5 lessons recruiters can learn from Game of Thrones

Whether you want to accept it or not, after so many unexpected turns, intense drama, dead-marching, dragon-flying action and breathtaking battles, Game of Thrones has come to an end last Sunday.

But before we start to say goodbye, here are 5 lessons that recruiters can learn from the Seven Kingdoms. Because let’s face it, recruitment can be as messy as a Game of Thrones episode!

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Sense Guest Blog: Developing your Candidate Journeys For Maximum Business Impact

This blog post was written by Alexandra Kane, Head of Marketing at our valued partner, Sense. 

Every candidate is on their own talent journey, and that starts way before they hit apply. Developing a candidate engagement strategy is top of mind for every staffing firm, but most don’t know where to start. Firms are spending large chunks of their budgets on job boards, but did you know almost 50% of them are already in your ATS? A staffing firm’s ATS is a treasure trove of candidates perfect to fill many open recs. Proactive outreach to your existing database of candidates should be a no brainer that will save your firm time and money. But setting up a discovery and engagement program from scratch is a daunting task. At Sense, we help staffing firms activate their candidate pool every day by not only helping identify dormant talent, but getting the conversation started. The Sense platform supports your candidates 24/7, so your recruiters can better manage their time (and get some sleep). Here are some tips for leveraging Erecruit and Sense, to get the most out of your candidate engagement strategy from the start.

Building a relationship with candidates means taking them on a talent journey based on where they are, to get to where you want them to be…. PLACED. These relationships are built way before most firms realize. Your employer brand is built through every interaction you have with a candidate, from a LinkedIn post to a networking event to the on-site interview experience. Sense helps you make sure these interactions are consistent across platforms and recruiters. Candidates need to be aware of you, and what you can offer them, before they even engage. And companies that focus on making talent their competitive advantage, ultimately win.

A few key things to keep in mind when mapping your candidate journeys:

  • Keep it simple – don’t overwhelm your candidates with information or ask them to do a lot of work. Your goal is to start a conversation so that your recruiters can consult from there.
  • Don’t over personalize the message – this seems counterintuitive but candidates don’t want to be told what they want, and you put yourself at higher risk of coming off tone deaf.
  • Meet them where they are – segment and understand your audience before you develop your journeys because delivering a relevant message in the right way at the right time is key to success.
  • Use a mix of mediums – don’t just spam your candidates with tons of emails, mix in personalized SMS messages to create a unique candidate experience and shorten response times.
  • Junk in equals junk out – in the age of automated candidate engagement, the quality of your candidate data is a competitive advantage that separates the winners from the losers.

What journeys do you need to move the needle? Get started with these five and start seeing the immediate business impact of candidate engagement.

Passive-to-Active Journey:

You never know when placed candidates or inactive candidates might start looking for a new role. Your job is to develop a relationship by constantly continuing the conversation about their talent journey.

V1: Automated Check-ins. Whether it is a simple happy birthday message or a holiday check in, these messages open the door for candidates to say “I’m looking!”
V2: For your contracted placements, check-in towards their projected end date to see if anything has changed. This keeps your records up to date, but also allows you to efficiently and seamlessly redeploy your best talent to your next open rec.
V3: Check in on job satisfaction for your placements a few months in. This not only helps you get ahead of churn but also can help your recruiters make sure that candidate finds the right fit.

Hiring Process Support:

Changing roles is an incredibly emotional time for candidates. Your recruiters are their guides through this journey, and can finally give every candidate white glove treatment!

V1: Automated reminders: Candidates are so busy these days that they often forget to follow through and click “apply.” Send application reminders to candidates who have shown interest but haven’t applied yet. Reduce your candidate no show rates by sending them interview reminders with critical information. Not only will your candidates be grateful but your clients will be happier too.
V2. Silver medalists: During the interview process, candidates are the most engaged with your firm. Don’t let that moment go to waste if they don’t get the job because strong candidates are hard to come by. Using custom tags from your ATS, re-engage active candidates with other roles and opportunities that might be relevant to them. Fill more roles while making quality candidates feel valued.
V3: Ask for feedback: Part of what differentiates one staffing firm from another is the way in which they manage candidates during the hiring process. It is never too soon to ask your candidates to fill out a quick NPS. The insights your recruiters will gain from candidates in the hiring process will help prevent a leaky funnel from source to hire.

Onboarding:

The period between offer letter to start date is one of the most critical periods in a candidate’s hiring journey, but it gets almost no time or attention. With dropoff rates as high as 25%, it is critical that the administrative tasks associated with onboarding a new placement are completed in a timely manner. If not, start dates can get delayed – or worse, you have a no-show! – and is a terrible experience for both candidates and clients.

V1: Give them all the information. When one of your candidates get an offer, make sure you congratulate them and let them know how to officially accept. Once they sign, remind them of their start date and provide all the critical logical information they need to know. The drop off for candidates on day one is almost X%, way higher than it should be. Make sure that your candidates know what is going on, and that they show up day one.
V2. Documentation and data. This period is perfect for verifying key information on your candidates. Some examples include contact information, W-2 address, and credentials.
V3. Ask how things are going. Check-in on your placements to make sure things are going smoothly. Are they set up with payroll? Do they like their manager? How was their hiring experience? Now is the perfect time for capturing candidate NPS.

Placement Maintenance:

When you have active placements, it is important not to let them slip through the cracks. Candidates and clients alike crave a channel for expressing their experience. Providing regular check-ins and being available to answer questions makes your firm indispensable to both candidates and clients.

V1. Keep the machine oiled. Send reminders to candidates about benefits, timecards, and other critical duties. Proactive reminders prevent you from having to chase down placements and fix administrative nightmares.
V2. Maintain the buzz. Get your happy placements to share their experience online and with friends. This is the perfect time to ask for referrals and social reviews on sites like Glassdoor.
V3. Continue the conversation. Keep checking in and asking how things are going, whether in NPS form or something more casual. You will learn information that will help you better serve your clients and your candidates.

Win the Alumni:

It is almost as critical to communicate with candidates during the offboarding process as it is during the onboarding process. Once your candidates have decided to move on, you want to be there to help them transition. This will mean higher redeployment rates, referral numbers, and NPS scores.

V1. Offboarding Administration. There are a lot of boxes to check here which means your candidate will need support in getting through all of them. This provides another opportunity to update your records and make sure your candidates have everything they need.
V2. Redeployment. About a month before your candidate’s placement is about to end, you should be reaching out to see if they are looking for another role. If they are, this is a great time to shift them into the hiring journey so they can fill your next open role.
V3. Build an alumni network. Delivering additional resources and well wishes to your community of past placements is a great way to drive engagement and referrals. If you do this well, these candidates will think of you the next time they are looking for a role, or when one of their friends starts looking.

The fun has only just begun once you have these journeys in place using Sense. Not only will you be able to start automatically delivering a positive and memorable candidate experience, you can start to benchmark your teams performance in new and meaningful ways.

Using Sense built-in analytics, staffing leaders can start to more accurately track critical business metrics in aggregate. Examples of this include candidate NPS, candidate fall-off, attrition, redeployment, time to place, referrals, and more. The key to unlocking your firm’s full potential is getting a complete picture of your candidates’ journeys through data. And its impact to the bottom line.

Ready to get started? Reach out to learn more about how Sense and Erecruit work together to deliver complete talent journey automation. Or come meet us in person next month at the SIA Exec Forum and Erecruit customer conference in Austin.


About the Author

Alexandra Kane, Head of Marketing, Sense

Alexandra is the currently Head of Marketing at Sense, where she leads product marketing, demand generation, brand and PR.

Prior to joining Sense, Alexandra served as the Head of Marketing at Chorus.ai, the leading AI-powered Conversation Intelligence platform, and the Director of Marketing at Zenreach, the world’s first online to offline attribution and WiFi powered marketing platform built for offline businesses. Previously, she served as an associate at Scout Capital Management, and a founding member of the Emjoyment leadership team, a mobile first recruitment marketplace for top young college graduates.

Alexandra holds a BSc and MSc in both Social Anthropology and Economics with highest distinction from the London School of Economics.

The 5-Star Fallacy: How Uber Ruined the Single-Point Rating System

The numbers don’t lie – unemployment is at a near all-time low and there seem to be new articles coming out every week about labor shortages and skill gaps across the globe – from IT to manufacturing to healthcare and beyond. And each of these institutions need to start coming up with new ways to tackle this ever-growing chasm in the demand for talent.

If You Build It, They Will Come
With more companies reporting that filling job vacancies is becoming increasingly difficult due to gaps in the necessary skills required for the job against those who are willing to work, it’s crucial that we seek creative and alternative ways to close the gap.
As part of this year’s World Economic Forum (aka Davos) a new report was published about the future of work, emphasizing that employers can no longer rely solely on new workers entering the labor market with the right ready-made skills, and that retraining and reskilling talent for this Fourth Industrial Revolution “are essential levers to fuel future economic growth, enhance societal resilience in the face of technological change and pave the way for future-ready education systems for the next generation of workers”.[1]  With the continual changes in the workforce and technology, approximately 1.4 million Americans will lose their jobs in the next eight years. Without developing new or refining existing skills, 41% (~575,000) will have very little to no work opportunities.
Data: World Economic Forum and Bureau of Labor Statistics (via Axios); Chart: Chris Canipe / Axios
[1] (Towards a Reskilling Revolution, 2018)

Amy Yackowski is the Director of Healthcare Best Practices for Erecruit, Enterprise Staffing Software & VMS. She is an avid 90s game show watcher and seeker of new ways to improve the contingent workforce management experience for staffing agencies and their clients. Amy is responsible for helping Erecruit healthcare customers develop their framework, analyze their business processes and optimize their use, effectiveness and efficiency of the Erecruit solutions to boost their profitability. Join her in conversation on Twitter, LinkedIn and ayackowski@erecruit.com.

Rachael Moss talks to idibu about Candidate Engagement

Candidate Engagement: Cultural or Economic Shift?

Steve Walker from idibu, a multi-sourcing and candidate engagement platform, interviews Rachael Moss, Group Marketing Director, erecruit, to get her views on how to win at candidate engagement.

Interview by Steve Walker, CTO and Founder of idibu.

Steve: So, lets keep this light. What’s the meaning of life?

Rachael: Oh my God! The meaning of life? Enjoyment. Being happy.

Steve: What did you have for breakfast this morning?

Rachael: A bowl of muesli.

Steve: Alright good. Interview is over.

Rachael and Steve: *Laugh*

Steve: Ok, to business. What do you think the average effectiveness of a recruitment agency’s marketing strategy is?

Rachael: I think that most recruitment agencies focus on the client equation and that’s also true of even some recruitment technology. Historically we’ve been very client-led because it’s the client that pays direct to you.

And I think actually what consultants would be better doing is to focus on candidate engagement. And actually that’s the whole point of TempBuddy. It takes a candidate-centric approach and it’s a really different.

Steve: Do you think candidate engagement is driven from a cultural shift? Or an economic shift?

Rachael: I think it’s both. But I think it is society now has become far more peer to peer, it’s much more open, it’s more transparent, it’s more accountable. People talk via Glassdoor, I’m not sure how widely that is used in the UK. But certainly, if you’re not happy, you can talk about it on Facebook / Social Media and that carries weight.

We’re now very familiar with 360 degree ratings, as candidates or consumers – people have got much bigger share with voice and they’ve got more channels.

Steve: So just as we have Trump tweeting, so we do with candidates – and fortunately the potential noise is kind of the same.

Rachael: We do and that in itself, is an interesting question because there is too much noise from every direction – not just recruitment agencies but marketing in particular.

We need to understand and segment properly – to channel down on the of focus – to find ways of monitoring that noise, and then practice putting in the right conversation.

Steve: When you look at social media, how un-effectively, and I’m leading the question here… How un-effectively are you seeing it being used by recruitment agencies?

Rachael: I think there are some agencies that do it well and then there are other agencies that are just scary. For example, they add a Twitter button to their website, it opens up to encourage a share, but doesn’t even feed back to the page they’ve shared!

Then you’ve got another group who just don’t understand it’s about conversation, it’s about engaging, and literally their feed is just jobs. 100% jobs. And let’s be honest, why would you even follow that unless you’re job hunting and you’re very going to very quickly switch that off?

And then I’d say there’s a middle group who are generally much better and understand that “OK, I’ll post some jobs but in between I need to share content as well” – but they are still mis-using it as a push channel rather than really listening or understanding, or even responding to what some of those questions and themes are.

Steve: What’s your favourite social network as a professional marketer?

Rachael: Oh interesting, I have been a huge Twitter fan and I’ve been using it for a very long time… I love Twitter because its current. If I want to find something out, my first go to is find it on Twitter rather than Google because with Google you’ll get the most prevalent search rather than the most recent.

And LinkedIn obviously, you can’t ignore LinkedIn as a platform. It’s an incredibly good professional networking system without question. But also for me now, Facebook is becoming more relevant in order to to talk to your candidates, and it’s becoming more used as a professional network in the US.

It’s all about understanding what these channels are and using them intelligently and testing. It depends on what your defined objectives are.

Steve: It’s interesting that Twitter seems to be losing its market value and at the same time, I think from a professional value standpoint, it seems to be increasing.

Rachael: I think it’s doing that partly because they’ve failed to understand how to monetize it – they’ve been less, strong perhaps in terms of the paid social campaigns that you have there. It still works well for you if you have built a solid Twitter follower base.

If you’re following the right people, and they’re following you back – you’ll be reaching the right audience and by additionally targeting those that can influence a group… *then* you’ll get great results.

Steve: What do you personally like to use to increase productivity, either to reduce “busy-ness” and create space in your life or to increase results. Do you have any methodologies, software products, anything you’d like to share?

Rachael: I’m hearing good things about Trello.

Steve: I’ve heard positive things too, it seems to work well on both the personal and team levels.

Rachael: Yeah, and we may see that two parts of our business will use that for collaboration, sharing, brain storming, thinking, but outside more of a formalized google docs environment – it’s definitely on my agenda for the next couple of weeks.

Steve: A well known and useful productivity habit is to always define “what’s the one thing I’m going to achieve today that really important, to allow me to tick one thing off my list and therefore define the day as a success.” Do you ever do that?

Rachael: You can get very busy with the day to day can’t you… The fact is our business is in a transitional stage, and that means deadlines – fitting everything in, working to other team members timelines.

You can also get caught up in social media – I have nothing against going into it, getting a snapshot of what’s going on. But then you must come out to regain focus on other activities.

Somebody once said to me if you fill your bucket with too many small activities, there’s never room for the really big stuff – I actually have that as a reminder above my desk. Tick-off the big rocks first!

I heard about the concept on a training course years ago – if you fill the bucket/jar with small tasks (grains of sand), there’s no space left for the big tasks/projects, but if you complete the big stuff first you can still fit in some of the smaller stuff (emails/tweets etc). I think in our uber connected world it’s very easy to get distracted, so we need this message/reminder/discipline more than ever.

Steve: That’s an excellent productivity habit!

What about noise. How do you find space in the noise?

Rachael: You might not describe it as mindfulness, but for me, having a break to look at media like Twitter, reading some topics and articles that helps me to be thoughtful, to understand some of the broader topics happening in the business… and I think you can do this, almost subliminally to help push your thinking in other areas and not just be 100% task-focused. The other thing is I do is regularly get up for couple of minutes, grab a drink or whatever, come back again – you need to move physically.

Steve: Marketing for me is really a combination of creative plus good process. And you need to have space to be creative.

Rachael: Yes! And for me marketing is always about having an outside view as well. As a marketer you can’t just sit inside your own world – you’ve got to see competitor trends, understand the bigger trends, take the time to research, and inform other people in the organization what is happening.

So you can also see a part of marketing as also being about the collaboration, the negotiating, and even working with competitors, having dialogues, having conversations, and ensuring you’re always being challenged professionally as well.

Steve: Rachael, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me.

Rachael: Thank you, you’re welcome.

(Previously published at idibu.com)

Roderick Smyth talks to idibu about the History of TempBuddy, Techniques to Develop Better Technology, and Improving Personal Productivity

Interview by Steve Walker, CTO and Founder of idibu.

Steve: Tell me how TempBuddy come about?

Rod: We founded the business three years ago – coming off my own need to do something in the time card space, eventually coming to the thinking of changing process and changing the outcome as well, rather than just fixing or building a product that does what other products do.
The first 12 months were about building the MVP and getting the team together. We launched in February 2015 whilst also juggling two businesses… until October 2015 when this became my entire focus.

Steve: Do you think the CRM market is too crowded?

Rod: It is very crowded – and for me there’s not just enough differentiation. The products out there are designed for data input and data capture. They are not designed to help business outcomes. A key lesson I learned through the process of TempBuddy was focusing on the client business outcome – and aligning what you’re building to meet that outcome. Not on how they do stuff but meeting the outcome. It gives you much better product direction.

Steve: Can you expand on what you mean by “outcome”?

Rod: The majority of businesses want to grow their profitability, their revenue, or their quality – to better serve their clients and meet their objectives. When you skip past the “How do I currently do this process?”, and ask the question “What is the best way to achieve higher, faster growth and profitability?”, it lets you look at the business itself, where the efficiencies and opportunities are, and then focus on just doing those things. Tackle the really big wins. One of those was the in the Temp side of the business, the vast majority of the recruiters time being taking up by managing availability and admin task-related time sheets.

If I look at product build, typically the CRM approach has been: I avail the products to do all parts of the process. So, I transfer what they do at the moment on the screen, which doesn’t really improve the process, it just puts them in a different place.

When you focus on business outcome, you say “Okay, one of the big barriers to growth is I can’t hire 100 new recruiters because they’re not easy to find etc. So I need to change my process to be more efficient… What’s the biggest bottle neck in my process? It’s in the availability and management of those time sheets. So you build a product that focuses on fixing those problems and does it really well.

Steve: Do you have a WHY of TempBuddy?

Rod: Absolutely. We want to change people’s lives for the better. We want to make flexible work easier and more rewarding. I want to empower agencies to provide a better level of service and a better employment environment for the workers.

When you think about what causes stress in life… getting married, moving house, changing jobs – one thing that’s often forgotten is that a temp worker changes and adapts practically daily. They’re going to new places of employment all the time. The consistent part of their lives is the agency that they work with. For quality of life, you need to have some balance, and the agency should be able to provide it.
They can’t provide it running around doing inefficient admin tasks. They need to be able to focus on the wellbeing of their employees; of the quality of work their employees are giving their end clients. And if they focus on those factors, they will attract more employees, they will provide a better quality of service to their clients, and ultimately this is what the end-client wants.

They want to have quality people who will produce quality work because that makes all of their businesses more efficient. Focusing on the wellbeing of their employees leads to a better outcome for everyone. We want to make the technology that gives them the tools and capabilities to do that. That’s what drives us.

Steve: Tell me more about the re-invention of process through technology?

Rod: The method of meeting clients’ requirements is often based on what they currently do, not how they should be doing things. For example, taking your legacy processes that you built around paper and converting it into a digital format.

Going back to the time sheets scenario… When I looked at how to solve the problem, I had to first understand why time sheets existed in their current form. Why does this piece of paper get signed by a manager, get signed by recruiter?

The simple answer was that the time sheet’s purpose is so that procurement – isolated from the front side of the business, can understand from somebody they trust (normally a line Manager) that a piece of work took place. Somebody turned up at a place, at a time, and did a piece of work. And the reason that this process works is because they trust the person that’s signing that sheet.

If you circumvent and bypass that using technology, that means putting biometrics, geo-location and other factors that will give procurement the same level of trust and comfort, but without having to go to through the same process to get there.

To really accelerate the growth of a business, you must improve processes. Too often technology starts off being built around replicating what the process currently does.

You need to properly utilize the tools that now exist. We don’t have stables everywhere to house our horses anymore, because we don’t use horses to get to places. The means of travel from A to B is a car, but the route to get from A to B has not changed. The process of how you achieve your goals changes over time.

Steve: Can you tell me about one or two personal methods of productivity that you have adopted as an entrepreneur and embedded into your life?

Rod: I do have a one thing that strikes me as really important – the advice I got from a mentor of mine, Kathy Murray. She’s an investor in TempBuddy and a good friend. She advised me long ago that how you achieve more in what you do – in business or anywhere else in life – is not focusing on the “urgent, important task”, it’s to focus on the “not urgent but important tasks”.

Steve: Yes, this one of the classic pieces of advice from Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” in what he calls “Put First Things First”, encouraging you to work in this “Second Quadrant”. I use this a lot as well, it’s been an instrumental tool in my task list prioritization methods over the past years.

Rod: Absolutely. That’s what I’m trying to achieve. You can’t always do it with the inevitable noise, but as long as you keep that front of mind, then the things that are urgent and important become much easier to delegate. Get those off your desk and get them delegated so you can focus on the things that are “not urgent, but highly important”.

Steve: How do you organize your tasks, what products do you use?

Rod: I’m 100% inbox. I just use my Gmail for everything.

Steve: Do you use any productivity software that works on top of Gmail to do that?

Rod: No. I process what I can, offload as much as I can quickly, and I have a target of ensuring there’s not more than 10 to 50 items left to work through by the end of the day-

Steve: You have a written list?

Rod: I work off a daily to-do list but if there’s a task that’s carrying over, it goes back to my Gmail. And that drives me to make sure that I never more than have 50 items in my entire task list. If it’s going past that, then I have to delegate more to someone else.

Steve: Do you have any morning routines?

Rod: Yeah, I listen to some music. Deal with family, get kids off to school, and then get at least 5 minutes of some music to lift me up. A bit of quiet time and then straight into the task list carried over from the night before via my email.

Steve: Do you ever ask the question “What’s that single most important task to achieve in a given day?”

Rod: Going into every night and every morning, I have one task as my top priority that I need to get done that day. You just get it nailed as early as you can. That task could be a successful meeting, something you need to produce, a conversation you need to have or whatever else. But definitely, you have to have one overriding goal each day

Steve: Rod, thank you very much for your time – and congratulations on creating such an awesome business.

Rod: Thank you, Steve – I really appreciate it.

(Previously published at idibu.com)

The SIA’s Staffing Industry Review magazine article on TempBuddy: “If Uber were a staffing firm…”

If Uber were a staffing firm…

When you push the magic button on your phone to request a driver, an email is sent to one of the thousands of Uber “taxi recruiters” around the country. The taxi recruiter searches its database of registered drivers for those with the same zip code as the passenger, and begins calling those drivers one by one to find out their exact position and availability. Once the recruiter finds a driver close enough who is on duty, they make them another to pick up the passenger who requested the ride. If the driver accepts, the order is confirmed and the driver is emailed instructions to pick up the passenger, with a purchase order and time sheet generated and emailed, which are to be printed, filled out and returned by the taxi driver at the end of the week, along with all other purchase orders. The taxi recruiter then calls the passenger to inform them a driver is enroute.

Fortunately for modern-day urbanites, this is not how Uber deploys its drivers. According to Dublin, Ireland-based TempBuddy, it’s not how staffing firms should deploy their temporary workforces, either. TempBuddy is a technology platform designed to make staffing recruiters more efficient in deploying temporary workforces, while increasing candidates’ engagement with the clients and staffing agencies they work with. The platform uses candidates’ mobile phones to give real time availability and deployment capability. The goal is to turn a passive temporary database into an “on-demand” workforce.

“Our technology accelerates the pace at which a staffing recruiter is able to deploy their temp workforce, and ensures they deploy their best people first,” said CEO and founder Roderick Smyth. “That opens up the opportunity for recruiters to make more placements, and focus on high-value, revenue-generating services. We give recruiters back 30 to 50 percent of their day.” The platform includes additional services such as compliance, scheduling, and paying and billing, and can integrate into existing systems and infrastructures. The firm charges a percent of the spend that runs through the platform as its fee. Full implementation takes three to six weeks, depending on the complexity of the temporary workforce.

Launched in 2013, the service now has more than 50 customers and a run rate of €120 million (US$131.1 million) in staffing spend as of the end of 2015. Its current trajectory puts it on track to achieve €400 to €500 million managed through its platform in 2016.
The Buzz TempBuddy offers an innovative way to “Uberize” staffing firms’ temporary workforces, and helps recruiters focus on what matters most: placing people and making money.

Previously published on the Staffing Industry Analyst’s website on 22/02/2016.