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How HR Leaders Expect the Talent Acquisition Landscape To Evolve

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Resignations and remote work policies and layoffs, oh my! The ever-changing talent acquisition landscape is enough to make anyone’s head spin. In order to stay afloat, talent teams must get comfortable with change. 

So, what does the future of the talent acquisition landscape look like? We went on the hunt for answers.

Our 2022 Hiring Insights Report surveyed 560 HR, talent, and recruiting decision makers across the U.S. We uncovered their perceptions on the most pressing challenges facing their teams, and how to succeed in the future of the hiring landscape.

The findings? Leaders expect for retaining talent, meaningfully connecting with candidates, and improving hiring efficiency to define the future of talent acquisition. Let’s dig into the data.

Candidate Relationships Grow in Importance

We asked respondents how they would describe the changes they’ve observed in the hiring landscape over the past 12 months. The majority (47%) said that the landscape has become more competitive due to an increased demand for talent. Trailing closely behind, 46% said that creating genuine relationships with candidates has become crucial.

Looking to the future, talent leaders agreed that connecting with candidates will remain of utmost importance. The ability to create meaningful candidate relationships topped the list of how HR leaders expect the landscape to change in the next 12 months.

The takeaways? If recruiting teams want to compete with the talent landscape, they must invest time and energy into forming a bond with candidates. For instance, instead of spending all of your energy on learning what candidates can offer your company, spend a little bit more time learning what candidates look for in a role.

Challenges With Talent Retention on the Horizon

When asked which hiring challenges they’ve faced in the past 12 months, talent leaders ranked “retaining top talent” as their biggest obstacle. In 2021, a whopping 47 million Americans quit their jobs as part of the Great Resignation. Needless to say, our report’s finding comes as no surprise.

Our respondents expect talent retention to remain their biggest challenge in the next 12 months as well. Here’s where things get interesting. Talent leaders agree that connecting with candidates will remain a key component of a successful hiring process. Yet creating candidate relationships isn’t just important for talent acquisition. It’s also crucial for talent retention.

So, if you want to master talent retention, know this: retaining talent starts from the first moment that a candidate speaks to a recruiter. Cultivating genuine connections with potential new hires sets the stage for a meaningful experience at your company—and higher retention down the line.

Improving Hiring Efficiency Remains Paramount

The majority of talent leaders (46%) said that in the past 12 months, their main concern when refining their hiring process was boosting their overall efficiency. Hiring efficiency proved to be absolutely essential amid 2021’s tight labor market, as teams scrambled to backfill roles.

Likewise, the majority of respondents agreed that improving efficiency is still their biggest focus area when diving into the future of the talent landscape. This isn’t the least bit shocking; enhancing hiring efficiency will never go out of style. 

To remain agile within the constantly changing landscape, teams must put the proper systems in place so that they can boost efficiency, do more with less, and remain prepared for anything that the talent world throws their way.

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

ROI is key. This is not a time to invest in software that won’t bring you immediate value. So let’s eliminate the guesswork with our free ROI calculator.

Calculate Your ROI

How To Succeed in the Talent Acquisition Landscape

So, you want to know how to prepare for the future of talent acquisition? Well, here’s the answer, tied up in a neat little bow, straight from the minds of the U.S.’s talent leaders.

Focus your attention on improving hiring efficiency, boosting talent retention, and improving candidate relationships, and you have yourself a masterful talent acquisition strategy.

If you lay the groundwork for an efficient hiring process, you create more space to connect with candidates. Strong candidate relationships give rise to lasting new hires. These lasting new hires result in better talent retention. Boom.

Keep Up With the Latest HR Trends

In a tumultuous environment like talent acquisition, it pays to have a pulse on the latest happenings in the landscape. If you’re looking to gain a better understanding of the challenges facing hiring teams and best practices for refining your strategies, you came to the right place.

Download our 2022 Hiring Insights Report today to learn more about the state of hiring, and what must be done to win over candidates.

5 Mistakes Recruiting Coordinators Make (And How To Avoid Them)

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Recruiting coordinators make the talent world go ‘round. As the unsung heroes of the hiring process, recruiting coordinators act as a candidate’s first impression of a company. RC’s juggle multiple tasks at once to keep this impression pristine and move the hiring process along. Yep, it’s a pretty big role.

However, as with any job—especially ones that involve a high workload (and stress)—mistakes happen. No matter if you slip up when emailing candidates, or stumble when coordinating interviews, the most important thing you can do is evaluate what went wrong and steer clear of it in the future.

Here are five common mistakes recruiting coordinators make, and how to avoid them to create an extraordinary hiring experience.

1. Sending Candidates Lackluster Communications

When sending message after message to candidates, it can be easy to go on autopilot and phone it in. We get it—coordinating interviews isn’t the most exciting task. 

But truth be told, the communication between RC’s and candidates plays a pivotal role in the hiring process. The last thing you want to do is send a robotic email riddled with errors. Even quick text exchanges with candidates should be scrutinized for high quality.

These messages inform candidates of your company’s tone of voice and can either increase or decrease their excitement for their upcoming interview.

How Recruiting Coordinators Can Avoid This

Whether you’re sending a message to gather a candidate’s availability or to confirm their upcoming interview, there’s several steps you should take to refine this communication.

To add a layer of empathy to your communications, direct candidates to an email and/or phone number to reach out to if they have any questions. You never know what’s going on inside a candidate’s head.

Above all, always review your responses for the ABC’s of communication: accuracy, brevity, and clarity. That way, your messages will contain the most important information, will be an appropriate length, and will be abundantly easy to digest. Now, your response is ready to be sent out into the world.

2. Failing to Give Candidates Scheduling Flexibility

Flexibility is a growing priority for those in the world of work. In fact, 96% of US professionals say they require flexibility. 

Asking candidates to adapt to your hiring team’s schedule, or to make themselves available within a narrow time frame, conveys that flexibility is not a priority for your organization.

How Recruiting Coordinators Can Avoid This

Make your hiring process flexibility-focused by putting candidates in the driver’s seat. Instead of expecting candidates to move their schedules around for your company, ask for their availability. Show that you respect their time by letting them schedule their interviews for whenever works best for them.  

At the end of the day, your candidates are likely chatting with multiple other companies. They’re more likely to remember and value your interview process—and you as an RC—if you act with flexibility and understanding.

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

ROI is key. This is not a time to invest in software that won’t bring you immediate value. So let’s eliminate the guesswork with our free ROI calculator.

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3. Coordinating Interviews Manually

If you’re still manually scheduling and coordinating interviews, you’re doing something wrong. (Too harsh?) Daily recruiting coordinator tasks become highly tedious and inefficient when they’re done without the help of technology. And when your head is stuck in calendars and spreadsheets, you have even less time to spend on high-value tasks that will actually move the needle.

Today’s candidates have little patience for clunky hiring processes that rely on manual operations. An inefficient process does nothing but degrade the candidate experience and weigh down your hiring metrics.

How Recruiting Coordinators Can Avoid This

The best way to keep up with candidate expectations and remain competitive in the talent landscape is by leveraging a tech solution that offers recruitment automation. Speed is crucial to a hiring process; automation gives you an edge by allowing you to coordinate in minutes, not hours. (Plus, your team will save major time and money.)

Leveraging an automated hiring solution creates a quick and easy hiring experience. This sends the message that you value your candidate’s time. With less bandwidth spent on scheduling and coordination, you’ll have more bandwidth to focus on what matters: better connecting with candidates.

4. Treating Candidate Relationships as Transactional

RC’s who have a transactional mindset interact with candidates with the sole purpose of turning them into new hires to fill open reqs and boost their hiring stats. Too many recruiting coordinators operate this way, and it’s a problem. 

Candidates don’t want to be viewed as just a number. They want to form a genuine connection with your recruitment team built on trust, transparency, and flexibility. Navigating with this transactional mindset is sure to push them away.

How Recruiting Coordinators Can Avoid This

Nurture the recruiting coordinator-candidate relationship. Spend some time learning what candidates look for when interacting with a hiring team, and apply those insights to your daily RC involvements.

Here’s an insight to start off with: 62% of employees cite well-being support as their top priority in their job hunt. Checking up on candidates and offering yourself as a resource if they have any concerns are both excellent, low-effort ways to show that you care about their well-being. 

You could also block off time to brainstorm what’s missing from the hiring process that could boost your team’s candidate relationships. For instance, if you don’t collect feedback from candidates, now is the time to do so. Let candidates speak their minds and remind them that you value their opinions.

5. Neglecting to Prioritize Upskilling

The life of a recruiting coordinator is sometimes downright overwhelming. With all of the tasks on your plate, making time to progress your skills and learnings can seem practically impossible. Or, you might even feel guilty at the thought of putting aside the tasks on your to-do list to focus on your own career development.

How Recruiting Coordinators Can Avoid This

If any of this resonates with you, know this: you must always fill your own cup. A hiring team that truly supports the success of their teammates understands that it’s crucial for everyone to invest in their own skills and knowledge once in a while.

Block off time on your calendar, notify your team that you’ll be heads-down and focused on upskilling, and ask your teammates if they could help out with any urgent tasks while you work on career development, if necessary.

There’s a variety of online classes and certifications for recruiting coordinators. Some of the popular ones include LinkedIn Learning, The Recruitment Education Institute, Alison, and Recruiting Toolbox.

Hey, RCs—Ready To Elevate Your Hiring Process?

Hundreds of companies have leveled up their recruitment process to stand out in the talent landscape. Patreon reduced their time-to-hire by 50%, Box reduced their time spent scheduling by 40%, and Deliveroo hired 700+ employees.

How’d these talent acquisition teams do it? Simple: they used GoodTime. And you can, too.

GoodTime Hire automates interview scheduling, builds relationships during interviews, and provides actionable insights to continuously improve your hiring process. 

If you want to take your recruitment process to the next level, learn more about Hire’s advanced interview scheduling software.

How to Get Actionable Candidate Feedback (And Actually Use It)

Posted on by Rachel Heller

It’s a candidate’s world, we’re all just living in it. Candidates now hold more power in the hiring process than ever before. Applicants don’t just want a hiring process that creates strong candidate relationships, they actively expect it.

With the pressure to create meaningful candidate relationships, recruitment teams commonly hold discussions on how to optimize their hiring for happier candidates. But where most teams falter is neglecting to loop candidates in on these conversations. No one can better speak to the quality of your hiring process than those who experience it first-hand. 

Sending candidate experience surveys to applicants allows you to know exactly what aspects of your hiring process help and hurt the candidate relationship. But gathering candidate feedback is one thing, and taking action on that feedback is another.

Read on to learn how to use your candidate experience surveys to evaluate four aspects of the hiring process that are integral to the candidate relationship—⁠and how to turn insights into action.

Performance of Your Interviewers

Your interviewers can make or break the candidate relationship. Interviewers act as the candidate’s first impression of your company’s employees, providing a window into what it’s like to work there. That means your interviewers need to be on their A-game, or you can expect disappointing candidate feedback. 

Candidate Feedback You Can Gather

Consider gathering feedback on the following topics related to your interviewers: 

  • The preparedness and professionalism of the interviewers.
  • The knowledge that interviewers displayed when answering questions.
  • How attentive the interviewers acted towards candidates.

How to Take Action

So you ask for candidate feedback on your interviewers, and you find that improvements are needed. Maybe you hear that your interviewers are doing a less-than-desirable job at answering questions. Or, maybe they’re not up to par when it comes to professionalism. Critiques on interviewer performance means that it’s time to get serious about interviewer training.

Inadequately trained interviewers sour the candidate relationship and lead to bad hiring decisions. By instituting an interviewer training program where interviewer newbies shadow your seasoned interviewers, you’ll be able to not only prevent negative candidate relationships, but also the wasted time, energy, and money that results from a bad hire.

Interviewer trainees should be made aware of critiques gathered from your candidate experience surveys so that past mistakes are not repeated. If a candidate was disappointed with how an interviewer answered their questions, all trainees should know this so that they pay extra attention to the thoroughness that seasoned interviewers use when providing responses.

Quality of Your Recruiting Tech Tools

The quality of your tech significantly impacts the quality of both your recruitment methods and your candidate relationships. In fact, of the recruiters and talent managers that reportedly use some form of recruiting and/or applicant tracking software, 94% say that their tech has improved their hiring process (Capterra). 

Candidate Feedback You Can Gather

Consider gathering feedback on the following topics related to your tech: 

  • The experience of using your hiring/ATS software.
  • The experience of using your video conferencing tech (if interviewing remotely).
  • The impact of your tech stack on the overall hiring experience.

How to Take Action

In the scenario where candidates express a dislike for your tech stack, take time to assess your tech for pitfalls. For instance, If your video conferencing tech is tripping candidates up, evaluate if you’re really setting all candidates up for success when using this software.

With the widespread use of tech like Zoom, it’s easy to forget that some candidates might be less familiar with how to use these tools, or might not have interviewed virtually before (the digital divide is a very real thing). To level the playing field and create a clear-cut experience for all, provide candidates with a best practices sheet on how to use your video conferencing tech.

If you only use an ATS, consider integrating your ATS with a Meeting Optimization Engine. With this extra technological boost, you’ll drive even more impactful hiring results and cultivate compelling candidate relationships—every single time.

Clarity of Your Company Culture and Values

The importance of clearly conveying your company culture and values is undeniable. Don’t believe me? Ask the candidates: studies show that the number one reason candidates choose one job over another is because of a better company culture. Candidates want their hiring experience to affirm that your culture and values align with what truly matters to them.

Candidate Feedback You Can Gather

Consider gathering feedback on the following topics related to your company culture and values: 

  • Any confusion on how to define the company culture.
  • If the hiring process cultivated excitement to join the company culture.
  • If the hiring process helped candidates understand company values.

How to Take Action

Failing to properly convey your culture and values doesn’t bode well for the candidate relationship. If your candidates express that the hiring process didn’t enhance their understanding of your culture and/or values, or if they didn’t find your culture to be compelling, your recruitment team has work to do.

One way to address their concerns is to gather everyone involved in the hiring process and align on how company culture and values are to be highlighted at every touch point. This way, you can ensure that everyone delivers a cohesive, engaging message that properly speaks to what it’s like to be an employee at your workplace.

This is also the time to check for any inconsistencies or improvements to be made in culture and value messaging on candidate-facing platforms, such as your company’s website. When it comes to cultivating a defined cultural image, it’s crucial that every material that candidates may come across enriches and unifies their understanding of your company.

Efficiency of Your Recruitment Process

Above all, the candidate relationship relies on a quick and easy hiring experience. Interviewing is nerve-wracking enough as it is, and having to go through a clunky hiring process only magnifies this stress.

Candidate Feedback You Can Gather

Consider gathering feedback on the following topics related to your recruitment efficiency: 

  • Whether candidates felt that you valued their time.
  • The ease of navigation of the recruitment process.
  • The quickness of the recruitment process.

How to Take Action

If your candidate experience surveys reveal that candidates are displeased with your hiring efficiency, leveling up your tech stack is once again the most helpful action you can take to supercharge your hiring. And with the tech-driven lifestyles that the majority of your candidates lead, advancing your tech tools may be just the thing that impresses candidates enough to win them over.

Another route to take is starting a dialogue among key players in the hiring process regarding expectations on communication and goals for your time-to-hire. If your team doesn’t schedule intake meetings at the beginning of each hiring process, this is your sign to start. 

In intake meetings, recruiters and hiring managers meet to align on topics such as goals for the recruitment process. By setting expectations early on, intake meetings eliminate any confusion down the road that may prolong the process and waste a candidate’s time.

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

ROI is key. This is not a time to invest in software that won’t bring you immediate value. So let’s eliminate the guesswork with our free ROI calculator.

Calculate Your ROI

Start Collecting Candidate Feedback Today

Even if your candidate experience surveys generate nothing but praise from candidates, don’t just sit back and relax. The expectations of candidates shift all the time, and this makes cultivating connections with candidates a never-ending process of adjusting to match these expectations.

If you want to double down on your candidate relationships, you need GoodTime Hire’s Candidate Pulse. Our newest feature collects input from applicants at every step of the hiring process, allowing you to fine-tune your operations and create recruiter-candidate bonds like never before.

Learn more about Candidate Pulse today.

15 Essential Candidate Experience Survey Questions

Posted on by Rachel Heller

The foundation of every successful relationship is clear communication, and recruiter-candidate relationships are no different. If you’re not asking candidates for feedback, you’re relying on guesswork when it comes to connecting with candidates in a meaningful way. That’s the magic of candidate experience survey questions.

These surveys take the ambiguity out of creating candidate relationships by allowing you to gather feedback on your hiring efforts. Armed with genuine input straight from the most reliable source—the candidates—you’ll be able to fine-tune your recruiting to ensure each and every candidate has a winning candidate experience.

When constructing your surveys, making them anonymous is the best way to encourage honest opinions. Candidates want to secure a job, and a lack of anonymity pressures them into designing responses that provide a better shot at an offer.

Ready to create a stronger connection with candidates? Here are 15 candidate experience survey questions to inform your efforts in crafting compelling candidate relationships.

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Open-Ended Candidate Experience Survey Questions

With open-ended questions, candidates can express their opinions in as much detail as they want. While the qualitative nature of this candidate feedback is a bit difficult to structurally analyze, the richness in responses is a significant positive.

Candidates can respond to your questions in their own way, allowing for an endless range of answers. Because of the infinite possibilities of open-ended questions, you’ll receive candidate feedback on unexpected aspects of the candidate relationship that you hadn’t previously considered.

Be cognizant of how many open-ended questions you include in each of your candidate experience surveys. Including too many questions creates surveys that are much too time-consuming for candidates to complete.

Examples of Open-Ended Questions

  1. How well were you able to connect with your interviewers? Please describe.
  2. How would you describe the overall experience with your interviewers?
  3. How would you describe the speed and efficiency of our hiring process?
  4. What are two things we could do to improve our hiring process?
  5. What were your two favorite aspects of our hiring process?
  6. Would you consider applying for a job at [your organization] again? Why or why not?
  7. Based on your experience, is [your organization] a place you would like to work? Why or why not?

Likert Scale Candidate Experience Survey Questions

Likert scale questions provide a bit more structure to data gathering and analysis. These questions ask candidates to evaluate their attitudes on a statement and select a rating on a scale from one extreme to another. Typically, “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” are at opposite ends of the likert scale.

Based on the sentiment that candidates select for each statement, hiring teams can assess the candidate feedback and zero in on problematic and successful areas of the candidate relationship.  

While open-ended questions generate rich insights, most candidates won’t want to spend time on a survey where all of the questions require typed-out responses. If you add a healthy dose of likert scale questions into the mix, your survey completion rates are bound to increase.

Examples of Likert Scale Questions

  1. My interviewers were knowledgeable.
  2. My interviews made me feel comfortable.
  3. I felt represented in my interviewer panel.
  4. The hiring process gave me a thorough understanding of [your organization]’s culture.
  5. I knew what to expect at each stage of the hiring process.
  6. The hiring process was quick.
  7. Recruiters communicated with me in a timely manner.
  8. Based on my experience, [your organization] is a company I would like to work for.

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Do You Really Know How Candidates Feel?

When it comes to cultivating strong relationships with candidates, putting effort into creating positive experiences is only half the battle. Candidates must also feel that they’ve formed a connection with your brand and your hiring team, or else you’ve created no candidate relationship at all.

Stop making assumptions about your relationships with candidates and start gathering genuine insights with candidate experience surveys. (Your candidates will thank you for it.)

If you want to understand the ins and outs of each candidate’s experience, GoodTime’s interview scheduling software’s got you covered.

Learn how Hire’s new feature, Candidate Pulse, gathers invaluable candidate insights to take the candidate relationship to the next level.

Tech Companies Hit Less Than 50% Of Their Hiring Goals. Here’s Why.

Posted on by Rachel Heller

For many job seekers, tech is where they want to be. Tech industry jobs commonly promise good pay, a decent work-life balance, and attractive career progression. Yet despite this allure, the majority of hiring teams in tech haven’t been doing too hot.

In fact, the tech companies surveyed in our 2022 Hiring Insights Report hit just 46% of their hiring goals in 2021. 

Why has tech taken a tumble? Is the industry losing its sparkle? Or are hiring teams tripping up?

We dug deeper into our report’s data and found the answers.

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Dropping the Ball on Candidate Relationships

Today’s candidates expect to feel a mutual bond with your hiring team and your company. If they don’t feel a connection, then they won’t join. Neglecting to prioritize your relationships with candidates means bad news for your hiring goal attainment. In this sense, it’s no wonder that hiring teams in tech missed the mark on their goals. 

To start on a positive note, 47% of tech companies agree that in the past 12 months, meaningfully connecting with candidates has become crucial. Likewise, 45% agree that this will remain a priority in the coming months.

But here’s the catch: only 34% of respondents looked to build better candidate relationships in the past 12 months, and just 35% plan on improving these relationships in the coming months.

When it comes to connecting with candidates, tech companies have great intentions but struggle with the execution. And yet, it’s not just tech companies that are struggling; this problem remained evident across all companies that we surveyed. The importance of candidate relationships is increasingly widely known. Now, it’s time to take action.

Lack of Focus on DEIB

It’s no secret that tech hasn’t always been the most welcoming industry for underrepresented groups. Female, Black, and Hispanic workers have historically made up just a small fraction of the tech workforce. But with the increased buzz surrounding DEIB in hiring over the last couple of years, one would think that tech would’ve made great strides…right? Our data isn’t hopeful.

When asked which aspects of their hiring process they looked to improve over the past 12 months, making DEIB a measurable priority was the lowest response (33%). The next 12 months don’t look promising: prioritizing DEIB was the second lowest response at 34%.

Yet at the same time, tech companies say that the diversity of candidates is the second most important metric to measure in the hiring process. Is it just us, or is something not adding up?

To make matters worse, when asked, “Which of the following do you communicate to candidates during the hiring process to attract top talent?” only 32% of tech companies said that they convey a commitment to DEIB.

Today’s Distance Economy opens the talent pool to a wide range of diverse candidates. Those candidates don’t just want to see an emphasis on DEIB in the hiring process—they expect it. And if tech companies don’t deliver? Candidates will run the opposite way, and hiring goal attainment will falter.

Hiring Efficiency Needs Improvements

In today’s competitive job market, efficiency is everything and hiring fast is essential. While a streamlined interview process is sure to wow candidates, a clunky experience can prompt them to turn down an otherwise desirable offer.

The more efficient your hiring process is, the shorter your time-to-hire will be. Unfortunately for tech companies, 58% said that their time-to-hire increased over the past 12 months. On top of that, 52% of tech respondents rated their talent acquisition process as just “somewhat efficient.”

Meanwhile, HR leadership at tech companies possess skewed perceptions on efficiency. Sixty-five percent of C-suite execs said their hiring process is very efficient, and just 33% of directors said the same. Directors have closer connections to daily recruitment operations than the C-suite, so it’s no wonder that their views reflect the reality of tech’s increasing time-to-hire.

None of this bodes well for tech companies’ hiring goals. The best candidates disappear from the market in just 10 days. If you don’t hire swiftly and efficiently, you can bid top talent good-bye.

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

ROI is key. This is not a time to invest in software that won’t bring you immediate value. So let’s eliminate the guesswork with our free ROI calculator.

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Interested in Tech Hiring Tips from the Experts?

A short supply of recruiter-candidate relationships, sparse DEIB efforts, and inadequate levels of efficiency create a perfect storm for low hiring goal attainment. Needless to say, hiring teams in tech have some work to do if they want to stay ahead of the competition.

Read what high-performing tech TA leaders recommend doing today to address tech hiring challenges.

3 Ways to Elevate the Candidate Relationship with Interview Feedback

Posted on by Rachel Heller

There’s no way around it. If your recruitment team does not focus on the candidate relationship, you will lose out on top talent. Recruiting is no small feat, and the hours upon hours that you spend fine-tuning your hiring process will all be for nothing if you don’t meaningfully connect with applicants.

But the frustrating reality is that you can take active steps to cultivate the candidate relationship, turn your hiring process on its head to deliver a high-caliber experience . . . and still see little results. How do you know if your efforts in cultivating this all-important relationship actually translate?

By sending candidate experience surveys to gather genuine feedback, you can get a leg up on the talent competition and understand what candidates really think about your process, from the highs to the lows. What better group of people to speak on the candidate relationship than the candidates themselves?

Despite the 68% of candidates that would like to provide feedback after an interview, 75% report rarely or never being asked for feedback.

Talentegy, State of Candidate Experience Report

And your candidates? They’re ready to be heard. Despite the 68% of candidates that would like to provide feedback after an interview, 75% report rarely or never being asked for feedback. Candidates have opinions on your hiring methods no matter what. If you don’t ask for their opinion in candidate experience surveys, they’ll gladly air their grievances on company review websites. 

Here are three ways to stay accountable for your candidate relationships by collecting candidate feedback in your hiring process.

1. Evaluate DEIB Initiatives

More and more candidates—three out of four, to be precise—cite DEIB as one of the top values they look for. A hiring process that promotes DEIB cultivates an experience for candidates where they feel comfortable throughout the recruitment process and can tell that you’ve fostered a culture where differences are celebrated.

Yet creating DEIB strategies that actually leave an impact is easier said than done. Promoting DEIB in recruiting is a continuous process that requires regular evaluations on if your efforts properly translate and improve the candidate relationship. 

Luckily, candidate experience surveys are a great way to gather metrics to endlessly improve DEIB in your hiring process and stay accountable for your goals. Consider asking for candidate feedback on how comfortable and inclusive each interview felt, and if candidates felt represented in their interviewer panels.

2. Check if Company Culture Translated

For most people, it’s easiest to understand a workplace’s culture through experience. Touring an office and shaking hands with potential coworkers makes the intangible concept of company culture incredibly tangible.

Yet with the rise of remote interviewing, recruiting teams grapple with conveying culture through a Zoom screen. Recruiters must now take an even more thoughtful approach to sharing company culture—a difficult task, but certainly not impossible.

As 46% of job seekers claim that company culture plays a crucial role when considering job offers, clearly communicating organizational culture—and checking if your efforts actually provide candidates with proper understanding—may be just the thing that enriches a candidate’s connection to your company and wins them over.

To check if your company culture properly translated to candidates, include questions regarding cultural understanding in your candidate experience surveys. Collect feedback on if the interview process gave candidates a clear understanding of your culture, or if they were left with an image that’s cloudy at best.

3. Assess Dissonance in Mission and Values

Conveying your company’s mission and values is just as important as conveying company culture. Across both the United States and Europe, 79% of candidates consider a company’s mission before applying, and 73% wouldn’t even apply to a company unless its values aligned with their own.

Candidates want to finish the hiring process feeling even more affirmed that your company aligns with what they care about most. This means that all aspects of recruiting, from the language in the job posting to the discussions in the interviews, must speak to your mission and values.

Imagine a candidate reads all about your company’s mission and values on your website, yet the discussions in the interview stage entirely conflict with what they read online. By asking for candidate feedback on how coherently your hiring process conveyed your mission and values, you avoid losing talent due to an inconsistent message.

Hold Yourself Accountable for the Candidate Relationship

Cultivating candidate relationships becomes even harder without a way to gauge if your efforts actually make a difference. That’s where candidate experience surveys come in.

When hiring teams collect ongoing feedback, everyone wins: candidates enjoy their hiring journey and feel that their opinions are valued, and recruiters stand out with a high-quality recruitment process backed by reliable insights.

Interested in taking your candidate relationships to the next level? You’re in luck. GoodTime Hire’s new feature, Candidate Pulse, collects feedback from candidates at every step to continuously improve your interview process—and your candidate relationships.

Learn more about Candidate Pulse here.

Here’s How To Turn the Great Resignation Into the Great Retention

Posted on by Rachel Heller

By now, we’re all familiar with the Great Resignation (shoutout to the internet’s endless think pieces). Don’t worry—we’re not here to talk your ear off about how employees are leaving companies in droves. Instead, we’re here to discuss how HR teams can transform this pivotal moment, and make lemons into lemonade. To ensure that their employees want to stick around, organizations must turn the Great Resignation into the Great Retention.

But this doesn’t mean that HR teams should throw retention strategies at the wall and see what sticks. In order to retain their people and make the Great Retention the next big phenomenon, companies need to study exactly why the vast majority of employees leave for greener pastures, and then strategize accordingly.

Here are several ways to boost retention in your organization, backed by the data behind why employees resign in the first place.

Make Employee Well-being Paramount

Key Stat: 40% of employees cited burnout as their top reason for leaving their jobs in 2021.

How to Respond: Employees experience burnout when a high workload and a high amount of stress combine with a low level of organizational support. HR teams must prioritize the well-being of employees to successfully combat burnout. This starts by making sure employees have access to the proper organizational support and resources. 

Remind employees of the resources that are available to them—such as Employee Assistance Programs—and think about which resources are missing or need improvements. For instance, perhaps you have a generous PTO policy, yet employees are having to jump through hoops to get their time off approved. Some organizations—wink wink, like GoodTime—also allow employees to take a day off each quarter for company-wide mental health days.

Emphasizing connection across your organization is another way to boost well-being and squash burnout. Consider planning virtual or in-person, get togethers for employees to bond.

Improve Opportunities for Advancement

Key Stat: 33% of people said no opportunities for advancement was a major reason why they quit their job in 2021.

How to Respond: Your HR team’s ability to support the career advancement of employees heavily influences whether they stay or leave. Ensure that your organization provides team members with a clear roadmap for career progression so that employees aren’t left wondering what they’re working towards.

Whether it’s a designated mentor or their team leader, employees will benefit from having someone that they can meet with on a regular basis to discuss their career goals and ensure that they’re set up for success.

Reimbursing employees for learning opportunities that they would like to take on, whether it’s a certification course or educational books, is another great way to support their goals.

Pay Employees What They Deserve

Key Stat: 37% of people said low pay was a major reason why they quit their job in 2021.

How to Respond: Yes, employees want to work at a place with flexibility and a good work/life balance, but they still have to pay their bills. Yet fulfilling requests for higher pay isn’t always an option for companies. Still, there’s steps you can take to ensure that your employees earn what they deserve.

A major way to move the Great Retention full steam ahead is to give employees retention bonuses. That way, employees have a worthwhile reason to stay at your company. Alternatively, set up a bonus plan where employees are compensated whenever your company reaches certain attainable milestones. With that option, employees will get to celebrate your company’s success and be rewarded for their contributions.

Above all, make sure that your company champions pay equity. Every single employee should receive equal and just compensation for their experience and tenure. 

Boost Work Flexibility

Key Stat: 21% of Americans who plan to resign want more flexible/remote work options.

How to Respond: For every company that doesn’t promote flexibility in work arrangements, there’s a handful that will—and those are the companies that your employees will flock to. The proof is in the headlines: we’ve already seen swarms of employees quitting over RTO policies.

Even if the nature of your organization/industry requires all or certain employees to spend time in the office, considering at least a hybrid work policy is sure to make a big impact on employee retention. 

If you don’t know where to start, learn from the companies that are excelling in this new world of work. We’ve compiled a list of four organizations with stellar flexible work policies.

Most Importantly: Listen to Your Employees 

The importance of gathering feedback from your employees cannot be overstated. Ask for their thoughts on how you can improve their experience at your organization. Listen to them with an open mind and be prepared to acknowledge any faults.

Transparent communication is crucial to a healthy company. Thoughtfully analyzing your periodic eNPS (Employer Net Promoter Score), a measure of employee satisfaction and loyalty, is a great way to understand how employees feel and take action on their feedback. 

And if you haven’t held exit interviews before, now is the time to do so. Facilitating candid discussions with employees who want to resign helps you identify patterns that cause team members to leave.

Give Your HR Team a Leg up With Goodtime Hire

Turning the Great Resignation into the Great Retention all boils down to acting in the best interest of your employees. But let’s not forget about your future employees. Talent retention and acquisition are two sides of the same coin; when you successfully cater to candidates, you create new hires that are eager to stay with your company for the long haul.

And the key to exceeding the expectations of candidates? Leveraging GoodTime Hire.

Hire automates coordination, builds relationships during interviews, and provides actionable insights to continuously improve your connections with applicants.

Interested in learning all about how Hire can supercharge your talent acquisition process? Come right this way.

9 Ways to Lead with Empathy in Your Hiring Process

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Forming connections with candidates is the future of attracting, winning, and retaining top talent. In fact, in our 2022 Hiring Insights Report, 46% of HR and talent leaders agreed that creating meaningful relationships with candidates is now non-negotiable. So, how do you form these bonds? Connecting with candidates all boils down to your ability to recruit with empathy.

Recruiters that put their best empathetic foot forward possess a keen understanding and awareness for how candidates experience the job seeking and interviewing process. Empathetic recruiters take this understanding and action on it to create a hiring process that attracts great candidates and shows that their hiring team cares.

Empathy is critical to the foundation of any relationship, including the connection between recruiters and candidates. Here are nine ways to recruit with empathy.

1. Understand That Life Happens

Everyone deals with their own unique stressors. You never truly know what’s going on in someone’s life, especially when it comes to candidates. Remember to handle candidates with a heightened sense of understanding. 

This isn’t to say that you should tolerate candidates ghosting you mid-interview process. However, if a candidate needs to reschedule an interview, recognize that life happens. Respond back from a place rooted in empathy, and provide them with the flexibility to meet with you at an alternative time.

2. Be Considerate of Virtual Candidates

Remote interviewing comes with an abundance of benefits for both interviewers and candidates. However, it also opens the door for frustrating complications to arise on the candidate side. 

Experiencing Wi-Fi issues and other disturbances in the middle of an interview is a virtual candidate’s worst nightmare. If a candidate’s in the middle of grappling with untimely interruptions, they’ll more than appreciate patience and reassurance from their recruiter. 

3. Small Talk Goes a Long Way

With candidates interviewing at multiple companies and receiving a handful of offers, it can feel difficult to stand out from the crowd. Want to know one crucial way to differentiate your hiring process? It’s incredibly easy, yet few recruiters put it in practice: talking to candidates like they’re humans. 

No matter how many interviews a candidate’s sat through, interviewing is an all-around nerve-wracking experience. Opening the conversation with light and easy small talk goes a long way in easing the tension and making candidates feel comfortable. With less stress on their shoulders, they’ll interview to the best of their ability.

4. View the Recruiter-candidate Relationship as Mutual

When recruiters operate with the sole purpose of turning applicants into new hires, their relationships with candidates become purely transactional. Candidates want to genuinely connect with your recruitment team, and navigating your hiring process with this transactional mindset is a surefire way to push them away.

Spend time nurturing the recruiter-candidate relationship. Find out what candidates want in a role—not just what they can offer your company. After all, you want future employees to enjoy their jobs.

5. Give Candidates a Voice

As all humans do, candidates want to feel that their opinions are valued. However, despite the 68% of candidates that would like to provide feedback after an interview, 75% report rarely or never being asked for their opinions. Let your candidates be heard!

Collecting candidate feedback actively conveys that you appreciate the input of candidates. Better yet, it also allows you to continuously reengineer your hiring process to best suit the needs and expectations of applicants.

6. Practice Active Listening

Meaningful communication is founded on active listening. Learn to live by the 70/30 Rule of Communication. To put this rule in action, aim to listen 70% of the time and speak 30% of the time when in conversation with a candidate.

And yes, active listening really does make a difference. When you listen for the content and feeling behind a candidate’s words, rather than waiting for your chance to respond, you build trust and rapport with your candidates. In turn, candidates will be more willing to fully express themselves.

7. Honesty Is the Best Policy

Applicants want to know what it’s like to work for your company from the very beginning of the interview process. In fact, 39% of candidates expect to learn about compensation in the initial job post. 

You’ll make it much easier for candidates if you’re open from the get-go on potential deal breakers, such as salary. Interviewing is time-consuming, so don’t make candidates wait until the final round to find out that they’ve wasted time on a position that offers less money than what they’re looking for.

8. Interview at a Time That Works for Candidates

In today’s candidate-driven market, don’t expect candidates to move their schedules around to suit your calendar. Instead, ask for their availability. Show that you respect their time by letting them schedule their interviews for whenever works best for their calendars.  

As we’ve said, your candidates are probably interviewing for multiple other companies. They’re more likely to remember and value your interview process if you act with flexibility and understanding. 

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

ROI is key. This is not a time to invest in software that won’t bring you immediate value. So let’s eliminate the guesswork with our free ROI calculator.

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9. Recognize That Candidates Must Do What’s Best for Them

No recruiter wants their star candidate to send them the dreaded, “I’ve decided to go in another direction” email. However, at the end of the day, candidates must stick with the career move that’s best for their future. 

When you receive this type of message, respond with grace and celebrate their win. While this might seem like a small act, you’re setting the standard for how your company interacts with candidates, regardless of if they’ve accepted an offer. Remember: your actions reflect not only you as a recruiter, but also your company’s brand.

Recruit With Empathy Using GoodTime Hire

 Empathy is a muscle that can be developed with exercise. The more you recruit with empathy, the more your muscle will bulk up.

If you want to remain competitive and stand out from the talent competition, you need recruitment tech that champions empathy and puts candidates in the driver’s seat. Look no further than GoodTime Hire.

By empowering candidates to schedule their interviews, presenting applicants with the best available interviewers, and unlocking data to continuously optimize your hiring process, Hire builds lasting connections with every single candidate.

Learn more about the power of GoodTime Hire today.

Hiring Slowdowns: 7 Ways Recruiters Can Make the Most of Their Time

Posted on by Rachel Heller

All good things must come to an end. After a year of rapid-fire hiring, sky-high startup valuations, and soaring stocks, companies are now coming back down to earth. As the market corrects itself, more and more organizations have responded by enacting hiring slowdowns.

While recruiters are used to adapting to shifting circumstances, hiring slowdowns can feel like uncharted territory. You might be limited from your usual day-to-day activities, but a hiring slowdown doesn’t mean that you need to slow down. Recruiting will rebound, and when it does, you’ll want to be in the most advantageous position possible to snag the best talent. 

Here are seven ways to turn hiring slowdowns into golden opportunities to optimize your recruitment process and boost efficiency.

1. Keep Your Talent Pipeline Warm

If hiring is screeching to a halt, the last thing you should do is cut off communication with candidates. Now’s the time to nurture your pipeline and deepen your recruiter-candidate relationships. That way, you’ll hit the ground running when hiring bounces back. 

Make it a habit to engage with candidates on a periodic basis. Keep them up to date on any roles that they’re interested in, and practice full transparency on the status of your team’s recruiting. 

You can also spend time holding meaningful conversations with candidates that you didn’t have the bandwidth to facilitate before. Delve deep into their career goals, interests, and skills so that you can match them with the perfect opportunity.

2. Improve Your Sourcing Strategies

Take a good, long look at your talent sourcing strategies. You likely have a preferred channel for finding candidates. For most recruiters, this is LinkedIn. However, it’s vital to also tap into alternative, lesser-used channels. 

Top candidates receive a flood of messages from recruiters on the most popular channels, making it difficult to stand out from the crowd. 95% of recruiters use LinkedIn to hunt for talent; that’s a lot of competition. Leveraging alternative channels gives you an edge and captures the attention of candidates that you might not have been able to reach before.

Look into industry-specific Facebook and Reddit groups, Slack communities, face-to-face events, and double down on your referral program to diversify your channels—and your candidates.

3. Upskill Your Interviewers

Chew on this stat: 44% of job seekers agree that the interview experience is the most influential part of the hiring process. To set yourself up for success once your hiring slowdown concludes, invest time into improving your interview experience. And the best way to do this? Creating a top-notch interviewer training program.

Start by establishing a process where new interviewers shadow the seasoned interviewers. During the shadowing stage, new interviewers should gain an understanding of which role and skill-specific questions they should ask—and which questions they should avoid (some are actually illegal to ask candidates).

4. …And Upskill Yourself

Always remember to fill your own cup. In the usual day-to-day life of a recruiter, it’s hard to block off time for learning. Thankfully, hiring slowdowns offer extra time to spend on professional development. Seize it!

Now’s the time to dig up those online courses, certifications, or webinars that you’ve bookmarked. Consider building up the following relevant skills and attributes: 

  • Resilience
  • Navigating remote/flexible work (if applicable)
  • Relationship building
  • Systems thinking
  • Personal branding
  • Data analysis
  • Time management

There’s countless platforms out there that offer classes and certifications, but some of the popular ones for recruiters include LinkedIn Learning, The Recruitment Education Institute, Alison, and Recruiting Toolbox.

5. Action on Candidate Feedback

It’s crucial to collect feedback from candidates to understand what they really think about your hiring process and recruitment methods. However, it can be difficult to find time to take action on the feedback.

Hiring slowdowns offer the opportunity to thoughtfully review this feedback. Assess your interview process for ways to make adjustments based on the input that you received.

If you’ve never even collected feedback, now’s the time to do so. Despite the 68% of candidates that would like to provide feedback after an interview, 75% report rarely or never being asked for their opinions. Make a project out of setting up a candidate feedback collection system, and plan out the perfect questions to ask candidates once hiring returns to business as usual.

6. Strengthen DEIB

It’s incredibly worthwhile to invest in your commitment to DEIB. A hiring process that reflects DEIB principles not only attracts top talent, but also benefits your bottom line. However, according to our 2022 Hiring Insights Report, only 33% of companies plan on prioritizing DEIB in the year ahead. 

One of the most difficult aspects of creating a high-quality DEIB hiring policy is finding enough time to thoughtfully strategize. Luckily, a pause in hiring serves as a great opportunity to lay the groundwork for a more equitable hiring process. You can also assess your interview panels to see if there’s opportunities to increase the diversity among your interviewers.

7. Implement the Right Technology

Soon enough, you’ll return to hiring at your normal volume, and your company will once again focus on growth. Now is the time to implement the right recruitment software to remain competitive in the future.

While you might think that hiring more recruiters is the solution to increasing efficiency, that isn’t the case. As wages increase and the Great Resignation moves full steam ahead, human reliant-processes will become far too expensive and downright unscalable. 

Tech is the way forward—specifically, GoodTime Hire. Hire automates coordination to reduce time-to-hire, builds genuine connections between recruiters and candidates, and gathers actionable insights to continuously optimize the entire process.

And the results: companies hire up to 70% faster and impress more candidates than ever before.

Ready to learn more about how Hire can transform your talent acquisition process? Come right this way.

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

ROI is key. This is not a time to invest in software that won’t bring you immediate value. So let’s eliminate the guesswork with our free ROI calculator.

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C-suite Execs and Directors in HR Disagree on Recruiting Realities

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Imagine you’re putting together a jigsaw puzzle. You feel pretty confident in your abilities to build the perfect puzzle; after all, you have the finest puzzle pieces on the market. But once you get down to business, you find that the pieces don’t align. 

HR leadership is like a jigsaw puzzle. While your leaders may be amazing individual contributors, your company is headed for trouble if they’re not in sync on the most critical matters. Misalignment among HR leaders means bad news for your hiring goals.

Our 2022 Hiring Insights Report surveyed 560 HR leaders across seniority levels to understand their perceptions on the most pressing challenges facing their teams, and how to succeed in a candidate’s market. The data shows that C-suite executives and directors disagree on multiple grounds, from the status of the hiring landscape to the conditions of their own recruitment operations.

Different Outlooks on the Hiring Landscape

Interested in learning how HR leaders perceive the state of the hiring landscape? We got you covered— but don’t expect a straightforward answer. The perceptions of C-suite executives and directors greatly differ.

When asked how they would say that the hiring landscape has changed in the past 12 months, the majority of C-suite executives (45%) said that the hiring landscape has become less competitive due to an increase in available talent. Meanwhile, the majority of directors (50%) said that it has become more competitive due to an increased demand for talent.

This pattern held true when asked how they believe the hiring landscape will change in the coming 12 months, with most directors believing that the landscape will remain more competitive, and most C-level executives believing it will still be less competitive in the future. 

If you browse through recent headlines and analyst reports, you’ll see that they align with the opinions of directors—those who are more entrenched in the day-to-day recruiting. It seems like almost everyone’s in the know on the ruthlessness of the hiring landscape…except for CHROs. In short, employees who have a closer connection to daily recruitment operations have a different perception of business functioning.

Disconnect on the Status of Their Hiring Process

Directors’ closer proximity to the hiring process also impacts their understanding of their own process and operations. When asked how their acceptance rate has changed over the past few months, C-suite executives rated it more favorably than directors. 74% of CHROs said their acceptance rate has increased. In contrast, 49% of directors—25 percentage points lower—said the same.

Our survey also evaluated their general attitudes on their recruiting process. The majority of C-level executives (53%) rated their overall process as excellent, while the majority of directors (58%) rated their process as good.

C-suite executives remained more optimistic than directors when asked about the efficiency of their talent acquisition process. Sixty-seven percent of C-suite executives rated their process as very efficient, compared to 41% of directors. 

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

ROI is key. This is not a time to invest in software that won’t bring you immediate value. So let’s eliminate the guesswork with our free ROI calculator.

Calculate Your ROI

Don’t See Eye-to-Eye on DEIB

Diverse teams reign supreme. It’s a known fact that diverse employees boost revenue and innovation. However, the C-level executives and directors from our survey differ on their prioritization of DEIB.

When identifying which areas of their hiring process they looked to improve in the past 12 months, and which areas they plan on improving in the future, “making DE&I a measurable priority” was the second most popular answer both times for C-suite executives.

CHROs are highly focused on DEIB, while directors aren’t. DEIB was the least popular answer for directors, both for the past and for the future (24% and 29%). Instead, directors are reportedly hyper-focused on boosting efficiency.

Now, don’t be fooled: this doesn’t mean that directors believe that improving DEIB is a waste of time. Since directors typically have a closer relationship to the hiring process than C-level executives, they understand how much time and resources it takes to properly prioritize DEIB. Directors know that creating successful DEIB initiatives is a lot easier said than done.

Want the Latest Insights? Read the 2023 Hiring Insights Report

Reaching alignment among the HR leaders at a company doesn’t just happen magically. It takes work—but it’s worth it. Trust us. Especially in today’s ever-evolving, intense hiring landscape, leaders need to become a unified force in order to conquer each challenge that comes their way.

Want to catch up on the latest hiring trends? Get excited: our 2023 Hiring Insights Report is now available. 500+ HR leaders, 1,000s of real findings, 1 industry-leading report. Read the report today.