The Great Recruitment Reset Featuring Adway, Cornerstone, Broadbean & Enboarder

The Great Recruitment Reset 

Featuring Adway, Cornerstone, Broadbean + Enboarder 

There’s no better way to jump into this fall than with a high-energy panel discussion from an expert lineup of TA thought leaders! 

In early September, Adway’s Senior HR-Tech Advisor & Head of Growth, Viktor Nord, sat down with the immensely insightful Su Oakley and David Nouveau of Cornerstone, along with Alex Fourlis of Broadbean Technology and Chris Jones of Enboarder. 

They covered a LOT of ground in their session about leveraging agile approaches and TA technologies in the ever-changing world of recruitment. Together, they talked about lessons learned since March 2020, specifically the need and opportunity to ‘reset’ recruiting for the long-term with innovative recruitment solutions. 

This is for anyone who’s ready to let agile approaches lead the way in hiring the BEST people with the right skills for your organisation— quickly, efficiently and from anywhere. 

If you have time to watch the full session, check it out below. To learn more about the top takeaways from the hour-long webinar, keep reading!

Creating a Foundation For Agility With Laser-Focused Hiring 

From a recruiter’s point of view, it’s about focusing on processing candidates, rather than trying to find candidates and compel them to apply. If you can figure out how to master this talent acquisition strategy, you can easily start building a foundation for agility. 

A few other tips for creating a foundation for hiring process agility include: 

1. Hone in on your digital marketing recruitment presence. From your career page to employee testimonials, employer reviews, employer branding videos, compelling images and social media job ads. 
    
2. Create your talent pools before you need them.You can build your career pages in advance and ensure everything is fully automated to save time upfront in the process and give it BACK to recruiters meeting the candidates. 
    
3. Build in scenario planning. If the last year and a half have taught us anything, it’s that we need to be prepared for changes on-the-fly. Are you ready for a sudden influx of job openings and applicants? How can you accelerate that process? Plan for each scenario in advance. 
    
4. Benchmark against your competitors. Use raw data to paint a picture of the changing TA environment we’re in and it will start attracting the best candidates into your roles. 
    
5. Ensure hiring managers are fully aware of the process. Particularly in a world where so many are working from home, it’s crucial to make sure each step in the candidate journey is clearly spelled out to close the hire. 
    
6. Automate as many processes as possible and explore new channels like social media recruitment marketing to reach hard-to-get candidates. 
    
7. Use flexible technology to help streamline your digital talent acquisition processes. There is an abundance of useful information in most talent acquisition systems, so finding a way to analyze your talent acquisition metrics can help you identify bottlenecks and become more efficient. 

Removing Unnecessary Hoops From the Hiring Process

There are several steps that can be taken to remove unnecessary snags in the hiring process and drive efficiency and speed: 

1. Have a crystal clear hiring process, particularly from the view of the hiring manager. Help them maximize the hiring experience by automating repetitive tasks, ensuring they’re fully trained on recruiting technologies and onboarding processes and streamlining the necessary signoffs. 
    
2. Approachthe candidate experience like an e-commerce experience. Link your social media job advertisements to the job application itself, so candidates can “check out” in an easy, e-commerce-like fashion. If you make your candidates jump through too many hoops  in the application process, they’re never going to submit the application! No more than three “asks” and thirty seconds should stand in the candidate’s way. 
    
3. Test your own hiring processes. The best way to uncover the unnecessary hoops is to see things from the candidate’s perspective. 
    
4. Speak to your technology providers. Technological updates and developments change with the wind. Before you know it, something new has been integrated. Created an ecosystem with these technology partners to maximize value in the hiring process. 
    
5. Evaluate your results in real time. Don’t wait too long to see results in your online recruitment marketing efforts. Don’t just post an ad, wait a month and then circle back to learn what the click rate was, how many applications came in, etc. Check in sooner in the process so you can refine your recruitment marketing strategy as you go. 

Accelerating High Volume Hiring 

Using gamification techniques, upfront skills assessments and automation can accelerate high-volume hiring. Here’s why: 

1. You get higher quality candidates on your short list. Finding the best candidates requires a wide array of automated tools, but creative job recruitment makes it easier to attract “needle-in-the-haystack” candidates. 
    
2. You can have less recruiters doing more work. This allows you to execute high-quality hiring at a lower cost. 
    
3. It straddles the fine line between maximizingautomation and using ahuman touch. Automation isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it approach to hiring. You have to be even more thoughtful about the personalization aspect of the candidate experience. 
    
4. You can leverage the power of AI and machine learning. There are so many tools available to recruiters and, rest assured, if you’re not using them, your competitors are. Don’t lose your edge in the talent war! 
    
5. You can provide instant feedback in the application process. Showing them exactly how far they are in the application journey helps them know what to expect, decreasing your drop-off rate and leading to a better candidate experience. 
    
6. You can use gamification to help your candidates recognize their best skills. This helps them find their ideal role at your company and tailor their future learning and development opportunities to their unique strengths. 

Eliminating Recruitment Tech Migraines 

When it comes to overcoming the common challenges around integrating recruitment technologies and avoiding the headaches that can go along with this process, there are a few steps you can take to ramp things up more quickly: 

1. Look for providers who can create flexible connections betweentalent acquisition systems. This will make your life easier when it comes to integration. 
    
2. Invest time in assessing data flows. Understand where you need to be getting information from and where you’re pushing it to in order to make the best experience for the candidate and your internal stakeholders. 
    
3. Repurpose your existing data in different processes. Refrain from asking the same questions and obtaining the same data during multiple touchpoints in the talent acquisition process. Repurpose what you already have to enhance the candidate experience by re-populating data in a smart, simple way. 
    
4. Don’t overcomplicate tech implementation. Select your vendors with this concept in mind. Do they have APIs? Do you even need APIs? How can you start implementing at a micro-level, do it step-by-step and then scale your TA tech stack from there? 
    
5. Identify your biggest challenges and find the right tech solution. You don’t need to use catch-all technologies all the time. Start with where your greatest needs in the hiring process lie and use technologies that streamline them specifically, first. 

Questions From the Audience

1. How do Adway’s specific technologies enable recruiters to continue to be agile?
   Recruiters should be able to focus on processing candidates versus finding candidates. Let interviews, assessments, gamification and onboarding be the core competencies recruiters focus on and use automation platforms like Adway to optimize earlier parts of the funnel, i.e. recruitment marketing to target passive candidates and innovative recruitment ads that reach a wider, more diverse audience. This means less time spent sourcing and more time meeting the best talent out there!
   
   
2. How quickly can Adway’s technologies be implemented?
   Adway’s approach to getting job ads on social media can be accomplished within a few days. If you’d like to be a bit more sophisticated, it would require 30-60 days to gather data from your career page and ATS system, draw analyses from that data, and use AI to optimize your recruitment marketing strategy and systems. From there, it will continue to self-improve the longer you use it.
   
   
3. What are the common barriers to resistance with embracing technology when you know the genuine benefits they will bring to the recruitment process? How can these challenges be overcome?
   A common cause of resistance in recruitment is people being so used to the way it’s always been done. One of the key areas to look at when trying to change this mentality with internal stakeholders is thinking about it from the perspective of “what’s in it for them?” What are that person or team’s key pain points in the talent acquisition process? How much time and resources are they spending on the hiring process? Show them there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and these innovative recruitment techniques will reduce the amount of time they’re spending and allow them to invest it in something that adds value back to the organization.