Talent Acquisition Excellence - July 2022

JULY 2022 • Vol.10 • No.07 (ISSN 2564-1964)

Themed Edition on

Emerging Workforce

Ageism In Recruitment: Why We Need To Change The Way We Think - David Bernard, CEO and Founder, AssessFirst

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Use The Force: Tapping Into The Power Of The Emerging Workforce - Ron Thomas, Strategy Focused Group

21

The Death Of Job Postings And The Birth Of The Working Interview - Jeffrey David Harris Impact Recruitment

31

39

How To Create A Successful Internship Program

Gen Z: What Every Hiring Pro Needs To Know

- Jordan Bridges Sweetwater

- Ben Tuttle,

Adopt the practicesProliant, thatInc best suit your organization’s needs

INDEX

Talent Acquisition Excellence JULY 2022

Vol.10

No.07

(ISSN 2564-1964)

08

Ageism In Recruitment: Why We Need To Change The Way We Think

Themed Edition on

Emerging Workforce

Ageism can negatively impact the market if we do not make necessary changes soon

On the Cover

- David Bernard,

CEO and Founder, AssessFirst

Articles 10

Unlocking The Power Of People Data: The Untold DEI&B Story Four reasons to adopt people analytics - Amy Mosher, Chief People Officer, isolved 1

13

Job Switching: Top 3 Reasons Offer Key To Recruitment And Retention We are at the crossroads of the future of work—employees must be clear on their priorities - John Woods, Provost and Chief Academic

26

CEO and Principal Strategist, exaqueo

36

Job Candidates Seek A Fair Shot At Hiring Highlights from Criteria’s 2022 Candidate Experience Report - Josh Millet Founder and CEO, Criteria

43

Tech Recruiting And Hiring: Saluda A America Latina In search of qualified, available tech talent destination - Lachlan de Crespigny, Co-Founder, Revelo

45

The Talent Gap Analysis Playbook For Recruiting And Hiring Everything you ever wanted to know about talent gap analysis - Hanson Cheng, Founder, Freedom to Ascend.

Officer, University of Phoenix

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Getting High On Your Own Apply: Why Screening Out Applicants Is The Opposite of Inclusion Here are some small steps that can make a big impact on the lives and livelihoods of the hourly workforce.

- Omer Molad, Co-Founder & CEO, Vervoe

In Their Shoes: How To Engage And Attract Gen Z? How today’s world is influencing career, job search, content, and channel preferences of students and recent grads - Shannon Smedstad Senior Employer Brand Strategist, exaqueo Susan LaMotte, Founder,

Top Picks

15

INDEX

Use The Force: Tapping Into The Power Of The Emerging Workforce It’s time to rethink your workforce dynamics - Ron Thomas, Managing Director, Strategy

Focused Group

21

The Death Of Job Postings And The Birth Of The Working Interview Technology will match right talent to the right jobs in future - Jeffrey David Harris, Founder & CEO,

31

Impact Recruitment

How To Create A Successful Internship Program 4 key elements of a successful internship program - Jordan Bridges, Talent Acquisition Specialist, Sweetwater

39

Gen Z: What Every Hiring Pro Needs To Know 4 themes that form the building blocks to create the foundation for Gen Z recruiting success - Ben Tuttle, Product Manager

with Proliant, Inc

Editorial Purpose Matt Charney

Our mission is to promote personal and

Talent Acquisition Community Leader

professional development based on constructive values, sound ethics, and timeless principles.

Excellence Publications Debbie McGrath

CEO, HR.com - Publisher

Dawn Jeffers VP, Sales

Sue Kelley

Varying Degrees: The Dangerous Truth About The Global Emerging Workforce

F

or all the amorphous content and abstract conversations around the rising ubiquity of “Gen Z” at work, the fact of the matter is that in actual practice, campus and new graduate recruitment is often among the most overlooked and under-resourced strategic functions in talent acquisition.

Director (Product, Marketing, and Research)

Babitha Balakrishnan and Deepa Damodaran

Excellence Publications Managers and Editors

Talent Acquisition Excellence Team Matt Charney

Talent Acquisition Community Leader

Deepa Damodaran Editor

Chinnavel

Design and Layout (Digital Magazine)

Vibha

Magazine (Online Version)

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This is nothing new - employers have long treated the emerging workforce and entry level employees with something approaching hiring hubris, the historical surplus of college graduates (both recent and impending) has long exceeded employer demand for entry level positions.

Data suggests, however, that the pendulum is perceptibly, and perhaps permanently, shifting, the result of a perfect demographic storm of steadily declining workforce participation, plummeting enrollment and graduation rates at postsecondary institutions around the world and the proliferation and relative popularity of non-traditional, “gig” and freelance work arrangements among younger workers.

As a result, in the post pandemic world of work, entry level hiring and new graduate recruitment has become more cutthroat, competitive and costly for employers across markets, verticals and sizes. With experienced employees turning over at historical highs, the direct and indirect cost of acquiring skilled and professional level workers is forcing many businesses to reimagine, redevelop and reinvent their approach to entry level hiring and emerging workforce development.

This month’s issue of Talent Acquisition Excellence will take a deep dive into the new world of graduate and entry level hiring in the US and around the world, and what employers in every market and industry need to do know to compete for, and win, their top talent of tomorrow, today.

Whether you’ve got a dedicated campus recruiting team or your emerging talent strategy is just in time, all the time, or if you just want a little bit of insight into those crazy kids who are now somehow your professional colleagues and coworkers (even if they make fun of the fact that you’re still using Facebook), then this issue is definitely required recruiting reading.

We’re bringing you bylines from some of the industry’s best and brightest as they explore the seismic shifts we’ve seen in the global graduate and Copyright © 2022 HR.com. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher. Quotations must be credited.

EDITOR’S NOTE the majority of them find their roles not through campus career centers or internship programs, but instead, through Indeed, just like the rest of us (although they’re much less likely to use LinkedIn, which means there’s still hope for the future).

entry level recruitment landscape, discuss the emerging best practices and real world strategies reshaping the future of the function, and share some of the newest tips, tools and tricks of the emerging talent trade.

Of course, the more things change, the more they stay the same - and emerging workforce recruiting is no exception. Everyone in their early career is going to come across as entitled, impatient and contrarian - that’s kind of what happens when you’re just starting out and have no experience with the vagaries of office politics, the ambiguities of the knowledge economy or, you know, being real adults with real jobs.

They’re also more likely to prefer a hybrid work arrangement than fully remote; they rate job titles as minimally important but are most motivated by the chance to learn new skills and gain as broad a range of experience as possible, and they’d rather grow with a single employer rather than constantly jump ship for a better job offer (at least, according to myriad surveys and studies).

In fact, the only thing that’s really all that different about Gen Z is that they don’t personally identify with that term, and the majority find it “offensive or prejudiced.” That’s why the first trick to recruiting the emerging workforce is to stop calling them “Gen Z” and conflating that term with emerging workers, which is both age agnostic and recognizes that professional inexperience is not a work style or world view - it’s the equivalent to a rite of passage in late stage capitalism.

One thing that I’d like every reader to remember, however, is that generational theory has been widely discredited since the days when, you know, those Millennials created a whole cottage industry of HR handwringing.

Also, age is a protected class, which means that every time you talk about “Gen Z” (or any other generational cohort) in sweeping stereotypes and overgeneralizations, you’re really just demonstrating extreme hiring bias and undermining your “commitment” to DEIB, which is seemingly pretty important in TA these days.

Trust me. I’m a Millennial.

Now, where’s the trophy I was supposed to get for showing up?

That is, except when it comes to those constantly connected, socially conscious, community minded and increasingly progressive workers who make up your emerging workforce. But here’s the thing - you’d do well to remember that age ain’t nothing but a number, and that Gen Z really isn’t all that different from any other demographic at your workplace.

Matt.

Write to the Editor at ePubEditors@hr.com

They’re more influenced by cash and direct comp than any other incentive when considering employment offers;

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COVER ARTICLE

Ageism In Recruitment: Why We Need To Change The Way We Think Ageism can negatively impact the market if we do not make necessary changes soon

By David Bernard, AssessFirst

W

hile both older and younger generations have suffered the effects of ageism in the workplace, those that sit within older age groups seem to have borne the brunt of this harmful way of thinking in recent years.

only 24% of HR leaders between the ages of 25 and 30 saying they felt motivated to recruit workers in the 55 to 75 age category, younger generations’ preconceptions seem to be one of the main problems.

The ageism trend has only been accelerated by the repercussions of Covid-19. After the pandemic, Baby Boomers and a significant portion of Gen X took early retirement, deciding against returning to full-time work due to the shortage of opportunities available to them.

The new generations’ bias is causing them to miss out on the plethora of benefits that working hand-in-hand with people of different ages can have, but also contributing to existing issues within the recruitment industry.

With individuals over 50 leaving work due to lack of support having been identified as the biggest cause of labor shortage across the UK, ageism has the potential to have a detrimental impact that extends far beyond the damage to individuals and businesses.

The recruitment crisis is still rampant in the UK, as the number of unfilled positions has risen to a new record of 1,300,000 between March and May 2022, up from 1,295,000 in the February and April quarter.

Here, let us discuss ageism within recruitment practices, while sharing valuable insight into the negative impact it is likely to have on the market if we do not make necessary changes.

The Issues with Recruitment in the UK Hiring managers’ bias towards employing older individuals has been known to be one of the main causes of ageism within recruitment, and with

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And retention is a problem too, with figures revealing that around 994,000 individuals moved jobs between January and March 2022 in the UK. This shows that businesses are not putting enough effort into retaining their workforce, making them feel valued and presenting them with a path for future progression.

Additionally, if we are only willing to offer employment to the younger generations, older age groups will

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Ageism In Recruitment: Why We Need To Change The Way We Think

or subconsciously – avoided hiring those within older age groups, and why.

While having three or four different generations within the workplace may potentially lead to some minor generational clashes, it also has the potential to be beneficial for all age groups, which is why businesses should empower individuals of different ages to work together.

naturally feel there are no longer any opportunities available to them, opting for early retirement instead, which is likely to cause the recruitment crisis to become worse in the next few years.

Why Are Current Recruitment Practices Not Working?

This should involve utilizing behavioral science to identify key traits in individuals to establish whether they will be able to work well together, regardless of age. Knowing exactly how workers collaborate with other individuals, manage stress, or react to change are all factors that can help hiring managers make the right decisions and avoid age bias.

The implications of ageist hiring practices are multifaceted, but their effects have undoubtedly been felt by many job seekers within older age groups.

Hiring managers should first and foremost establish what individuals’ abilities are, how they behave in different situations and what sets them in motion.

A research project investigating ageism in recruitment in the UK revealed that around 30% of individuals, between the ages of 50 and 69, felt the application process itself put them at a disadvantage because of their age, while around 23% of those who participated said that it is the way that job adverts are written and marketed that is particularly problematic.

While there is no one answer for every business, our focus should be on making hiring practices as inclusive as possible, which starts with making decisions based on data and focusing on skills and qualities that truly matter.

These findings provide interesting food for thought for recruiters: biased screening processes and job descriptions could easily put off certain individuals from applying for a job, causing businesses to lose a potentially perfect candidate. For instance, hiring processes that are entirely digital or that require the use technology that older individuals may not be familiar with would naturally penalize older applicants.

Evaluating the efficacy of their recruitment practices should be the first step for hiring managers and talent acquisition teams, particularly establishing whether these include any elements or processes that would ostracise certain individuals.

What’s the Answer?

If an organization has built teams predominantly comprising younger individuals, they should consider asking themselves whether they have – consciously Talent Acquisition Excellence presented by HR.com

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Ultimately, biased hiring practices are exacerbating the labor shortage and causing businesses to miss out on a huge portion of talented workers capable of really making a difference.

David Bernard is the CEO and Founder of AssessFirst. He is an entrepreneur specializing in the prediction of human behavior. A firm believer that traditional CV-based hiring is both broken and biased, David is passionate about the performance and correct placement of talented people.

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Unlocking The Power Of People Data: The Untold DEI&B Story Four reasons to adopt people analytics

By Amy Mosher, isolved

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oday’s predictive people analytics solutions – particularly when part of an intelligently connected human capital management (HCM) platform can do all three. Using people data is not exclusive to anonymizing it and protecting it – all three can happen at once to ensure proper use of people data.

When this happens, we can dig into the data to reveal our organization’s diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEI&B) story. So often, and through no fault of their own, HR leaders do not know what they do not know.

Here are four ways to uncover that information for the betterment of DEI&B for that it never is an excuse again.

1. Candidate Trends

The employee journey starts before a person’s first day on the job – so do your company’s DEI&B efforts.

Candidate experience is an often overlooked, yet fundamental way, to improve diversity from the way the job descriptions are written to the sources from which HR recruits.

When it comes to using people data, it is critical for organizations to understand candidate trends. While this is often self-identified information, HR leaders can analyze candidate trends, such as if there are underrepresented groups applying for their open positions.

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If an HR leader sees that 75 percent of candidates for one position are of a certain group, for example, they can work with managers to optimize job descriptions for all groups. Perhaps the language or requirements included is not inclusive or recruiting efforts are not reaching more diverse candidates. Knowing these gaps is half the challenge and people data can help.

2. Churn Patterns

Once an employee, people need to have a sense of belonging – that the work they do matters, that people around them care and that they have people they can connect with. This can be difficult if you’re an “only” or a “double only” as in the only female or maybe the only female and the only person of color.

But how can HR leaders use data to measure a sense of belonging? It is tough but churn patterns can reveal a company’s DEI&B story. If certain groups – be it those with neurodiversity, those of a certain gender or race, you name it – have higher churn rates than others, there could be a problem. What about the culture is not helping people equally? Predictive people analytics can help uncover this story based on churn rates and demographics.

What is important, however, is someone with experience in understanding data and culture being the one to read and analyze it. The beauty of analytics platforms today is it does not take a data scientist to

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Unlocking The Power Of People Data: The Untold DEI&B Story

than women or the less-commonly stated stats around people of color earning less, it is an issue that should be rectified. Even those with the best of intentions, however, may not realize they are offering people less because it is based on what they asked for, their previous salary history, or other challenges that have kept people back in the past.

Predictive people analytics can give HR leaders a more automated way of looking at salary discrepancies. Does a female VP make less than a male VP in the same role? Are those with neurodiversity making less? Being able to surface this data with a few clicks or even ask a virtual assistant, is available now. Predictive people analytics can also take it a step further: if I rectified gender pay gap by 5% what does that do to retention rates? These are questions systems have answers for.

While there is a lot that data can not tell us, a company’s DEI&B practices are a story that data can tell. Investing in people analytics that can do good for a company, for communities and for people, is something worth investing in and a story to be told.

gather data and see predictions and suggestions. The challenge is how people react to what they see. Data training is critical when people data is unlocked and decisions are based on it.

3. Diversity Density

Is a business diverse? This question is the fundamental DEI&B question to ask, but many HR leaders do not really know the answer. People analytics can more accurately define diversity in a business to identify gaps where companies may not be equal or fair. While this may sound basic, sometimes it is the basic data that companies do not have access to. Some systems leverage conversational virtual assistants to help as well: Hey, how many female VPs do I have compared to males?

Well, that is just an audible ask away.

Amy Mosher is the Chief People Officer at isolved. With more than 20 years of global human resources experience, Amy has contributed to the success of multiple public and private companies across various industries, including software, biotechnology and hardware.

For the last decade, she has served as the Head of Human Resources with Accel-KKR SaaS software portfolio companies, including HighWire Press, Inc., KANA Software, Inc. and, now, isolved – enhancing cultures and building positive employee experiences at each.

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2. Salary Discrepancies

A hot topic, rightfully, is that of pay equality. Whether it is the commonly stated men make more per dollar

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Job Switching: Top 3 Reasons Offer Key To Recruitment And Retention We are at the crossroads of the future of work— employees must be clear on their priorities

By John Woods, University of Phoenix

L

abor shortages have been a top challenge for employers across sectors over the past two years and this trend does not appear to be slowing down.

The recent Career Optimism Index® study from the University of Phoenix Career Institute™ shows that nearly a third of workers in the U.S. say they would quit their job without having another one lined up.

This figure is representative of deeper shifts in the relationship between employees and their workplaces.

Among workers, who have changed careers in the last six months, the top reasons for making the switch included seeking a better work-life balance, pursuing a higher salary, and the desire to try something new.

These insights provide a roadmap for employers looking to recruit new talent; leaders should examine what is already being accomplished in these areas to determine how existing offerings can be better marketed throughout the recruitment process, in addition to making improvements where necessary to make their companies more attractive to new employees.

Even better, these findings present an opportunity for employers to uplevel career development support for their existing workforce. Sixty nine percent of employees say they would consider staying at their

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current job if they thought things would change—and we now know the exact areas where employees desire improvement. By prioritizing enhancements that directly address these priorities and values, employers can quell the need for extraneous, continuous recruitment by starting at the source.

Whether employers are prioritizing attracting new talent, retention of their current workforce, or both, here are tactics to consider implementing to tackle the top three workplace values driving employees’ career decisions:

1. Prioritizing Mental Health and Wellness to Increase Work-life Balance Overall, approximately half of employers and employees currently feel work-life balance is being prioritized at their companies. These are figures that need to improve in order for businesses to maintain a resilient workforce.

One aspect of how work-life balance can be better addressed in the workplace is through the provision of mental health and wellness resources. Eighty five percent of employers say such offerings are already offered within their companies, however, less than half of employees say that they have taken advantage of these resources to manage work-related stress. This

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Job Switching: Top 3 Reasons Offer Key To Recruitment And Retention

retaining a workforce. Across the board, it must be a top priority for employers to gain an understanding of employees’ needs and expectations, so that they may take action to alleviate key pain points and build trusting employee-employer relationships.

3. Upleveling Skills Training to Increase Internal Career-change Opportunities

Knowing that a large population of workers are desiring to try something new in their careers, employers should provide opportunities for their workers to explore such options internally before making the decision to leave. One way employers can do this is through increased skills training. According to our research, 65 percent of employees said they would be more likely to stay with their company throughout their career if their employer did more to reskill them.

points to an issue of workplace culture, which must incorporate encouragement around the utilization of such resources to instigate real progress.

By focusing on creating a culture of learning and continuous improvement, consistently offering upskilling and reskilling opportunities and sourcing talent from within, employers are not only aiding people in their career enhancement and increasing engagement and retention but building a more agile workforce and stronger organizations that are better equipped for the future.

It should be noted that healthy workplace behaviors often need to be modeled from the top-down; from demonstrating participation in mental health and wellness programs to holding ongoing conversations that perpetuate a value of wellness at every level of the company, leaders’ engagement in this aspect of the workplace is critical to its ongoing success.

We are at a crossroads in terms of the future of work—employees have made it clear what their needs are, and they have been direct with the fact that they are willing to move on if their needs are not met. Now it is up to employers to decide how they are going to apply these learnings to ensure the future of their businesses.

2. Strengthening Transparent Communication Around Compensation

It is a well-known fact that pay has been a significant driver of attrition throughout the Great Resignation.

Our study found that a missing piece in this part of the conversation is the lack of communication from employers around employee compensation and financial rewards. Only 56 percent of employers say their companies hold regular conversations around pay, with a mere 37 percent of employees agreeing with this claim, which is concerning as transparency and open communication are key to attracting and

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John Woods is Provost and Chief Academic Officer at University of Phoenix.

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Top Pick

Use The Force: Tapping Into The Power Of The Emerging Workforce It’s time to rethink your workforce dynamics

By Ron Thomas, Strategy Focused Group Work from the office or you lose your job.

We need you back in the office on Monday and Wednesday.

We think you can be more productive if we split the days that we are needed in the office.

I

even heard the linkage of the importance of the water cooler, of all places. Had to laugh at that one.

We all have heard variations of these directives. The messaging says that we can not be productive, innovative, or efficient unless we try as hard as we can to move back into the cocoon of that post-industrial comfort zone known as the office.

The 3 Ws: Work, Workplace & Workforce

There are so many dynamics at play as we gingerly try and readjust to a new and emerging

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workforce, work, and workplace.

My phrase for this is the 3 Ws. We are entering into an age of major disruptions, and this has nothing to do with strategy, business models, etc.

This era is based on trying to create the next model of work.

We have no playbook to refer to.

We are all trodding along and trying to figure out this postindustrial age model of work.

When I read these directives, I think about our “parents’ workforce”, who would have “blindly” abided by the new work model. Would they be happy?

Probably not. Would they rebel?

Probably not.

A New and Dynamic Workforce

The new and emerging workforce is going to be a force to be reckoned with. I was in Hong Kong pre-covid during the demonstrations. While

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we watched from the window how these young people were challenging authority, letting their voices be heard, and not afraid to speak up, for the most part a peaceful yet boisterous demonstration, they were not afraid.

As things calmed down and we moved back to our PPT, whiteboards, etc., I posed a question to the group of seniorlevel HR executives. How are we going to manage this type of workforce? This is the new emerging workforce. They are vocal, they are willing to share their thoughts, and don’t buy into long-term tenure.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your new workforce.

The new emerging workforce, made up of mostly young people between the ages of 20 and 35, is shifting work environments across the globe. Thanks to technology

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Use The Force: Tapping Into The Power Of The Emerging Workforce

we no longer communicate solely via email or need to have inperson meetings every day.

The pendulum has swung.

The facts are in and they can not be disputed. There is an unprecedented shift in the way we work, and it is NOT going back to the starting gate. This is a new era, and we should all be excited.

We have a blank slate, create like you do not have a reference point.

Every organization will have to find a workable solution. Forget about best practices because their best practice is not your solution. Every organization has a DNA, and your DNA may not coincide with the best practice.

The pendulum has swung and for the first time in the world of work, the organization can no longer dictate. The power dynamic has swung in another direction and your employees as a group will have to be involved in this new model of decisionmaking. You have always said in the past that they were your most “valuable asset”. Well, now that most valuable asset is in the driver’s seat.

C Suite Mindset: Carved in Stone?

My advice to the C-Suite is what are you afraid of? Your mindset

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is your greatest impediment.

You must let go. You must connect to your workforce. You were successful in another environment. Your career trajectory worked in that model.

Your younger executive team is not anchored into that zone and may want change. Let it go and LISTEN. They are hankering to give you their insight.

a strategy where it is one size communication fits all. Not a successful strategy. Understand the segments of your workforce.

Define and understand the DNA of your workforce and the segments. Design a structured approach with the flexibility to communicate whether it is all hands-on meetings, smaller group interactions…I call it ‘connect first, collaborate second’.

We are all struggling whether it is virtual, loneliness, overwhelmed, etc. This is exactly why we must rethink the workforce dynamics.

We might as well because that long-ago model is a thing of the past and it is not coming back.

The new work decision model for workforce dynamic is bottoms up and not top-down the way that it used to be.

So, going forward, there are two things that an organization needs to work on.

1. Listening Strategy. Get away from the conference room while making decisions, especially if it involves your workforce. If you look around in the decision room and it only has your peers… cancel it and bring more voices into the decision-making process. Have all your managers develop listening skills. Brand the organization as a listener. However, the catch is to listen and then respond.

Remember they are watching.

2. Communication Strategy.

The email announcement is a thing of the past. Imagine your marketing department designing

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Ron Thomas is the Managing Director of Strategy Focused Group, an international consulting firm based in Dubai and Singapore. Ron has been most recently named in leadersHum Power List of the Top 200 Biggest Voices in Leadership list to watch for in 2022. His podcast, “The CEO Series”, is named one among the ‘Top 9 HR Podcasts You Need To Follow In 2022’. He is a visiting executive faculty member at the Global Human Resources Leadership Institute at Howard University School of Business in Washington, DC.

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Getting High On Your Own Apply: Why Screening Out Applicants Is The Opposite of Inclusion Here are some small steps that can make a big impact on the lives and livelihoods of the hourly workforce.

By Omer Molad, Vervoe

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n high-volume hiring, sifting through resumes can feel a lot like flicking through profiles on Tinder (or so I’ve, uh, heard). Sure, it’d be great to give everyone’s profile a comprehensive review, and maybe do a bit of due diligence before agreeing to actually meet a stranger you found online, but let’s be honest: it’s almost reflexive for most of us to “swipe left” almost immediately (or right, depending).

Part of this is probably Pavolovian, but let’s be honest: no one has the time to read through every potential online dating match, which means that we’re acting mostly on instinct. This leads many to accept dates that are, in short, a disaster. Bad dates based on bad matches are seen as one of the necessary evils of online dating, but really, it’s more our fault than any algorithm.

We react based on immediate impressions, not careful consideration - which means, inevitably, many people who would be otherwise perfect matches soulmates, even - are rejected for really no reason other than expediency and immediacy, which are pretty crap reasons to exclude any potential partner in a long term relationship.

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It’s the same exact problem that’s so pervasive and persistent when it comes to how employers approach high volume hiring. When most of us think “high volume hiring,” we think of people as widgets, really - interchangeable cogs in the human capital supply chain, with low skills, high turnover and little need for the kind of personalization or high touch approach that’s become so critical for hiring professional, salaried “talent” in today’s tight market.

This means that instead of personalization, high volume hiring solutions tend to place a premium on recruitment process automation. In theory, this should create efficiencies, and make hiring much more effective, given the fact that most of the manual, resource intensive work has been outsourced to some machine learning instance. In practice, this AI tends to eliminate as many people as possible, based solely on poorly defined job requirements and whether their resume is stack ranked with a high enough score to move along to the next stage of the process.

Thing is, few do. And that, frankly, is a waste - of time, resources, and, inevitably, potentially great hires who are cut from the process before they can even really

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Getting High On Your Own Apply: Why Screening Out Applicants Is The Opposite of Inclusion

be considered. These candidates are the collateral damage in our never ending quest for efficiency, even at the risk of real recruiting results.

Of course, you don’t need AI or ML to spend 3-4 seconds looking for a reason to pass on an applicant - individual recruiters have a long history of acting as gatekeepers based on arbitrary and subjective criteria.

For many, it’s a “gut feeling,” something that really can’t be explained besides some vague utterances about intuition and experience. Which is not only a whole lot of BS, but more importantly, those less than objective outcomes are the very same data that’s used to train the algorithms that we’re increasingly relying on to make informed decisions on who should be hired.

The process of “pre screening” candidates is, of course, code for “disqualifying as many applicants as possible” - typically involves pinpointing a few missing qualifications or characteristics on a resume, ones that rarely do anything to predict potential or performance, so that candidates can be quickly culled. This is where the “black hole” lives, and why candidate experience is still a problem, even after all these years.

We always want every candidate to be “perfect” for the role, although in reality, there’s really no such thing

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as a perfect candidate, merely one who is over-experienced, underpaid and willing to accept our job offers.

We think cutting candidates eliminates the extraneous ones, with every rejection getting us that much closer to our perception of perfection.

Just like swiping left at the first sign of imperfection or incompatibility on dating apps can cost us potentially great matches, professionally swiping left based on nothing more than impulse and “feeling” probably doesn’t lead to the best hires.

Of course, there’s no way to measure an opportunity cost, which means that we’ll never know what we don’t have, or who we missed out on by not even considering them past our perfunctory prescreens.

We are not particularly effective at high volume hiring, based on industry wide retention rates, endemic talent shortages and a huge amount of churn over what often amounts to a few cents.

So what do we have to lose by switching things up and instead of finding reasons to reject candidates, start looking for reasons to say “yes” instead?

Why Screening Hurts Hiring

Many people make the false assumption that screening candidates out and narrowing their talent funnel even before the first touch by a recruiter is a

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Getting High On Your Own Apply: Why Screening Out Applicants Is The Opposite of Inclusion

huge time saver, a way to create efficiencies, eliminate manual, repetitive work while streamlining our hiring process.

This has led to a proliferation of tools and technologies that are explicitly designed to automate the high volume hiring process for employers, and if that’s the direction that you’ve decided to go, well, the good news is that you have options.

The bad news is that few, if any, of these tools have any empirical evidence or long term proof of concept that they’re doing anything to improve or impact the hiring process. To be fair, neither do most human recruiters, either.

The thing that we’re learning about these technologies and their efficacies, while the jury is still out on whether they’re helping organizations at TA, there seems to be a growing body of evidence that automation in high volume hiring can actually do more harm than good. Efficiency always comes at a cost, and for many employers, it’s a price that they probably can’t afford.

By eliminating so many candidates simply because they’re missing information or not perfectly aligned with tightly scoped job requirements that tend to be a bit specious to begin with, they are ignoring the fact that just like you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can’t judge high volume workers by their resumes, either.

Many have limited experience in any professional position, or have been on a different career path, or lack formal qualifications, education or industry credentials. They’re willing to learn, and eager to work, of course - and don’t come in with a lot of bad habits or preconceptions - but potential isn’t something that a resume, or even a basic prescreen, could ever predict or project.

Like Tinder, matches are the basis of a lot of historical data and our own prejudices around perfectly asinine requirements, removing any nuance or discretion the end user might have in favor of a checklist of criteria that instantly eliminate anyone who isn’t a perfect

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fit - even if it might turn out, in fact, that they are a perfect fit for you and your company. Forget hiring for potential and training for skills. We’d rather hire someone who’s already done the job than someone who could potentially do it even better.

It seems like a pretty big miss.

So, what happens when you stop screening out candidates entirely?

What if every applicant was a potential new hire, and we looked for reasons to say “yes” instead of consistently looking for reasons to knock them out before they’re even technically candidates?

It’d probably make high volume hiring a whole hell of a lot easier.

Do The Math: Making The Case With Recruitment Metrics.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Screening everyone in sounds like a huge waste of time and effort, particularly since, if you’re like most high volume recruiters, you’re generally faced with dozens of open requisitions and thousands of applicants, with finite time and resources.

However, with the right tools, strategy and mindset, screening candidates in is actually markedly less work than erring towards screening them out. It also helps organizations achieve much better outcomes - and improved core recruitment metrics and talent analytics, too.

Those companies who took advantage of the global COVID 19 pandemic to upskill their workforces and refine their recruitment programs and strategies rather than resort to redundancies, furloughs and freezes, had the time and bandwidth to create a pretty compelling proof of concept.

Many clients I work with, for example, initiate the conversation based on their needs for a better screening solution; most on the market are long,

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Getting High On Your Own Apply: Why Screening Out Applicants Is The Opposite of Inclusion

labor intensive and use the dreaded resume review as the primary way to assess candidates, without consideration of the myriad other dimensions that do a far better job of predicting potential and performance.

or low performers to screen themselves out before having to start a job that they realize they’re poorly suited for and dislike. This is a win-win for everyone, and actually leads to much better matching than any algorithm out there.

Most companies literally screened most, if not all, of the resumes that came into their ATS; rethinking that approach to screening, though, has led many companies to realize that picking up the phone, having conversations with people, building relationships and trying to find complementary skills rather than screening against a list minimum requirements is far more effective.

The hope is that hiring managers will see someone’s capabilities, especially those top performers whose resumes might otherwise disqualify them from consideration, and lets hiring managers base their decisions not on a static piece of paper or personal bias, but instead, on what really matters in hiring and recruiting: whether or not the person has the skill set required for those jobs.

Turns out, when it comes to high volume hiring - or really all recruitment - personalization beats automation every time, and high touch beats high tech. Of course, these aren’t mutually exclusive; used in tandem, they’re the closest thing we have to a silver bullet in TA today.

This leads to hiring managers being able to make more informed decisions about candidates instead of relying on bias and instinct, which, as it turns out, not only leads to more productive and engaged workers, but increases offer acceptance ratios, shortens time to fill and significantly reduces cost of hire (and backfilling those hires, too).

The best way to do this is by opening up the assessment process to all applicants, so that everyone who wants to apply will not only be filtered based on what they self-report on their resume, but also tested and scored on the skills that the job requires.

These assessments should be unique to your company, and based on behavioral science and quantitative outcomes that measure candidates’ knowledge, skills and situational judgment, among other characteristics that are imperative for high volume hires.

Fit happens.

Can you really afford to “swipe left?”

Omer Molad is Co-Founder & CEO of Vervoe.

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This allows companies to actually articulate real problems, and provide context to candidates around real workplace challenges, allowing them to respond to certain situations or questions in their preferred communication style - and allows them to realistically preview the job before moving on to the next stage in the hiring process.

Bringing the opportunity to life is one of the primary benefits to this approach; ideally, this allows candidates who might otherwise be failed hires

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Top Pick

The Death Of Job Postings And The Birth Of The Working Interview Technology will match right talent to the right jobs in future

By Jeffrey David Harris, Impact Recruitment

“What’s a job posting?” Ten years from now, this will be a real question and we can begin making this a reality by embracing the future of the emerging workforce.

Everywhere you look, there are attempts to change or improve how people find jobs and how companies find employees.

From the founding of LinkedIn in 2003, which leveraged the social network concept and applied it to professionals, to Fivver and UpWork which focus on outsourcing freelance work around the world, emerging technologies are everywhere.

In order to best prepare for the future, it is sometimes helpful to understand the past. What is a job posting? It is a piece of written information that should tell you about the company hiring, the job and its related duties,

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the compensation package in exchange for being in the job, and the general qualifications of the ideal candidate with some attempt to screen out those who do not qualify. Why screen out? To streamline the information flow of too many non-qualified applicants and to make it easier on someone “scrolling through” masses of resumes and cover letters.

What did a job posting look like 100 years ago? As described above; but it was typically posted on a bulletin board at a company’s address or located as a classified advertisement in a local print newspaper.

What does a job posting look like in 2022? Nearly the same as in 1922. Today’s job posting includes mainly words to loosely describe a job, an underwhelming list of reasons “why” an applicant would want to work for a company, and

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qualifications that are likely too difficult to properly define.

Today’s job posting may also contain pictures, company videos, links to websites, benefits packages and perhaps even a very well-written diversity and inclusion policy. However, few job postings contain enough real information about an organization, its people and culture, what it is like to work there, or even an accurate description of the job itself.

Now, I must side note that many attempts have been made over the years to improve job postings.

From the first online classified ads with Craigslist, came the ability to apply to jobs by category, and to make your application anonymous. Then came several job posting sites, namely Monster, Indeed, and ZipRecruiter, to name a few. Each of these sites has its own technology enhancements

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The Death Of Job Postings And The Birth Of The Working Interview

and tools, such as featured jobs, job alerts, or resume searches.

Alas, the bulk of the job postings on these sites still contain only words – words, words, and more words with little or no structure to the information itself.

As a recruitment professional, this is the best-case scenario: the compounded mismatch of information leads to a need for recruitment specialists, screening expertise and advanced background checking in order to properly create a shortlist of qualified candidates, a recruitment agency.

Even for us, the sheer volume of unqualified or mismatched applications for our own job postings leads to countless hours spent trying to find the right humans for just one opening.

To me, the whole undertaking screams a need for improvement,

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but what will it take? The answer, more advanced technology.

credit card if you want to hire someone through an app?

The rise of the gig-economy, both pre- and post-pandemic, has given equal rise to many tech-based solutions for job matching, which you may not have noticed. Your Uber driver was matched to a job as your driver using an app. Your DoorDash delivery person was dispatched to a gig when you ordered your vegan kale salad.

Your cleaning company may have supplemented part or all of their staff using a gig-hiring application, which are often used for jobs with limited or few specific skill requirements. Technology is coming and it is speeding up.

Well, although old habits die hard, the river is flowing in the right direction. I pay for my Uber driver before she picks me up. I have put my credit card information into countless online shopping sites. I am on my phone for over two hours a day (thanks to Apple’s screen time feature, I know this for a fact) so yes, I am ready for a change, are you?

Now, technology does have some headwinds. The first question is: do you trust an app to find you a job? Is there some sort of algorithm designed to steal your identity? Should you input your

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Here’s what is coming – companies no longer have the upper hand when it comes to hiring. Each time a new hire is brought on, not only is the company trying out the individual, equally, the individual is giving the new employer a test run.

Welcome to the working interview, the first of the best new innovative approaches to talent acquisition made easier by modern technology.

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The Death Of Job Postings And The Birth Of The Working Interview

Consider it similar to dating before you get married. You book an individual through an application to come to your workplace. You pay them for their time. They come and show you how they work, and you show them what it is like to work for you. If it is a good fit, “great, you are hired.” If it is not a good fit, “good luck with your next date... I mean working interview.”

With the job posting approach to recruitment, the working interview is rare. You might find yourself executing several rounds of interviews with the same pool or different applicants.

While you are busy spending time wrangling hiring managers, conducting background checks and making decisions, you could lose anywhere between 50-100% of your initial applicants.

Good luck trying to convince an applicant to work for two hours after they have gone through your interview process. However, a

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working interview is paid; and it is understood by both parties that it is simply a way to try each other out (much like dating); best of all, it is working.

Thanks to technology applications, the working interview is possible. You go into the app, select the qualifications you require, choose the candidates that match, and book the working interviews. The payments and bookings are handled through the app, and all you need to do is choose (and they choose you as well). In the end, you get to see someone work rather than guess at their work ethic.

At the same time, you have the advantage of showcasing your operation, introducing your team and gauging whether or not the applicant really wants to be there.

Job postings were great when they were the only option, but they still lead to mismatches, hiring bias, and endless interviews. It is

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time to plan for their death and host a celebration of life as we embrace the working interview and leverage the future of hiring technologies as they emerge.

Jeffrey David Harris is the Founder & CEO of Impact Recruitment.

Jeff is also the Founder & CEO of AmbiMi, a skills-based job matching platform. Jeff is primarily focused on upward mobility for the masses and aims to achieve his goals through a combination of leadership development, thought-provoking, disruptive measures, technological advancement, and investment in decentralized economies.

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In Their Shoes: How To Engage and Attract Gen Z? How today’s world is influencing career, job search, content, and channel preferences of students and recent grads

By Shannon Smedstad and Susan LaMotte, exaqueo

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ovid-19. Social unrest. Social media. Remote classes. Virtual graduations. How is today’s world influencing career, job search, content, and channel preferences of students, recent graduates, and early careerists? Where do they spend their time, online and offline? Who and what are driving their behaviors and attitudes toward work? What do they need, want, and expect from employers? These are some of the big questions answered by exaqueo’s 2021 Gen Z Early Career Employment Study.

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Generation Z, known also as zoomers, are those individuals born between 1997 and 2015. They are today’s six to 24-year olds. For purposes of this work, we focused specifically on young adults in this generation (also referred to in this article as “early career” or “early careerists”) living in the United States.

These respondents, ages 18 to 24, are the oldest members of Gen Z. Our early career study uncovered when making job-related decisions:

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In Their Shoes: How To Engage and Attract Gen Z?

promising benefits and pay, and also have good morals and company values,” shares one survey respondent, encapsulating similar sentiment shared by other participants.

While pay and benefits are important, these basics are “table stakes” to this generation. They expect these needs to be met, but organizations cannot rely on just meeting these basic needs. Employers today must communicate with more transparency than ever before, while creating frictionless hiring experiences that advance with ease.

Study respondents were vocal about how employers can best attract and engage them: ● “Make benefits clear, and talk about what to expect when you get the job.” ● “Make it easy to apply and hear back from you.” ● “A company should tell me what their future goals are since if I do join the company, that is what we would be working towards.” ● One in four participants said parents are the most influential people when it comes to search decisions. ● One in three said career growth is the most important attribute when considering employment opportunities. ● One in three said family-friendly policies are very important when researching jobs and employers. ● Two in five said better benefits and better pay are the top two reasons early careerists may leave an employer. ● Access to the latest tools and technology is the least important factor considered when choosing employment options. ● Pay and company culture are the top two motivators to stay with an employer.

Attracting and Engaging Early Career Talent

Although early careerists are newer to the workforce, they have a strong sense of what they are looking for from a job and an employer. “Offer good and

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● “Be open and honest about what responsibilities my job will have, explain their office culture and the company’s beliefs, and be upfront about salary.”

While some of these themes are not new, this generation is especially clear about their expectations, valuing information, clarity, and honesty at an exceptionally high level.

Early Career Talent Content and Channel Preferences

Attracting Gen Z is not just about sharing the information they want to see. Throughout the study, we found it is also about showing up in the places they are most likely to see it. It is content marketing 101: connecting your audience with the right content, on the right channels, at the right time. Our study indicates early careerists are likely to use a variety of traditional and social channels throughout their job search.

The following diagram shows how likely study participants are to use traditional and social channels specifically for employment-related research. The further to the right, the higher the likelihood of use and the more influential the source.

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In Their Shoes: How To Engage and Attract Gen Z?

Over the years, sources including CareerBuilder state that 70 percent of all job searches start on Google. In this particular study, Google was named the number one channel most likely used above all others during job searches.

At exaqueo, we have found Google is most often preferred because it allows job seekers to connect offline influences (like conversations with friends, family, and colleagues) to additional information; specifically, it allows users to: ● Access all relevant search information at once ● Get results from many online sources (not limiting them to just one) ● Find out general news and information about an employer ● Understand broad perceptions about the employer

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Early career talent is counting on employers to be more authentic and transparent, and using social media to find real-life proof points to support the commitment employers are making. They want employers to “relate to them using social media.” The adage “show don’t tell” is alive here, as Gen Z prefers to experience the story while consuming content via video and imagery.

Actionable Advice for Today’s Employers

YouTube and Instagram are the social media platforms most likely used in career-related discovery

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and research, and among the top channels Gen Z believes where employers should have an active presence. Participants included that they want employers to “get their name and company out there on platforms that are popular today,” and “have as much social media presence as possible [with] statements from real people working there about their experiences.”

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Early career talent is asking employers to take a hard look in the mirror. To attract and retain this next generation of individuals, employers must consider these key takeaways from this study:

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In Their Shoes: How To Engage and Attract Gen Z?

communication and interactions are incredibly important. How we treat people is an opportunity to differentiate.

4. Make the hiring process easy: Starting with the job application, audit the hiring experience to identify roadblocks and friction points. Consider quick fixes and longer-term solutions.

5. Communicate and show the value of employment opportunities: People need various forms and levels of detail and content across the hiring experience. Map out the experience and identify where and how to communicate.

6. Take a chance, be open to transferable skills from those less qualified on paper: Talk with hiring managers and identify recruiter training opportunities to more fully understand how to hire for potential.

1. Have a strong digital presence: Choose channels you can resource effectively, going beyond posting and engaging with users daily. Curate fresh content regularly in a relatable way.

2. Be honest and share accurate job details and expectations up front: Test job descriptions with early career talent; have them highlight areas of missing and/or inauthentic information.

3. Be nice, welcoming, and inclusive of all people: While much of the candidate experience is online, the offline and person-to-person

This study is just the beginning toward understanding early careerists. Taking a look in the mirror also means gathering data specific to your organization and the talent you want to attract and engage. Every organization is different, from industry to skills needed and from benefits to culture. What’s right for one talent attraction team may be different for another.

The best, first step is to focus on your target audience and get the data you and your team needs to make strategic decisions for 2022 and beyond.

Shannon Smedstad is a Senior Employer Brand Strategist at exaqueo with more than 20 years of talent acquisition, employee communications, and employer brand experience. At exaqueo, she’s led the employer brand engagements for Kempinski Hotels, Red Wing Shoe Company, etc.

Susan LaMotte is the Founder, CEO and Principal Strategist at exaqueo.

At exaqueo, she has worked directly with senior leaders at organizations including T-Mobile, CVS Health, Zillow, and Baxter Healthcare.

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Top Pick

How To Create A Successful Internship Program 4 key elements of a successful internship program

By Jordan Bridges, Sweetwater

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nternship programs have historically been the way that the emerging workforce in general, but upcoming and recent college graduates in particular, gain their first exposure, and first experience, with the real world of work.

Internships were long seen as a stepping stone to better job opportunities, accelerated career development and a way for companies to take emerging talent for a proverbial test drive (and for that same talent to see what it is really like, and whether it is really worth it, to work at a particular company).

Internship programs have an established track record of success. They are one of the top sources of entry-level, professional hires at most enterprise employers; they are among the most cost-effective sources of talent for any organization; and, of course, they allow organizations to build relationships, assess culture fit and do due diligence on both potential and personality with a dedicated, proprietary pool of top talent that knows how business really gets done at your business.

As aggregate statistics and anecdotal evidence go, that is a hard business case to beat, but not every internship program, of course, has proven to be efficient, effective, or even minimally viable, for that matter.

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The success of an internship program depends on both the candidate and the company, and without a mutual commitment, or structured program, or even expectations or outcomes from either party, internship programs can create either apathy or antipathy between interns and companies that can last a lifetime (or at least, linger over the course of a career). Done right, of course, it can also build the foundation for a long term, mutually beneficial professional relationship based not on enmity, but affinity, instead.

The most important metric, or basic baseline, for the relative success of an internship program is, of course, how many of those interns convert into full-time hires?

In recent years, about half of the interns here at Sweetwater have been subsequently hired as full-time employees after the completion of their internship program. As one of the nation’s largest providers of professional musical and audio equipment, that sounds pretty sweet - and right at the national average of 56.1%, according to NACE. Of course, we did not get there right away - and average, compared to when we started our internship program, is really anything but. We have built what is seen throughout the organization - and the industry - as a successful internship program.

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How To Create A Successful Internship Program

But more importantly, we have seen that success in the dozens of interns who not only started their careers with us, but have also grown and developed those careers within the company. They are our high potentials, and our future leaders - and we have got a pretty impressive track record of promotions and conversions to prove that we are building a scalable, sustainable internship program that is both an efficient source of hire and an effective way to attract and convert top emerging talent who see Sweetwater not as a stepping stone, but instead, as an employer of choice.

I am often asked what, exactly, makes an internship program “successful.” Well, I can not speak for every employer offering internships or every potential hire pulled from these programs, but I think I have narrowed it down to pretty much four factors that can make or break any internship program.

The 4 Key Elements of a Successful Internship Program: A TA Cheat Sheet Here are the 4 things every talent acquisition (TA) professional and leader needs to consider when considering if, or how, to build a world-class internship program. They do not require a ton of resources or budget, but they do require careful consideration and critical thinking - which, as we all know, is really the hard part.

1. Room to grow: The path to professional development Have you considered the question, “How can our interns grow professionally outside of the job duties assigned”? It can be tempting to become hands-off once you successfully hire interns and have them get started in their jobs. However, engaging interns in professional development sessions or activities can be a great way to bolster your internship program.

Think about how multifaceted your company might be and how many successful professionals work in your organization.

There are numerous topics that could be relevant for interns to hear about as it relates to professional development. Those topics could include, but are not limited to, the following: imposture syndrome, proper

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business etiquette, how to network in the workplace, the mindset needed to learn from mistakes, etc.

College students have so much to learn as they prepare themselves for the workforce. Having professional development built into the internship can create a great name for your program and serve your interns well in the long run.

2. Connect for: Aligning today’s opportunities and tomorrow’s goals Many people can think back to their experience of searching for a job as a new graduate. However, there is a special group of people who remember getting hired full-time for a company they interned for.

That was my story, and I can tell you from personal experience that intern “buy-in” sizably increases when they know that they have a real chance at remaining an employee post internship. While very few employers can ever guarantee full-time placement for an intern, every employer can ensure interns of their goal to retain interns. Internships serve as an excellent pipelining tool for young talent coming into the industry.

I encourage every employer to frequently remind interns of their desire to retain interns after the internship. This reinforcement can be a great way to promote top performance and give interns perspective on how to view their internship.

Suggesting that an internship can be viewed as an extended job interview is also another way to help shape interns’ thoughts toward the job.

3. Call of duty: Why job duties should be adding value, not just work We are far past the day and age where interns simply grab a coffee and do other similar tasks for people in the office. In order to have a successful internship program, interns should be involved in value-added job duties. These are tasks that essentially have a direct impact on the company’s bottom line.

Students are looking for opportunities to apply their classroom knowledge and complement what they have been learning in school. Developing the

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reputation as “the coffee runner internship” will drive away intern candidates who are in search of meaningful work.

Having interns engage in value-added job duties also gives an employer an excellent look into what it might look like to have them work full-time.

4. Building comradery Starting in a new internship role can be daunting, especially in a large company. It is imperative that employers set the stage for interns to build community with each other. One of the many ways you might consider doing so is by hosting a few intern-only events off-campus.

Requiring attendance for a couple of these events is suggested in order to have the turn out and setting for interns to engage in socializing.

their time outside of the program as well as develop a professional network.

Lastly, if multiple interns get hired full-time, it gives them a community of people they are already well connected with. Which, as we all know, is what makes workers at every level not only attracted to a job, but willing to stay for the long term, too. After all, that is what an internship program is really all about - and that is the bottom line.

Jordan Bridges is Talent Acquisition Specialist at Sweetwater.

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Job Candidates Seek A Fair Shot At Hiring Highlights from Criteria’s 2022 Candidate Experience Report

By Josh Millet, Criteria

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t a time when companies are confronting surging inflation, record-setting turnover rates, and the most competitive labor market in years, it is critical to make hiring and retention efforts top priorities.

Although HR teams face a challenging economic environment, now is the time when they can set their companies apart from competitors by demonstrating that they are committed to fairness and diversity in their hiring process.

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Criteria recently published our 2022 Candidate Experience Report, which provides insights based on a survey of almost 2,000 job-seekers from around the world. One of the central findings from the report is that candidates are confident in their own abilities and eager to prove themselves – as long as they have an opportunity to do so on a level playing field. These facts add to an already-strong body of evidence that it is long past time for companies to

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Job Candidates Seek A Fair Shot At Hiring

reconsider traditional hiring resources like resumes and unstructured interviews – resources that have repeatedly proven to be vulnerable to subjectivity, bias and discrimination.

Expectations among candidates have undergone a permanent shift in recent years – they want transparency, efficiency, and above all, a fair shot.

These expectations, coupled with a tight labor market that shows no sign of slackening anytime soon, should drive many companies to make long-overdue changes to their hiring process.

experience holds them back. Meanwhile, 94 percent of candidates think their pre-employment assessment scores demonstrate their potential to succeed – either “very well” (52 percent) or “somewhat well” (42 percent).

Candidates Want (and Deserve) to Be Treated Fairly

Despite the common myth that candidates are reluctant to take pre-employment assessments, our research indicates that they welcome the opportunity to show hiring managers what they can do. Candidates are open to AI-based hiring as well – 52 percent of our respondents strongly agree (26 percent) or somewhat agree (26 percent) that AIpowered evaluative tools (when used ethically and appropriately) can represent them accurately.

Our survey found that 28 percent of candidates believe the traditional hiring process puts them at a disadvantage, while 35 percent say their level of

One of the reasons candidates embrace preemployment assessments is the fact that they believe their performance could make up for other areas where they fall short. For example, almost threequarters of candidates strongly agree (45 percent) or somewhat agree (29 percent) that assessments allow them to demonstrate their potential beyond their experience. These are reminders that candidates will thank you for looking beyond traditional hiring methods and giving them a chance to showcase their abilities.

When hiring managers rely on resumes and unstructured interviews to make decisions about candidates, their biases can get in the way of impartial judgments about who will be best for the job. Many companies also place inordinate emphasis on experience, which can be a poor predictor of job performance (as well as a “qualification” that is often misrepresented on resumes and in interviews).

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Job Candidates Seek A Fair Shot At Hiring

How an Objective Hiring Process Ensures Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion The candidates who stand to benefit the most from more objective and less biased hiring processes are members of marginalized groups who are often the victims of bias and discrimination. When companies deploy rigorous and objective hiring tools like pre-employment assessments, they do not just demonstrate that they are committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) – they also create a more predictive hiring process which drastically increases the likelihood that they’ll find the right person for the job.

According to a landmark study on resume call-back rates, unconscious bias has introduced serious adverse impact against black candidates. When researchers changed just the names on resumes from white-sounding ones to stereotypically blacksounding names the call-back rates fell precipitously.

Perhaps this is why Black candidates were much more likely than their white counterparts to strongly agree that assessments help them demonstrate their potential beyond experience – a gap of 16 percentage points. Asian candidates were almost twice as likely as white candidates to say the same.

Diversity is not just a business imperative because, as the NBER report states, discrimination is “negatively correlated with firm profitability.” It is also essential for building a healthy company culture and attracting candidates – over three-quarters of which say a diverse workforce is an “important factor when evaluating companies and job offers.” As our report demonstrates, diverse candidates want companies to level the playing field by using objective preemployment assessments in their hiring decisions.

What Candidates Want from the Hiring Process

dropped out because of negative reviews about a company’s culture and almost a third have done so because the process was taking too long.

These are the reasons companies have to focus on the elements of the recruitment and hiring process that candidates are demanding: open and clear communication, objective assessments of their abilities, and an engaging, streamlined experience from beginning to end. Companies can meet these demands with hiring resources like game-based assessments, which 51 percent of candidates say they prefer over traditional question-and-answer assessments (just 12 percent say the opposite).

Candidates do not just prefer transparency with issues like salary, benefits, and career advancement opportunities – they also want to know how they performed. In fact, 91 percent of candidates say they want feedback on their assessment results (77 percent strongly prefer to see how they did).

A central theme of our 2022 Candidate Experience Report is the fact that candidates are confident they can impress employers: 84 percent say they are able to demonstrate their full potential in the hiring process, 79 percent believe they will be paid enough in their new role, and 87 percent think they will be able to find a satisfying new job. Candidates are prepared to bring their best to the hiring process, in other words, and companies should do the same.

Josh Millet is Founder and CEO of Los Angeles-based Criteria.

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Many candidates never make it to the end of the recruitment process – a problem that is even more pressing as companies face high turnover rates and intense competition for talent. Our research found that over half of candidates say they have abandoned the recruitment process due to poor communication from a potential employer, while 36 percent have

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Top Pick

Gen Z: What Every Hiring Pro Needs To Know 4 themes that form the building blocks to create the foundation for Gen Z recruiting success

By Ben Tuttle, Proliant, Inc

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he emerging workforce - those workers who have either recently graduated college or are just launching their careers - are already impacting the workplace, a trend that should only continue as these early career professionals become

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increasingly prevalent in the world of work.

With them come a divergent set of expectations, values and work styles that significantly differentiate these emerging professionals from other

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generations at work, from retiring Baby Boomers to mid-career Millennials.

Perhaps nowhere are these differences more noticeable than when it comes to the seismic shift employers are already seeing

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Gen Z: What Every Hiring Pro Needs To Know

when it comes to attracting, recruiting and retaining these emerging workers.

A recent LinkedIn study found that over 9 in 10 companies plan to hire or currently have open postings for positions requiring less than two years of experience, a significant bounceback in demand for a cohort who suffered the biggest pandemic-related decline in overall employment numbers for any demographic.

With this increased demand, however, came some unique talent acquisition challenges, as both workforce participation, as well as educational and career attainment for workers under the age of 25, have significantly declined over the past 3 years. So, if you’re in the 90% of employers who want to recruit top emerging talent, then you’re going to have to start rethinking, redefining and reinventing your recruitment function today for the talent of tomorrow.

So, let’s take a deeper dive into this slightly enigmatic, but essential, cohort of emerging talent better known by the catchall term “Generation Z” (or Zed, depending on where you’re reading this).

Here’s what talent pros need to know.

Generation Z: Meet Your Future Workers

While the generational theory has both prominent proponents as well as detractors (see:

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anything related to “Millennials”), Generation Z can be broadly defined as those workers born between 1994 and 2010.

Unlike Millennials, this generation is principally characterized by their lifelong connection to the internet and social media, among other technological advancements; Gen Z has never known a time without Uber, without Facebook, or without Spotify.

While they do share some characteristics with Gen Y workers, particularly in their stated preference for social responsibility and collective consciousness, as well as their proclivity for immediate feedback and validation (as one would expect from a generation raised on TikTok and Instagram), there are a few defining factors that distinguish them from other generations at work.

If you’re looking to recruit Gen Z talent, here’s a short run-down of some terms you might want to target while developing candidate personas; however, we’d like to caution against age-based stereotyping, as these workers constitute a protected class and as we all know by now, sweeping generalizations work better in content marketing than human resources. But, here are some of the more common factors you should consider.

Gen Z talent is likely to be: ●● Self-confident ●● Team-oriented

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●● Seeking happiness at work ●● Requiring job security ●● Desiring independence over authority This generation is ready to work - and work hard - to achieve their goals, but they also expect quick upward mobility and more regular individual recognition or praise, despite the fact that they often lack specific job-related experience or expertise.

Of course, this skills gap is largely related to the fact that they have limited job experience of any sort, and the “everybody gets a trophy mentality” is likely the result of wanting to know that their performance is meeting expectations and to ensure alignment with their managers and colleagues.

So, they’re pretty much just like everyone else beginning their careers, generational identities aside. They just need a little bit more guidance, direction and support.

Perk Up: What Gen Z Workers Want from a Job

Because Generation Z tends to be extremely ambitious, an ambition that as yet far outpaces their specific skill sets and professional experiences, alignment is essential - and getting on the same page between what you need now and what they want next requires an increased focus on training and development. This is likely one of the more valuable (and salient) perks employers can offer.

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Gen Z: What Every Hiring Pro Needs To Know

Therefore, HR professionals and talent leaders seeking Gen Z talent may want to consider implementing technologies like learning management systems (LMS) into their core work tech stack to facilitate both skills-based training as well as providing exposure to upskilling and advancement opportunities that allow them to learn on the job while gaining the skills necessary for their next one. This is a win-win for companies and emerging workers; developing talent in-house is linked to improved performance, retention and employee engagement, while the ambitious nature of Gen Z, and their preference for continuous learning and advancement opportunities, can easily be met by integrating LMS technologies and upskilling capabilities into the core employee experience.

As easy as it is to stereotype Gen Z as a bunch of wanna-be influencers with a crippling addiction to their mobile devices, the fact is technology has always been an integral part of their everyday lives; their expectations of work are no different. To compete for top Gen Z talent, employers must embrace best-in-class, consumer-grade technologies - or at least, not appear like they’re still stuck in the Stone Age. This means any manual or paper-based processes have to go (and should have, if we’re being honest); cloud-based solutions, particularly those with capabilities such as social

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network integrations, elements of gamification or total immersion (think VR, AR, or online gaming) will demonstrate to Gen Z applicants (and other workers who are probably already over your legacy systems, for that matter) that your organization is not only forward-thinking and up-to-date, but embraces the kinds of work styles and innovative thinking that the emerging workforce expects from an employer of choice.

Other workplace features that you may think about redesigning and redefining for Gen Z include: ●● Less email, more texts and instant messaging ●● A robust employer brand across social networks ●● Cross-functional teams and projects that facilitate multicultural experiences and interactions with coworkers beyond the scope of their immediate team ●● Regular, standardized feedback that’s constructive, didactic and personalized ●● Transparency in business processes and practices, and the ability to have some sort of open dialogue with senior management and company leaders so that they feel recognized and valued.

Gen Z relies more heavily than other generations on their jobs for self-actualization and personal fulfillment, so employers should intentionally create experiences that facilitate these outcomes.

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While it’d be misleading to say money doesn’t matter to the emerging workforce, or that they’re not as title sensitive as previous generations, the fact is, things like the ability to travel or work on different projects or gain exposure to other business units or functions are even more valuable than compensation when it comes to recruiting and retaining Gen Z workers.

Closing Time: How To Make Generation Z Hiring Happen

Like so much else in talent acquisition, success at recruiting emerging workers starts with the most fundamental and foundational part of TA today: the much-maligned, but empirically essential, job posting.

When creating requisitions or writing job descriptions targeting early career professionals, it’s important that employers highlight 4 elements that must be a part of every JD: career path, individual development, benefits and total rewards and social media acumen.

These four key themes are the basic building blocks for creating a foundation for Gen Z recruiting success. Let’s break each of these down a bit.

1. Career Pathing

Generation Z is often more motivated by job satisfaction and career prospects than a high salary. This group is looking for a meaningful experience that will progress their overall

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Gen Z: What Every Hiring Pro Needs To Know

life goals. Thus, it is vital for recruiters to include information about possible career paths and upward mobility within the organization.

2. Individual Development

Use the job description to demonstrate an investment in their future. Highlight any opportunities for continued training and development. Many job seekers will appreciate any opportunities to improve their skills in the evolving job market, where many are left in the dust when it comes to their skill sets.

Generation Z is very aware of the issues caused by the skills gap, so it will be essential for employers to showcase any training or educational programs.

3. Total Rewards and Benefits

Generation Z is motivated by opportunities for exciting life experiences. To attract this generation, employers may consider offering benefits that allow for greater work-life balance. Such benefits might include flexible scheduling, more paid time off, and remote/hybrid work. Highlighting flexibility will go a long way in making your job descriptions stand out to young job seekers.

Of course, competitive salaries will also be a huge factor, even if this generation is characterized as valuing experiences over monetary gain.

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4. Social Media Acumen

Having a presence on social media is crucial for recruiting the younger generation. Social media impacts many of the decisions people make today, including where to work. A job seeker may look to your social media pages to better understand what it’s like to work for your organization.

Social media is also where many will assess your company’s values and social impact. Thus, maintaining a social presence and managing your reputation online will be a huge part of recruiting from the emerging workforce.

soon, the good news is that it’s relatively easy for employers to do so to sufficiently attract top Gen Z talent over the short and long term, too.

Simply start with the four key areas outlined above, and remember: age is nothing but a number, but so too are talent analytics. And how your recruiting team - and company - perform over the coming months and years will be measured by how well you’re able to attract the top talent of tomorrow, today.

And that’s the bottom line.

The Future of Talent Is Now

Even if you’re not currently hiring for open early career positions or actively targeting the emerging workforce, the fact of the matter is that today’s entry level hires are the talent your company will need tomorrow to survive, and thrive, in the rapidly changing world of work.

If you haven’t yet had the need for Gen Z talent, just wait a year or two - they’re expected to make up a majority of the overall workforce by 2027, which means that Gen Z is the future of talent acquisition and hiring, a demographic inevitability that every employer should start preparing for right now.

Ben Tuttle is a Product Manager with Proliant, Inc. Ben has over a decade of experience working with HR professionals and HR Technologies.

He has helped hundreds of organizations find HR technology that suits their business needs.

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Tech Recruiting And Hiring: Saluda A America Latina In search of qualified, available tech talent destination

By Lachlan de Crespigny, Revelo

T

he digital world has grown rapidly since its inception. With the launch of the internet, we were off to the races as new digital developments happened each day. The dot-com boom of the 1990s was not unlike the California gold rush of the 1850s— both created a massive influx of value in the market and an influx of workers in the industry. Today we are on the edge of a new gold rush, and once again, it will have tech at its center.

10.5%. Both software and tech consulting services will grow at a rapid rate, faster than pre-pandemic levels, according to the report. Hiring has become so competitive that small or even mid-sized businesses are finding it more difficult to innovate and operate in their industries because they cannot compete with the tech behemoths that monopolize talent.

Companies across the United States are struggling to hire developers, designers, data engineers, and IT specialists to sustain the digital end of their businesses. As a result, tech talent is in high demand.

From January to May 2022, there have been more than 1.6 million tech job postings in the U.S., a 40% year-over-year increase, according to a report from CompTIA.

While the dot-com boom and the gold rush were both geographically located in California, this boom of tech talent will come from a different place. Latin America offers the best of both worlds—highly skilled and English-speaking tech talent in overlapping time zones, without the challenges of a shortage. This is because Latin America is a hub of innovation and rapid growth is happening in Brazil and Mexico, with “unicorn companies” (up-and-coming companies valued at $1 billion or more) on the rise.

This data demonstrates a critical point: with US demand outpacing available talent, companies will be searching for new places where tech talent is abundant and available. Enter Latin America.

So it is time for HR teams to tap into the network of highly skilled software developers in Latin America that are ready to join companies as full-time employees.

Latin America and Tech Recruiting: El Proximo Silicon Valley!

Here are a few reasons why and how HR can prepare.

Latin America: Donde Estas El Talento

Per Forrester’s Global Tech Market Outlook for 2022 to 2023, software is anticipated to grow by

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to Latin America because that is where qualified tech talent is available. There is an untapped market of highly skilled developers, designers, and IT specialists who are trained in the critical languages of tech, like Java, React, Python, IOS, and Android (among others).

Availability is vital here because American companies are finding that there is little availability in their pool of tech talent. HR leaders and executives likely saw this problem on the horizon as more companies scrambled to equip their teams for the digital age.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that demand for tech talent will increase by 22% between 2020 and 2030. To put that in context, the average growth rate for all occupations is 8%. Even with concerns about economic volatility, high rates of inflation, and a potential market crash, experts are predicting that the search for tech talent will remain competitive.

HR leaders of U.S.-based companies must start looking for tech talent outside of their existing, localized talent pool. Latin America’s talent pool makes the most sense for U.S.-based companies because tech talent is available, qualified, timezonealigned, and English speaking. These are the essential elements HR leaders are looking for in the search for tech talent.

Remote Work Is a Virtual Reality

One key question arises for HR leaders looking to join the gold rush and seek out the Latin American tech talent pool: How will we find, recruit, hire, and maintain remote talent? Technology is the answer.

Digital, remote staffing solutions enable HR leaders to find, recruit, hire and manage tech talent from a global talent pool.

According to a 2022 survey from PwC, recruiting and hiring is one of the top 10 challenges facing HR this year. Remote staffing solutions do the heavy lifting of sourcing and vetting talent so that HR does not spend hours filtering through thousands of candidates that do not make the cut. Any hesitations about hiring remote talent dissipate when HR is equipped with turnkey hiring solutions.

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Get with the System

HR teams have previously avoided hiring from the global market because there were numerous challenges to hiring and maintaining remote talent.

This is no longer the case. Remote staffing solutions remove barriers and make the remote tech talent pool more accessible.

Once the hard work of recruiting and hiring is done, management and retention become the primary focus of HR. With the help of technology, maintaining a global team is no more difficult than managing a local team. While there may be differences in the regulation of payroll, processes, or tax laws, remote staffing solutions can bridge the gap between U.S.-based companies and the global talent they choose to employ. These solutions remove previous challenges of hiring a remote team and enable companies to find the qualified talent they need and maintain their teams with ease.

Remote staffing platforms can assist HR teams in their search for qualified talent from global markets because it streamlines recruiting and hiring and makes it easy to manage and maintain talent once hired. With remote staffing solutions, HR does not have to carry the heavy burden of finding tech talent in an already depleted market. Instead, HR can devote time, energy, and resources to equipping, training, and empowering their tech talent teams so that they will stay with the company long term. The gold rush is beginning. If you are looking for qualified, available tech talent, you will find it in Latin America.

Lachlan de Crespigny is Co-Founder of Revelo.

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The Talent Gap Analysis Playbook For Recruiting And Hiring Everything you ever wanted to know about talent gap analysis

By Hanson Cheng, Freedom to Ascend WTF is a “talent gap analysis,” you might ask?

Well, it’s an essential tool for modern hiring, and if you’re not using it in your organization, you’re probably already falling behind the competition for top talent.

skills your business needs. That is where a talent gap analysis comes into play.

Performing an effective talent gap analysis is the best way to identify skills that your organization can benefit from. In this article, we are going to take a close look at what talent gap analysis is and how you can take advantage of one.

If you’re not familiar with talent gap analyses, don’t worry. We’ve got your back, which is why we’ve put together this handy guide on Talent Gap Analysis written with recruiting and TA professionals in mind. Don’t worry. It’s much simpler than it sounds.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Talent Gap Analysis (But Were Afraid to Ask)

What Exactly Is A Talent Gap Analysis?

The modern work environment is changing; and along with it, the skills needed to achieve stellar workplace results.

A talent gap analysis is also known as a skills gap analysis. It is a tool used to identify any gaps between an organization’s current and required talent pool.

Through this process, a business can determine any disparities between present talent levels and the preferred talent levels.

Today, remote work has become the norm rather than the exception. Most careers that young professionals aspire to pursue today did not even exist a decade ago. And entrepreneurs are exploring novel business ideas that require a different talent set than traditional roles.

A typical instance where a skills gap analysis can help would be this: suppose your business is looking to expand and needs to set up a complex sales process.

In such a situation, a talent gap analysis will tell you whether you need to hire new talent for the purpose, or can retrain existing employees.

In such an environment, hiring the right talent is imperative. However, even more important is recognizing exactly which form of talent and

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The Talent Gap Analysis Playbook For Recruiting And Hiring

In several cases, such analyses can even identify previously hidden skills in the existing workforce.

In short, a talent gap analysis can help prepare your business for meeting present and future skill requirements.

Worth It: 5 Advantages of Performing a Talent Gap Analysis

From the above, the significant advantage of a talent gap analysis is simple: it helps you identify skill gaps that you need to fill. When looked at closely, there are several other advantages to performing this exercise, as listed below. A talent gap analysis allows you to: 1. Streamline the hiring process and scale your strategy As every hiring manager knows fully well, hiring the right talent is one of the most critical business functions. Naturally, the task is easier said than done, as most businesses find it to their disadvantage.

Conducting a talent gap analysis allows you to match your hiring needs to the ever-evolving digital work environment. This way, you can create effective hiring strategies and ensure that your hiring process goes as smoothly as possible. At the same time, it helps to ensure that any new talent you hire can contribute significantly to the long term company goals.

Part of having the right hiring process also comes down to ensuring that potential employees know they are safe when they get started with this process. Similar to promises organizations make to customers before they become so, you need to make sure that you as an employer offer a fair chance, great development opportunities and a clear path to success.

Let’s consider a very niched example.

A company that offers an at home STD test promises clients “CLIA Certified Labs”, “Physician Reviewed” tests, and “Secure Data”. While these are, probably, not promises that every organization can make, they are important to the client and give them a sense of security in the industry in which this company operates.

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Thinking along the same lines when it comes to making promises to potential candidates that apply to your company, you could consider offering (and featuring): ●● A career growth path ●● State of the art work environment ●● The opportunity to work with the latest technologies ●● Continuous learning and development opportunities 2. All your talent, all in one place: The source of truth in TA The next significant advantage of a talent gap analysis is that it helps you get a bird’s-eye-view of the entire organization’s talent landscape. Through this exercise, decision-makers can narrow in on skill gaps in any particular department or function.

This, in turn, allows the C-suite to understand whether the organization or any specific department has the talent required to fulfill the company’s goals. It even allows you to understand whether there is a need to restructure the organization’s employee hierarchy.

3. Better insights, better recruitment outcomes Hiring and training new talent is a costly and time-consuming task. Naturally, you will not be able to get the right talent, on-demand exactly when you need it. A talent gap analysis helps you create long term recruitment strategies. This way, you always have employees with the required skills at hand when you need them.

4. Hack employee performance and productivity Talent gap analyses do not just help identify hiring requirements; they also enable reskilling and upskilling of existing staff. As a result, the productivity levels of your workforce increase significantly.

Another aspect of such analyses is the enhancement of employee morale. By improving employee skill levels, you stand to further their career development and increase loyalty and enthusiasm for the organization.

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5. Make hires before the competition can Through a talent gap analysis, you stand to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your workforce. This lets you bridge your organization’s gaps and plan ahead for better training of existing employees.

As a result, you’ll be able to stay several steps ahead of the competition and get a competitive edge over them. Through smart hires and the creation of an innovative talent pool, your organization stays ahead of the hiring curve in your niche.

Performing a Talent Gap Analysis: 5 Steps for Success The exact steps to perform a talent gap analysis will vary based on the size of the organization, its present and future needs, industry, and budget and time constraints. It can also get modified according to the company culture.

In the following, we will outline a five-step process for performing a talent gap analysis. Keep in mind that these are only guidelines, and the exact implementation will differ from business to business.

1. Pre-plan Your analysis As with any analysis, effective planning is half the job done. When assessing talent gaps, the first step you need to keep in mind is the granularity level at which you should carry out the assessment.

For any business, talent gaps can usually be identified at three levels: individual, team/departmental, and organizational. Talent gap analysis at each level plays a different role and serves different purposes.

Analysis at the individual level can help to understand where employees lack skills specific to their job roles. Once identified, you can fill these gaps through reskilling or upskilling programs.

Next comes the skill analysis at the team/department level, which looks at specific employee clusters. Here, the aim is to identify collective talent gaps and fill the same through new hires or departmental training.

Finally, at the organizational level, talent gap analysis aims to understand whether the entire organizational

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hierarchy, from the C-suite to on-field workers, is aligned with company goals. Here, the focus should be on mapping organizational competencies to long-term targets.

In most cases, you’ll need to involve all workforce levels to get a comprehensive view. Depending on your planned granularity, you might need to talk with staff members, team leaders, and top-tier executives to take the task forward.

2. Clearly define long as well as short term goals The fundamental question of what kind of talent you need revolves around what goals you are looking to achieve using such talent. So, it is essential to define and document both long and short-term organizational goals for proper talent gap analysis.

Ask yourself where you want to see your business in the next year. Then extend that vision to the next five, and then the next ten. Once you have a clear idea of the above, you need to envisage whether the current skill-set you have in employment is enough to get you there. If not, then where are the significant talent gaps, and how can they be fulfilled?

After you’ve answered the above questions, you now need to decide on skills acquisition priority. Naturally, the talent needed for short term goal accomplishment refers to immediate skills that you must acquire.

For the long term, you need to focus on acquiring sustainable talent. And in both cases, be sure to keep applicability in mind, which is a practical translation of acquired talent from a training environment to the actual work environment.

3. Understand where the future of work is going The modern workplace is nothing like it was even a decade ago. Today, we no longer have to travel to work physically. Documentation has moved from the realm of paper and pen to digital signatures. And algorithms are taking over roles that were previously undoable without human intervention.

Naturally, your organization needs to understand where the future of work is heading. Can some legacy functions be automated and the corresponding

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The Talent Gap Analysis Playbook For Recruiting And Hiring

human resource redirected? What skills would these employees need to be sustainable in the future? And what are the roles that your business might need to create that it still hasn’t?

Understanding the above can help you realize which skill gaps can be fulfilled by technology and which are inherently human. You can then take the required steps to fulfill the need for those essential skills that can only be met by human talent and leave the rest to automation.

4. Take stock of the present talent pool So, by this point in the analysis, you know the talent levels that your business should aspire to. But how do you realize the gaps? To do so, you need to take stock of the talent pool that you already have. Once you understand both the present and the required talent levels, you’ll be able to quickly identify the gaps, if any.

For this purpose, you can make use of multiple tools, such as electronically distributed skill assessments and surveys. You can also choose to conduct detailed interviews and performance appraisals of employees on individual and group levels.

Another method of understanding the present talent status is to examine employee KPIs on an individual level. This will give you an understanding of the degree of each employee’s contribution to the business.

You can also implement a comprehensive feedback process where the employees themselves let you know of perceived talent gaps. Organizational performance charts are also good indicators of where and what kind of talent your business lacks.

5. Document and execute The above four steps were all about collecting the data; now, it’s time to document and make sense of it. The best way to document talent gap analysis data would be a visual, chart-based representation. This will allow you and any business associates to make better decisions.

Once you’ve identified and documented all the talent gaps, next, it’s time to execute based on those

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findings. You can plug any talent gap in two ways: reskilling existing employees or hiring new talent.

Both avenues involve a significant investment of time, human resources as well as money. Which avenue you choose will ultimately depend upon how big the gap between your current and required talent levels is. In some cases, you can opt for a combination of the two.

Mind the Gap: 5 Tips, Tricks and Tools for Success Merely carrying out a talent gap analysis for the sake of it is not enough. You need to ensure that the exercise is carried out effectively. As the new decade rolls on, skills gaps continue to widen. Business owners need to realize this and act accordingly. The following are specific tips to keep in mind for an effective talent gap analysis.

1. Be proactive When it comes to closing talent gaps, HR managers and decision-makers need to be proactive. Please don’t wait till the talent gap becomes apparent and then rush reactively to fill it. Instead, research industry trends, build a habit of continuous expertise improvement and enhance skills as a matter of course. Only then can the talent gap be genuinely overcome.

2. Lay focus on workforce requirements The data that you gather during the talent gap analysis can reveal valuable insights about your workforce. By understanding their needs and wants, you can develop a deeper connection with your employees beyond mere skill analysis.

Such understanding needs to go over and above regular survey data and take into account global socio-economic and industry trends. This way, you’ll be positioned to gain a collaborative, comprehensive view of your workforce’s talent needs.

3. Leverage online tools Once you’ve identified the talent gaps, technology can be your best friend. Through the power of online courses, you can provide your employees with engaging content for acquiring new skills.

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The Talent Gap Analysis Playbook For Recruiting And Hiring

However, new talent will come with new challenges and work cultures. As a business leader, you’ll need to adapt to these changes and also be open to experimentation at the workplace. Not everything will succeed, but the lessons learned from them can be invaluable in the long run.

5. Never allow complacency to creep in Talent gap analysis is not a one-and-done exercise.

Instead, it’s a continuous process that must be carried out to maintain a relevant talent pool. That’s why you should never stop the process of identifying talent requirements and always be on the lookout for fresh skill sets. This way, you’ll be able to maintain a workforce that’s ready to handle present and future challenges.

Final Words Using popular online course platforms, you can create customized courses for your organization’s employees. These can focus on specific talent gaps you need to fulfill, and at the same time, also lead to the creation of content that can be repurposed for marketing.

The same applies to other tools that you can use to your advantage. Email marketing platforms will allow you to set up campaigns that specifically target prospective talent that may help plug your identified gaps. The great thing is that once you write the emails that you want to go out at regular intervals, the platforms will automate the process for you.

You can also use SMS marketing to reach out to a larger audience and talent pool with lesser effort. With this type of marketing having high open rates (since everyone checks their phone regularly), you’re more likely to get your message across to a larger number of people.

Technology today is advancing faster than at any other time in human history. As a result, traditional skills are becoming outdated faster than you can keep track of.

In such a scenario, it’s only natural for talent gaps to arise. However, it’s essential to understand that identifying talent gaps is not a cause for concern but rather an opportunity to improve. The very fact that there’s a gap between your current and future organisational skill sets means your business is progressing.

What remains is for you to grab this opportunity and stay ahead of the curve.

Hanson Cheng is the founder of Freedom to Ascend.

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4. Don’t be afraid to experiment As the corporate ecosystem evolves, wider, more disparate talent gaps are bound to emerge. In such a situation, you’ll need to hire fresh talent and train them for furthering your business goals.

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