The Talent Scout Episode 40: Candidate Attraction During the Holiday Season
The holiday season is approaching, everything is that delightful chaos that it always is at this time of year, you’re trying to finish off the last of your tasks for the year before you take a break, and you suddenly get hit with a business need to have a role filled by early January. Not
The Talent Scout Episode 38: Scout’s Guide to Successful Rating, Ranking, and Initial Screening
As you hopefully know by now, at Scout Talent we are passionate about the world of recruitment. We work with our clients to support as much or as little of their recruitment process as they need us to. One area that we often find ourselves supporting our clients with is the screening process prior to
The Talent Scout Episode 34: Do you need an ATS or a HRIS?
Do you need an Applicant Tracking System or a Human Resources Information System? It’s a very fair question and before we dive into it I’d just like to say that I’ll be using ATS and Applicant Tracking System interchangeably and I’ll do the same for HRIS and Human Resources Information System. HRIS vs ATS We’ve talked a lot about Applicant Tracking Systems on this podcast, at their core they are an effective piece of technology used to streamline and improve your recruitment efforts by storing your candidates all in one place and allowing you to easily manage those candidates throughout a campaign. But what is an HRIS? An HRIS is a tool that combines multiple HR functions, streams, and systems into one place to ensure the easy management of human resources, business processes, and data. Often an HRIS will allow you to keep tabs on employee information, carry out payroll, and also act as an applicant tracking system all in one go. Sounds pretty impressive right? I’m sure your gut reaction is why pay for both an ATS and an HRIS when you can have both covered by the right HRIS. If you can find that HRIS that does everything you need it to, does it well, and most importantly is affordable then I don’t think there’s an argument I can make that might dissuade you from purchasing it. However as the former employee of an organisation that spent two years attempting to implement a pricey HRIS that was going to cover payroll, employee data, pension information, and recruitment – I know first hand how often HRIS tools and software are sold by salespeople who promise a phoenix and deliver a chicken. Think about size and scale If you’re a large organisation that has a significant headcount then yes, you likely do need a centralised HRIS to store that employee data. You would be surprised how important information around start dates and length of service can be, especially in a recession. But, that doesn’t mean you don’t necessarily need an Applicant Tracking System as well. Many HRIS tools are sold as a full end to end solution which would include an Applicant Tracking System. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to see this being very true. The problem is, that most HRIS tools do one or two things exceptionally well and then have other functions, such as recruitment and payroll, chucked in as an afterthought and not given a whole lot of love. These extras, which is often how they’re treated, are usually quite rigid and unable to mold effectively to most organisations. In a past organisation, I worked with we had multiple payrolls that occurred on different dates based on different union agreements; it became quickly apparent that the HRIS we were attempting to implement would, at best, struggle to accommodate this unique aspect of our organisation. ATS and Employer Branding As Employer Branding becomes more of a necessity and Recruitment starts to find itself being pulled from HR and shared between both HR and Marketing, the argument for possessing a highly versatile and separate Applicant Tracking System starts to become a bit more realised. One of the options we offer to our clients with our Applicant Tracking System is that we can integrate its onboarding function with a HRIS. This allows our clients to essentially get the best of both worlds. An excellent applicant tracking system that will fully meet your recruitment needs before successfully transferring the data of hired candidates directly into a centralised HRIS. Whether you need an ATS, a HRIS, or a combination of both ultimately comes down to your individual organisation and where you plan to be. Are you a small to medium-sized organisation that hires seasonal staff frequently? Well, you could probably use an ATS to manage that recruitment but if your headcount is relatively small and stable then a HRIS is likely a cost not worth paying. Are you a large organisation that is planning on downsizing it’s headcount in the next financial year? A HRIS is going to be highly important for this task, an Applicant Tracking System less so. Are you a mid-sized organisation planning on doubling your headcount in the next financial year? You probably need a combination of an ATS and a HRIS. One to help you rapidly increase your headcount and the other to keep track of all those new hires as they enter your organisation. Using an ATS, a HRIS, or a combination of both is going to be a nuanced decision based on where your organisation is now and where you’re aiming to be. There aren’t really any wrong answers but there are certainly some choices that can make achieving your goals a lot harder than they need to be. As with everything tech-related, I would recommend reviewing your goals and the areas of improvement you’ll need to shore up in order to reach those goals. As you review technology and solutions, try to keep those areas of improvement center in your mind and avoid being taken in by flawless end to end solutions. If such a thing existed, we’d all be using it. If you’d like to see how Scout Talent’s ATS can help you to achieve recruitment success, reach out to us at info@scouttalent.com.au or on 1300 366 573
The Talent Scout Episode 32: Using an ATS to Recruit During High Unemployment
This post is written by our Senior Recruitment Marketing Specialist, Shane Keane. It is based on our webinar on the same topic and you can find that here. Recently my colleagues and I here at Scout Talent completed a webinar for our clients on how to get the most out of your Applicant Tracking System
The Talent Scout Episode 31: The Biggest Mistake in Recruitment and How to Avoid It
This post is written by our Senior Recruitment Marketing Specialist, Shane Keane. It is based on our free guide on the same topic and you can find that here. I’ve talked quite extensively about this in webinars, but I don’t think we’ve ever touched on the biggest mistake in recruitment within our podcast series and
The Talent Scout Episode 33: A Guide to Better Shortlisting & Selection
This post is written by our Senior Recruitment Marketing Specialist, Shane Keane. It is based on our guide on the same topic that you can download at the bottom of this post. As we navigate the shifting talent markets of this year one of the biggest challenges facing most recruiters is adapting to the increased
The Talent Scout Episode 29: Scout Talent’s 5 steps to successful Employer Branding
This post is written by our Senior Recruitment Marketing Specialist, Shane Keane. We’ve touched on it before but it’s always useful to not get lost in the conversation and to remind ourselves what we mean when we talk about employer branding. Employer branding is the way you go about cutting through the noise of your competition and connecting powerfully and meaningfully with the very best candidates. At its essence employer branding is all about positioning your organisation as a great place to work for the right people, for the right reasons. There’s a difference between recruitment marketing and regular marketing. Recently in a webinar of ours, I compared and contrasted recruitment marketing, which is a subset of employer branding, and regular marketing. The reason I did this was to acknowledge that yes, they are similar concepts using similar tools but at their foundations, they have different goals. Traditional marketing has the goal of continuously increasing the number of consumers for an organisation, that’s a success for marketing. If recruitment marketing and employer branding continuously increase the number of candidates, that’s a massive failure. Firstly, more candidates does not mean more good candidates, and secondly, more candidates just make it a harder and more time-consuming process to get to your new hire. This means that while consumer marketing and recruitment marketing may use similar tools to achieve their aims, the way they use these tools have to be fundamentally different because their respective goals are hugely different. Your Employer Brand is how your current and future people think and feel about you as an organisation. As you can imagine this is made up of every interaction that these individuals have had with you and your brand and while you can’t control it, you can certainly shape and influence it. But the way you go about shaping and influencing the sentiment that makes up your employer brand shouldn’t be to position yourself as an organisation that appeals to all people; it should be to position yourself so that you are the most appealing organisation to the sort of people who are most likely going to drive your organisation forward. You might consider the phrase “driving your organisation forward” to be a bit hyperbolic but there is truth to it. This is because your employer brand really does determine the quality of your workforce. A strong employer brand is directly linked to and encourages the levels of engagement, motivation, and retention found within your workforce. Each of these factors is also strongly linked to higher revenues, profit margins, and overall return on investment in people operations. Furthermore, recruiters who build a strong employer brand are twice as likely to receive responses from the candidates they contact while companies with a strong employer brand can reduce their cost-per-hire by 50%. Of course, knowing how a strong employer brand can benefit you isn’t enough because the big question is, how do you make employer branding work for you. At Scout Talent when we work with our clients to develop, refine, and activate their employer branding. We do this by using the following 5 Steps to successful employer branding: Understand your audience and your brand Articulate your unique authentic brand Amplify your message to the right people Live your EVP and practice what you pitch Measure your results and grow your impact 1. Understand your audience and your brand To understand your audience and your brand it is critical that you begin by identifying what your target audience values most in their job, career, and even their life. Ask yourself how do each of these facets interact with your talent offering. The best way to do this is to carry out a thorough and robust research process to determine how your employees see you. Try to be as objective as possible or better still, work with an external group who can offer an unbiased viewpoint. Once you’ve carried out this research project use the insights you’ve gained to develop your employer branding themes and the key elements that you can authentically sell your organisation on in order to attract talent. 2. Articulate your unique authentic brand Having unpacked your employer brand, the next step in the process is all about crafting your core proposition and articulating your unique and authentic proposition. At this point, it’s common to establish and realise your employer value proposition statement. However, you should also try to establish your key messaging which quickly and powerfully communicates your “why work for us.” This is a unique and single-line message that you can weave into your talent efforts. If we look at Nike as an example their traditional marketing tagline is “Just do it” while when you enter their careers site the three words that instead greet you in large bold writing are “Move the world”. That’s who they are, that’s what they want for the people who join their organisation and that’s what you’ve got to strive towards when developing and unpacking your employer brand – something that is authentically you and appeals to the individuals who are going to be best suited to grow your organisation. 3. Amplify your message to the right people Armed with research and a robust employer value proposition it’s now time to amplify your message to the right people. In today’s digital world employer branding is no longer a simple matter of booking advertising space with your local media outlet; it takes a little bit more effort and thought to get your message in front of the right people. The best place to start is with a solid and actionable plan. Be focused on what you’re going to do, when you’re going to do it, and how you’re going to measure it. This plan could look like developing a robust library of careers based content and directing it at people considering a career with you either by targeting online places that appeal to those individuals or by weaving this content and collateral into your careers page
The Talent Scout Episode 28: Everything you need to know about Executive Recruitment
This post is written by our Senior Recruitment Marketing Specialist, Shane Keane. It is based on our webinar on the same topic and you can find that here. Every month here at Scout Talent our recruitment specialists offer free webinars on a range of recruitment topics for our clients. I was lucky enough to be
The Talent Scout Episode 27: How to Pick Your Recruitment Technology
This post is written by our Senior Recruitment Marketing Leader, Shane Keane. In keeping with our theme of recruitment technology and leveraging automation to create a great experience for both candidate and hiring manager alike, today we are going to talk about how to choose your ideal recruitment tech stack. What is Recruitment Technology? Of
The Talent Scout Episode 25: Types and benefits of candidate testing
This post is written by our Recruitment Marketing Senior Leader, Shane Keane. I think a lot of us are very guilty of thinking that we are highly intuitive. We often come to a conclusion about a person very quickly after first meeting them and we trust that this opinion is in fact truth. I know that I like to consider myself a highly empathetic, intuitive, and emotionally intelligent person to the point that I often think I’m capable of “reading” a person and knowing who they are. It’s in recent years that I’ve started to practice checking that line of thought by reminding myself that subconscious bias exists and that the way someone presents themselves on the first meeting is not necessarily a true representation of who they are. Be careful of your biases These gut feelings and intuition are ever-present when we are recruiting candidates and if we listen to them during our interview process instead of fully assessing our candidates it’s very easy to fall into the trap of a bad hire who interviews well. When we interview candidates, whether we’re consciously aware of it or not, we’re often appraising them on 3 main criteria to establish their ability to perform on the job. The first of these areas can be called “Appears To”. This is the candidate’s appearance, pose, dress sense, mannerisms and expressiveness, as well as their interests and goals. It’s the area that really has the least impact on a candidate’s ability to be effective in a role and yet it’s the area that most of our gut feeling is based on. The second of these areas has a greater impact on a candidate’s ability to be effective in a role and can be called “Can do”. This area refers to a candidate’s knowledge and skills, their training and education, and their experience. Typically a resume gives us this information and we confirm this or dig a little bit deeper into this during an interview. The third of these areas can be referred to as “Will do” and this is the area that has the biggest impact on a candidate’s ability to be effective in a role. This area refers to a candidate’s attitudes and beliefs, internal motivation, stability and persistence, maturity, intelligence, aptitude, and temperament. These are things that we like to believe we’re all really effective at assessing in an interview but the truth is we’re not. We get caught up in our own biases and false truths from past experiences causing us to draw conclusions about people that simply aren’t true. Now this isn’t an argument against the interview process that we all know. Instead it’s an argument to improve it by combining it with different forms of candidate testing allowing you to make sure you’ve truly seen everything a candidate has to offer. Types of testing There is a huge volume of different tests you can avail of to round out your interview process and give you more insight into how your candidate fairs in terms of “Can do” and “Will do”. Some examples are numerical, verbal, and logical reasoning tests to establish the strengths and weaknesses of candidates in these areas and back up some of their educational and experiential claims. Situational Judgement assessments allow you to perceive how a candidate approaches various scenarios in the workplace by presenting them with a scenario and asking them how they’d likely respond from a multiple choice of options. This can be useful if a candidate is moving from a similar role or industry towards your organisation but if the role is brand new to the candidate, you likely will not glean much of use here. Most of the testing I’ve mentioned covers the “Can do” section that we discussed but doesn’t cast must insight on the aptitudes presented by the “Will do” section. To gain an understanding of a candidate’s “Will do” our best avenue of approach is personality and psychometric testing. The benefits of using candidate testing in your recruitment process I imagine some of you may have rolled your eyes when I mentioned personality tests, certainly the personality test debate is a decades-old dilemma that HR professionals have been pondering for a significant amount of time now. But not only is it useful as a selection tool by giving you insight into how your prospective new hire will perform on the job, it can also be an effective tool for employee retention. In fact, using personality tests such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (also known as MBTI) of the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) may help you better understand your team, the way they think, and who they’ll work well with. Myers Briggs testing and HBDI testing are both personality tests that we offer to our clients, but equally, everyone who joins our organisation undergoes at least one of these tests. It can certainly have a powerful impact on a workplace to better understand how your colleagues work and think, and that has certainly been my experience of these specific tests. There are no right or wrong outcomes when it comes to the results of a personality test. But as I’ve been saying throughout, the findings can help you build a better idea of your prospective candidate beyond just a gut feeling. This in turn will allow you to separate the “ok hires” that will coast within your organisation from the “excellent hires” that will drive your organisation forward. Similarly, personality testing may help you increase employee retention within your organisation by allowing both management and the greater team to become aware of the different ways that other people think, better understand how other people operate and work best, and understanding where personality clashes may occur and how best to resolve them. Using testing is not a sure-fire way to make an excellent hire. But it is a means of removing incorrect bias from your interview process and getting a more robust idea of who your candidates are. If
