had to deal with as a recruiter?

Janine Truitt
The Aristocracy of HR

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