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4 Tools to Modernize Your TA Tech Stack

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Feeling overwhelmed by all of the TA software options on the market? You’re not alone. In today’s tech-driven world, the key to standing out from the talent competition is a strong TA tech stack. But with so many solutions available, it’s difficult to assess which tools are necessities and which ones are just nice-to-haves. 

Don’t worry—we’re here to point you in the right direction. With these four tools, you’ll impress candidates and smash your TA goals in one fell swoop.

1. Applicant Tracking Systems

If you don’t already have an applicant tracking system (ATS), this is your sign to invest in one. There’s a reason why over 98% of Fortune 500 companies use an ATS software (that’s all but nine companies). With an ATS in your TA tech stack, you can facilitate the application process without the risk of losing qualified candidates to the “black hole.” 

An ATS also allows you to easily filter applicants through keywords, skills, or previous roles. No need to spend time organizing applicants; an ATS conveniently collects all your applications in one place. 

While an ATS is a must-have, it’s not without limitations. Even though the typical ATS can now do more than just handle applications, their main expertise lies in that area. You’ll need to add additional products to your tech arsenal if you want to robustly tackle performance metrics, load balance, or enhance DEIB.

The ATS that you choose depends on the needs of your talent team and company. Consider your company size, scalability, and additional features that you’d like to use (text recruiting, referral program management, etc). 

Can’t decide which ATS is right for you? We get it—there’s a LOT. Here’s some recommendations:

  • Greenhouse
  • iCIMS
  • Jobvite
  • SmartRecruiters
  • Workday
  • Lever

2. Virtual Interviewing Platforms 

Remote hiring is far from a pandemic-born phase. Just look at the numbers: 93% of employers reportedly plan to conduct virtual interviews well into the future. If one thing’s for sure, getting acquainted with virtual interviewing platforms is non-negotiable. 

From Zoom to BlueJeans, adding virtual interviewing platforms to their TA tech stack enable recruiting teams to connect with applicants from across the world. No longer limited by a candidate’s geographic location, these platforms both widen and diversify your talent pool.

While remote interviewing is here to stay, you’ll need to master several best practices to maximize the potential of virtual interviewing platforms. These platforms are only as helpful as you make them. To give candidates the best impression of your virtual interview process, standardize the virtual interviewing process and troubleshoot your software before diving into an interview. Remember: candidates are assessing you as much as you’re assessing them.

3. Employee Pulse Surveys

Listen: from a talent retention standpoint, we need to change our employee surveys. 74% of companies still use detailed surveys to analyze employee engagement, but large-scale surveys just don’t cut it anymore. They’re time-consuming to both create and orchestrate—and not to mention an absolute pain to analyze. Instead, opt for employee pulse surveys. 

Pulse surveys allow leaders to solicit feedback and benchmark their employee satisfaction “health” by asking the same questions every survey. They’re designed to be short-and-sweet, so you can expect a high response rate with simplified, actionable feedback. 

Similar to virtual interviewing platforms, employee pulse surveys are what you make them. Pulse surveys can measure anything and everything, and the question types are up to you. Most companies use these surveys on a monthly basis, but there’s no one-size-fits-all survey cadence.

4. Candidate Relationship Intelligence

Throwing more candidates into the top of the funnel simply isn’t an effective way to hit your hiring goals and snag the best talent. The real secret to recruitment success lies in forming connections with candidates in the middle of the funnel, all while moving them through the process as quickly as possible. That’s why companies like Slack and Box now use Candidate Relationship Intelligence as the solution to their hiring.

GoodTime Hire is the only platform that harnesses Candidate Relationship Intelligence to win the best talent. Hire’s success comes from three pillars: automation, relationships, and insights. The magic happens by automating coordination to reduce time to hire, building genuine connections between recruiters and candidates, and gathering 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 recruiting process? Let’s do it.

The Data Is In: Recruiters Must Connect to Compete

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Recruitment teams, let’s make one thing clear: candidates now call the shots.

In every sense of the word, we’re living in a candidate’s market. The job market is twice as competitive as it was pre-pandemic, and it’s increasingly common for candidates to end up spoiled for choice with multiple offers. To top it all off, the Great Resignation is still in full swing, as employees leave for greener pastures in droves.

In our ever-evolving hiring landscape, companies must stay in-the-know on the latest HR trends—or risk getting left in the dust. To gain an inside look on these trends and uncover how to succeed in a candidate’s market, GoodTime surveyed 560 HR, talent, and recruiting leaders across the U.S. for our 2022 Hiring Insights Report.

The findings? Companies that build genuine candidate relationships smash their hiring goals. If teams want to compete with the talent landscape, they must invest time and energy into building relationships with applicants. There’s no way around it.

Candidate Relationships Remain Paramount

When asked how they would describe the changes they’ve observed in the hiring landscape over the past 12 months, 46% of HR leaders said that the ability to create meaningful relationships with candidates has become more important than ever before. This is 1% below the top response, “the hiring landscape has become more competitive due to an increased demand for talent.”

The data shows that focusing on candidate relationships will remain of utmost importance in the future. The ability to create meaningful candidate relationships topped the list of how HR leaders expect the landscape to evolve in the next 12 months. 

Interestingly, when asked which hiring challenges they’ve faced in the past 12 months and which challenges they expect to face in the coming months, HR leaders ranked “retaining top talent” as the biggest challenge each time.

The writing’s on the wall: connecting with candidates is a key component of a successful hiring process. This won’t change anytime soon. But creating candidate relationships is as important for talent retention as it is for acquisition. Retaining talent starts from the very first moment that a candidate has a conversation with a recruiter. In order to turn candidates into long-term hires, talent teams must cultivate genuine connections with new employees from the get-go.

Say Good-bye To One-sided Hiring Practices…

If you didn’t know before, now you know: one-sided, staged hiring practices belong in the past. “Our company has ‘Bring Your Pet to Work Days!’” just doesn’t have the same pizzazz anymore. Candidates expect something deeper.

We asked our report’s respondents what, if anything, does their organization currently do to build a meaningful relationship with candidates throughout the recruiting process. Out of the seven items to choose from, the first seven are candidate-focused hiring practices, and the last two—office tours and free lunch—are outdated methods. Unsurprisingly, we found that less than 35% of companies partake in the last two methods.

The vast majority of companies now realize that one-sided practices don’t generate offer acceptances. Flashy perks hold no value in today’s Distance Economy. (Finally, we can put the in-office ping pong table to rest.) Emphasizing genuine connection, transparency, adaptability, and candidate well-being transforms candidates into new hires.

…And Say Hello To Candidate-focused Methods

It’s no secret that hiring in today’s intensely competitive labor market can feel like an uphill battle. If you want to give your hiring goal attainment a major boost, look no further than candidate-focused hiring practices. 

Among the report’s respondents, we found a notably positive correlation between the number of candidate-focused hiring practices implemented and the percentage of hiring goals met. Specifically, companies implementing seven candidate-focused practices from the previous list saw a 17.7% gain in attaining their hiring goals. 

In fact, as long as companies implemented at least four candidate relationship best practices from the list, they outperformed the average. The business gains from creating genuine candidate relationships are very real. If you care about your bottom line, it’s time to connect.

Want the Latest Insights? Read the 2023 Hiring Insights Report

The recent changes in the hiring landscape are enough to make anyone’s head spin, but at its core, succeeding at TA in today’s world isn’t as complicated as it seems. If applicants don’t feel connected to your company, they won’t join. And if employees feel disconnected from your company, they will leave. It all boils down to connection. Candidates are people, and everyone yearns for a genuine connection. It’s only human nature.

The solution to TA is right in front of us: invest in candidate relationships as you would in any meaningful asset. You’ll be impressed with the payoff.

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.

Imposter Syndrome in the Workplace: You’re Not A Fraud

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Do you feel like a phony even though your accomplishments tell a different story? Don’t worry, you’re not crazy. You just have imposter syndrome. And you’re far from alone: 70% of adults experience these feelings at some point in their lifetime.

In Crosschq’s latest installment in their People Lead/HER webinar series, Debra Wade Carney, Director of Marketing, and Elena Arney, Director of People & Culture, sat down with three women leaders to get to the root of imposter syndrome in the workplace. 

Jenn Oswald, Head of People Strategy at GoodTime; Katie Mehnert, CEO at ALLY Energy; and ErinBlythe “EB” Sanders, Career Coach and Consultant, dove into how they’ve experienced and navigated imposter syndrome to become the strong leaders that they are today.

You can watch the full webinar here, but for the TLDR, here’s the key takeaways from the chat. 

Is Imposter Syndrome the Best Label?

First thing’s first: should we even call it “imposter syndrome”? EB noted that when the concept behind imposter syndrome became popularized in the 1970s, people referred to it as “imposter phenomenon” before later morphing into imposter syndrome.

“Somewhere along the way, that became ‘syndrome,’ which is problematic in that it pathologizes it,” EB said. “What it’s saying is that there’s something off neurologically with everyone that’s experiencing it.”

EB uses the term “inner critic” to emphasize that these feelings aren’t signs of a disorder, but that they’re feelings that the majority of people experience.

“Imposter syndrome is not categorized as mental illness, but at the end of the day it gets back to a reflection of who we think we are, and that is powerful work we have to do ourselves.”

— Katie Mehnert, CEO at ALLY Energy

Coping With Imposter Syndrome 

The things that trigger feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt vary from person to person. Recognizing the triggers—whether they stem from specific actions, people, or situations—is the first step to mitigating them.

To alleviate imposter syndrome in the workplace, Jenn encourages people at GoodTime to hold open discussions when those feelings begin to arise. She finds it helpful to have a peer at work to confide in for coaching tips or a different perspective.

“Find those allies and people who will support you, and coach you, and mentor you so that you can realize your greatness,” Jenn said.

As a CEO, Katie tries to foster a culture of openness. Similar to Jenn, she encourages people at ALLY to share whenever they experience imposter syndrome, if they feel comfortable. She’s found that imposter syndrome is all around us and can affect anyone, regardless of their title.

Not Just a “Female Thing”

While Katie, EB, and Jenn all have their fair share of experiences with imposter syndrome, its effects extend far beyond the female population. Imposter syndrome remains prevalent among both men and women across a variety of age groups. However, EB noted, women tend to discuss imposter syndrome more openly than men. 

Yet within those populations, she added, people who are part of systematically marginalized and underrepresented groups—such as POC and LGBTQ individuals—tend to experience imposter syndrome to a higher degree. This can be attributed to the negative stimuli that they already experience due to their identities.

As for people with a neurodevelopmental disorder, such as ADHD, imposter syndrome can be a massive struggle. 

“There is a saying in the community that you have to work twice as hard to feel as if you are half as good,” EB said. “If you are neurodivergent, there is the daily baseline of functioning that you’re trying to work with, and then trying to feel as if you are competent and as if you are fitting in.”

Social Media’s Impact

Does social media heighten imposter syndrome? For many people, the answer is yes. Social media generates a constant flow of feedback—both good and bad. That never-ending feedback can compound feelings of self-doubt and feed the inner critic.

In order to combat the negative side of social media, Katie encourages her team to have digital breaks once in a while to center themselves outside of the noise. Digital breaks allow people to reconnect with their purpose and the reasons behind the work that they do each week.

“Reconnecting with what those reasons are, and who we are, and what we want, and why we want those things builds a little shield of, ‘It doesn’t matter what all that chatter is, because I got my own path, I’m doing my own thing,’” EB added.

However, EB said, some people find value in the comparisons that social media breeds. For some, feeling envious of others on social media can inform what they’d like to achieve. They then use this information to the advantage of their personal growth. Instead of comparing, they compete.

“We’re moving into a space where employers need to think of the overall well-being of their people.” 

— Jenn Oswald, Head of People Strategy at GoodTime

The Way Forward

As a byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic, mental wellness is now top of mind in the work environment. In order to overcome imposter syndrome in the workplace and other negative thought patterns, give your mind a little TLC.

Jenn sees value in going to therapy to address your mental health head-on. She added that as GoodTime grows, they continue to evaluate their employee wellness benefits.

“I think we’ll continue to see the landscape of benefits change over the next few years and see much more of a focus on mental health,” Jenn said.

Katie believes that there are two distinct parts to addressing negative thoughts: one involves coaching to develop confidence and leadership skills, and the other involves doing the inner work to see where the thoughts come from. Both hold equal merit, and we must tackle both to understand why we think the way that we do.

“We are the way that we are because of the environment that we grew up in,” Katie said. “It is super important as professionals to make sure we are taking care of our mental health.”

Recruitment Automation vs. Human Touch: How to Balance Both

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Balancing recruitment automation and human touch is much like walking a tightrope. Too much automation? Your hiring process starts to feel robotic and impersonal. Too much human touch? Your daily recruitment tasks become far too tedious and inefficient.

Reaching a perfect balance between automation and humanity is the secret to building solid relationships with candidates and maintaining the efficiency that’s needed to engage top-tier talent. So—how do you achieve the perfect balance?

Automate To Boost Human Connection

HR professionals spend a whopping 86% of their time on administrative duties. The right tech tools can slash this time in half. But while your tech automates tasks for you, should you kick your feet up and bask in your newfound free time? Of course not—you have candidates to attend to!

Recruitment process automation is only helpful to the extent that it gives your talent team more time to connect with applicants on a personal level. If you use technology to replace rather than amplify human connection, you’re doing something wrong.

As wonderful as it is to have your tech stack take care of recruitment tasks, certain human elements are incredibly hard to replicate. Take empathy, for example. 96% of employees agree that empathy makes them want to stay at a job. Displaying empathy from the first moment a future employee interacts with a recruiter is crucial, and true empathy simply doesn’t have a technological equivalent.

Far too often, people view HR tech tools as a threat to human connection. But in reality, it isn’t the tools that are threats. The ways that some people use the tools are the true threats to connection. Talent professionals must recognize that technology can free up time for their teams to focus on what matters: building empathy, trust, and transparency to create better candidate relationships.

Leverage Talent Tech for Personalization

Personalization goes a long way in making people feel special, and the same applies to candidates. It’s the reason why people love personalized music recommendations. We want to feel unique, and above all, we want to feel seen. It’s only human nature.

While recruiting tech can’t replicate all the human elements that a successful hiring process requires, technology that enables personalization adds a human touch. For instance, custom email templates that automatically generate personalized communications for each candidate foster meaningful connections with minimal effort. The companies that succeed in making their automation feel less automated are the ones that come out on top.

Use the free time that automation provides to further emphasize personalization and elevate the recruiter-candidate relationship. Spend time jotting down more notes on relatable aspects of a candidate’s background that could translate to conversations in the interview stage (who knows—maybe you attended the same college). 

Candidate Relationships Are Human Relationships

Applicants have increasingly high expectations of your recruitment process. They expect a tech-driven hiring process to match their tech-driven lifestyle. However, candidates still want to connect with your talent team on a human-to-human level. After all, candidates are humans, too. If candidates don’t connect with your company in the process, there’s a good chance that they’ll turn down your job offer. 

Ironically, while candidates crave a personal touch throughout the hiring process, more and more candidates seek virtual work opportunities. Now that remote hiring is the norm, companies are pulling out all the stops to make hiring from across the world feel a bit less distant.

Achieving a balance between leveraging recruitment automation and human touch is the key to competing in today’s fiercely competitive market. To strike the perfect balance, treat candidate relationships the same way you would treat human relationships. Texting a friend can sustain a friendship, but you still need to connect in person once in a while. Likewise, recruitment automation can boost your hiring efficiency to impress applicants, but you still need to personally refine your connection to candidates. 

Say Hello to Candidate Relationship Intelligence

Pre-pandemic, less than half of recruiters said that they have the technology they need to build relationships with candidates. 53% wanted to emerge post-pandemic with the tools needed to improve their relationship building. Want to become one of the recruiters that rave about their tech stack? Time to level up your technology.

GoodTime Hire harnesses Candidate Relationship Intelligence to automate coordination, build relationships during interviews, and provide actionable insights to continuously improve your connections with applicants. It’s the tech of your candidate relationship-building dreams.

Learn more about how Hire can supercharge your talent acquisition team.

How to Win Top Talent With Strong Candidate Relationships

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Want to move the needle on your hiring goals? Sorry to break it to you, but cool swag and flashy benefits don’t cut it. Today’s top talent leaders focus on fostering candidate relationships. 

Recruiters had the upper hand in the recruiter-candidate relationship in the past, but not anymore. Candidates now hold all the cards in choosing where they want to go for their next career, and they’ve grown more and more selective. Job seekers won’t just accept any offer that comes their way; they expect deeper relationships and intangibles such as flexibility, transparency, and a visible commitment to DEIB.

To snag the best talent from the bunch, you must establish a genuine connection to your company’s mission, to the team, and to your recruiters. So, where do you start? 

GoodTime Account Executives John Bartsch and Siegfried Huffnagle, joined by Maria Riabukhina and Matthias Schmeißer from Beamery’s talent team, sat down to discuss the secret sauce to cultivating healthy candidate relationships. If you didn’t catch the webinar, here’s the TLDR with the key takeaways on how to better connect with candidates for hiring success.

Four Pillars of Candidate Relationships

Yes, investing time into connecting with candidates is non-negotiable for recruiters, but what do candidates actually expect from the relationship? Here are four main pillars that should comprise your candidate relationships.

Genuine Connection

While remote work has created a distance economy, candidates don’t want to feel so “distant.” Genuine connections are now more valuable than ever. In fact, 72% of candidates would reject a job offer if they didn’t feel connected to the company culture during the hiring process. Even if the salary and the job description are aligned, if candidates don’t recognize a human-to-human connection, it’s a no go. Recruiters must address candidates from a position strongly rooted in authenticity.

Transparency

To instill your recruitment process with authenticity, start by prioritizing transparency. Don’t leave candidates guessing; applicants want to know what it’s like to work for your company from the very beginning of the interview process. 39% of candidates expect to be informed about compensation in the initial job post. Besides expecting open communication surrounding compensation, candidates want potential employers to be loud and clear on their DEIB initiatives.

“People have spent the last couple years thinking about what’s most important to them, how they want to spend their time, and what their values are. People want to make sure that the time that they spend at work is aligned with that.”

— Siegfried Huffnagle, Account Executive at GoodTime

Adaptability

GoodTime found that candidates currently interview at 4x more employers than pre-pandemic — meaning that the talent competition is more intense than ever. This is largely due to the rise of remote work. As the office workspace continues to evolve, so does candidates’ ideal work arrangement. Flexible work arrangements are now at the top of job seekers’ wish lists. Companies must adapt to the work preferences of candidates, and demonstrate that adaptability throughout the company culture.

Candidate Well-being

All in all, candidates don’t want to sacrifice their well-being for their job. Sixty-two percent of employees cite well-being support as their top priority when job hunting. Work must exist in harmony with health — there’s no way around it. Recruitment teams should be prepared to openly address the efforts that their company makes in prioritizing the health and general well-being of their employees.

Boost Connections With Recruiting Tools and Techniques

Once you’ve mastered the building blocks of candidate relationships, it’s time to reel candidates in — hook, line, and sinker. Examine your hiring methods and tools and look for areas of improvement. You’ll not only enhance the relationships created from your hiring process, but also move candidates through the funnel more efficiently to get an offer in their hand.

Gather Candidate Feedback

Now that candidates are in the driver’s seat, they want more ownership and involvement in the recruitment process. For this reason, gathering candidate feedback becomes both necessary and expected. Who can speak to the quality of your hiring process better than those that experience it firsthand? By factoring in candidate feedback on your entire interview process, talent teams can ensure that their process exceeds expectations.

Build DEIB From the Studs Up

If you think you can skate by in the hiring process without highlighting your company’s DEIB efforts, think again. To align with candidate expectations, recruitment teams must present candidates with a holistic image of what their company stands for on DEIB. This translates to having the tools and strategies in place to provide this image from the very first moment that candidates sit down to interview.

“Companies that are enabling diverse and inclusive interview panels experienced a 4X increase in interviews in less than one year. This really speaks to the importance of training up your interviewers and having a broad and diverse pool.”

— John Bartsch, Account Executive at GoodTime

Prioritize Interviewer Training

How do you demonstrate a genuine commitment to DEIB? Start by training a diverse and expansive pool of potential interviewers. Widening your interviewer pool not only ensures that you’ll always have people available to interview applicants, but also cultivates a group of diverse panelists that are representative of both your company and the candidates you want to attract. Having five alternative interviewers for each interview translates to a 95% chance that one of them will be available for the time slot selected by the candidate.

Empower Your Recruiting Tech Stack

A robust tech stack seals the deal when it comes to impressing candidates. Beamery’s talent lifecycle management platform delivers meaningful insights to shape customers’ holistic talent strategy. Here at GoodTime, our Hire product uses Candidate Relationship Intelligence to automate coordination, connect with candidates, and gather actionable data.

Interested in learning all about the positive change Hire can make for your recruiting process? Say no more.

Behavioral Interview Training 101: How to Support Hiring Managers

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Not all interviews are created equal. Behavioral interviews just happen to be better than most.

By using a candidate’s past experiences to assess their future potential, behavioral interviews serve as one of the most accurate predictors of how a candidate would perform as an employee. 

The popular logic is that if a candidate exhibited questionable behavior in professional settings in the past, who’s to say that they won’t do the same in the future? And by the looks of it, this logic usually prevails: 89% of hiring managers and recruiters rated behavioral interviewing techniques as effective, which was more than any other traditional interviewing technique.

If you want to harness the full power of behavioral interviews and weed out bad hires, the first step is ensuring that your interviewers are trained in the art of this special type of interviewing. That’s right—candidates aren’t the only ones who need to prepare for interviews.

Read on to discover several best practices to emphasize in your behavioral interviewer training.

WATCH: We asked Socotra’s Head of Talent Acquisition about his process for coaching and training interviewers, including behavioral interviewing techniques and making sure he has a reputation as a trusted advisor and mentor.

Craft Strategic Initial Questions

Your interviewers’ questions for behavioral interviews need to be thoughtful and strategic. Now isn’t the time to say, “Tell me about yourself,” or the classic, “Walk me through your resume.” All of that information can be learned from the materials submitted in a candidate’s application. Now’s the time to dig deep.

The behavioral questions that your interviewers ask should get to the heart of a candidate’s experience and uncover specific competencies most relevant to the role, such as leadership, quick thinking, and teamwork. 

To ensure that the questions are purposeful, write down several of the competencies that an ideal candidate should possess. Then, plan out questions that prompt candidates to discuss past behaviors that allude to each competency. These questions should be open-ended and shouldn’t hint at the desired response.

Ask Explorative Follow-up Questions 

Ready to dig even deeper? Initial behavioral interview questions are effective on their own, but your interviewers must be prepared to probe further with follow-up questions.

Unlike initial questions, follow-up questions shouldn’t be pre-planned. Rather, they should arise from cues that your interviewers pick up on from candidates during the interview. This makes active listening a crucial component in successful behavioral interviewing techniques.

Follow-up is necessary when responses need more detail, don’t fully answer the original question, or outwardly attempt to evade the question. Non-verbal cues, such as a shift in a candidate’s demeanor, should also elicit follow-up.

These additional questions shouldn’t feel interrogative toward candidates. Rather, they should feel explorative, adding nuance and depth to a candidate’s behavior.

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Look Out for STAR-Studded Answers

As another component of proper behavioral interviewing techniques, your interviewers should keep an eye out for candidates that use the STAR method when structuring their answers.

The STAR method is a structure candidates should use to answer behavioral interview questions in a thoughtful manner. A STAR (situation, task at hand, action taken, and result) response contains a structured beginning, middle, and end. This adds a storytelling framework to a candidate’s response, providing fluidity, depth, and clarity for your interviewers. 

The structure of a candidate’s responses tells just as much about their competencies as the actual content of their responses. A candidate who effortlessly employs STAR likely instills meaningful thought into their everyday speech. If a job requires articulate communication, your interviewers should highly prioritize candidates who demonstrate STAR.

Remember to Practice Empathy

We all know how nerve-wracking a job interview can be, and the high level of thought that behavioral interviews require can feel even more stress-inducing.

When interviewers practice empathy, candidates feel at ease. Comfortable candidates are better equipped to demonstrate their abilities, which makes it easier for interviewers to assess their true nature and make smart hiring decisions.

Interviewers that fail to lean into their empathetic side are bad for business. 58% of job seekers reportedly declined a job offer due to a poor experience in the hiring process, meaning that an uncomfortable interview may prompt candidates to run the opposite way.

To practice empathy, interviewers should allow candidates an appropriate amount of time to think about each question before they respond. While interviews should be kept professional, starting each interview with light small talk can go a long way in alleviating a candidate’s stress. All in all, interviews that feel a bit more human form trust between interviewers and the candidate, cultivating the all-important candidate relationship.

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Ready to Elevate Your Behavioral Interviewer Training?

Behavioral interviews can be a fantastic tool for hiring teams, yet they are only as good as their interviewers. Enforcing training on proper behavioral interviewing techniques guarantees that your interviewers ask the right questions and use the best strategies to hire top talent and build meaningful connections with every candidate. 

Learn more about how interviewer training creates hiring success by reading our eBook, The True Cost of Untrained Interviewers.

Yes, You Can High-Volume Hire AND Create Candidate Relationships

Posted on by Rachel Heller

High-volume hiring isn’t for the faint of heart. Hiring a mass amount of candidates in a short time frame AND investing the time to create bespoke candidate relationships with each potential hire? Recruitment teams must practically become superheroes to get the job done.

Recruiting coordinators should always focus on fostering strong candidate relationships, but when overwhelmed with the unique challenges that come with hiring at scale for rapidly growing companies, how can you possibly make time for candidates?

Here’s the good news: with the right strategies and software, you’ll hire at scale AND develop genuine candidate relationships in one fell swoop. 

Don’t get trapped in a cycle of tedious recruiting tasks at the expense of your candidates. Read on to discover key ways to keep the candidate relationship front and center while acing your high-volume hiring strategy. 

Grow Your Interviewer Pool

The last thing you want to deal with when hiring a large number of employees is an interviewer pool that’s much too small for your scheduling needs. Expanding this pool is an absolute must-do to guarantee that you always have quality interviewers at your fingertips.

Need further encouragement to grow your interviewer pool? Consider the cost of interviewer burnout. Our studies show that 30% of employees typically handle 70% of the interviewer load. When interviewers find themselves bogged down by heavy workloads, they can’t possibly be on their A-game to connect with candidates.

Interviewer training is the key to evenly distributing the interview load across your company’s employees. Training your interviewers might sound time consuming in the context of high-volume hiring, but have no fear: tech tools make scaling interviewer pools an effortless process.

After you train more employees in the art of interviewing, you’ll have a large group of capable interviewers with ample time to personally connect with candidates — even in the middle of chaotic high-volume recruiting seasons.

Automate Your Interview Scheduling

When you say good-bye to manual scheduling and hello to automation, everything falls into place. Suddenly you can spend more time prioritizing candidates and less time playing calendar tetris.

Automated candidate-driven scheduling streamlines your high-volume hiring and mitigates long wait times to ensure that candidates move on to the next step in the process as soon as possible. After all, recruiting coordinators are busy, but so are candidates. Candidates don’t want to wait around for someone to schedule their interview, so why not let them schedule themselves?

Allowing candidates to self-schedule their interviews based on their own calendar eliminates back-and-forth emails and conveys that you appreciate their time. That’s a win-win.

Rediscover Eligible Candidates

The best strategy when high-volume hiring: work smarter, not harder. Before you scour the job boards for qualified candidates, first identify the candidates you already have at hand that fit the criteria for a new opportunity.

Now is the time to consider previous silver or bronze-medal candidates. Just because you passed on a candidate previously doesn’t mean that you should forget about them — the timing might not have been right, another candidate might’ve narrowly beat them, or the candidate might’ve been better suited for a different position.

In addition to considering previous candidates, you can also look into current employees who are interested in switching jobs internally and talent that your hiring team connected with at professional events.

Tapping into candidates that are already on your radar gives your hiring efforts a boost by eliminating the time it takes to source and screen fresh candidates. Not only that, but reaching out to old connections promotes positive candidate relationships through the power of continuous candidate engagement.

Engage with Candidate Experience Surveys

In a perfect recruiting world, we’d suggest for you to supply each every candidate with feedback on how they performed within your hiring process. But this is the real world, and sending each candidate feedback is nearly impossible to do when hiring in mass quantities.

What is possible is sending automated candidate experience surveys to your candidates. Collecting candidate feedback through anonymous surveys provides an inside look at the current state of the candidate relationship within your hiring process, straight from the perspectives of those who know your hiring process best: your candidates. 

This is a highly effective, highly low-effort way for you to collect crucial data to improve your recruitment strategies and keep candidates engaged, all without expending valuable time and energy during your hiring frenzy. What’s better than that?

Above All: Leverage Tech When High-Volume Hiring

When filling many positions at once, it’s much too easy to get caught up in the noise and neglect to engage with your candidates. One of the worst things that you can do while trying to attract the best talent is to provide candidates with a hiring process that feels cold and impersonal.

Make every interview impactful with Candidate Relationship Intelligence. GoodTime’s high-volume recruiting software supercharges your recruiting and unlocks meaningful data so that your team gives candidates the genuine connections that they expect — every single time.

Request a demo to see how Hire creates more than just a candidate “experience.”

Culture Fit Is Dead. It’s Time to Hire for Culture Add.

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Keeping your company’s culture in mind is a must-do when recruiting for open positions, but should you really hire for culture fit? Or is hiring for culture add the new way to go?

When done right, hiring for culture fit means looking for candidates that align with the core company values and the way that things are done at an organization, making it even more likely that they would thrive in the workplace and successfully perform as new employees.

Sounds logical, right? Most recruitment teams would agree: 83% of recruiters reportedly consider culture fit to be the most important hiring factor after previous job experience. Meshing with company culture is equally significant to candidates, as more than half of job seekers say that company culture is more important than salary when it comes to being satisfied at work.

But as is the unfortunate fate for many recruiting buzzwords, culture fit has been misinterpreted and misused to the point where the concept now does more harm than good. It’s time to say good-bye to hiring for culture fit and hello to hiring for culture add.

Dangers of Hiring for Culture Fit

Culture Fit Is Difficult to Define

How well a candidate fits into a company’s culture is incredibly subjective and hard to measure. One recruiter may see a candidate as a perfect culture match, and another may have a completely different perspective.

Leaving culture fit open to interpretation makes it susceptible to misuse. What recruiters and hiring managers often end up measuring instead is how well they get along with a candidate. This is where hiring for culture fit becomes problematic.

Prioritizes Similarities When Hiring

The rumors are true: birds of a feather really do flock together. Science shows that we naturally take comfort in identifying with people who are similar to us. In a recruitment context, this means that if a candidate shares a specific characteristic or lived experience with a hiring manager, this commonality creates a bond. 

In turn, some hiring managers neglect to prioritize alignment between the company and the candidate — aka, what culture fit should really be about — and instead focus on alignment between themselves and the candidate. Hiring for culture fit turns into hiring for homogeneity, and I’m sure you can guess how this impacts DEI recruitment efforts.

Negates DEI Recruitment Principles

Selecting candidates based on how well you mesh with them goes against everything that equitable hiring stands for. What started as an attempt to hire for culture fit snowballs into a company that lacks diversity and struggles with DEI hiring practices.

Prioritizing sameness maintains the status quo and creates unconscious biases. Diverse candidates — whether this means diversity of thought or of demographic characteristics — find themselves at a disadvantage.

All in all, hiring for culture fit in this manner creates a workforce with employees that think and look the same. A truly successful company is a diverse company, where issues are tackled and innovations are created thanks to employees with a wide range of thought processes and lived experiences. 

Start Hiring for Culture Add

Stop looking for someone who simply fits your company culture and start searching for something more meaningful: culture add. 

Hiring for culture add means considering your company’s culture while looking for candidates who would enrich the culture with diverse experiences and ideas. In this way, your hiring team fosters a forward-thinking mindset by considering how adding certain perspectives and backgrounds would create a successful future for your organization. 

How to Hire for Culture Add

Assess What’s Missing from Your Organization

It’s impossible to identify candidates who would add to your company culture without first examining what your company lacks. Perhaps you don’t have enough employees who take risks and propose pie in the sky ideas, or who thrive when hyper-focused on the details of a project.

Once you’ve identified what you’re missing, your hiring team can venture forward in their search for candidates who would be successful additions.

Ask Candidates How Your Culture Can Improve

A good candidate keenly understands and appreciates your company culture. A great candidate goes against the grain and recognizes where your culture needs improvements.

If a candidate acknowledges gaps within your company culture, they’d likely be an employee who contributes to your culture with positive change and a different perspective on how to do things, instead of an employee who assimilates to how things have always been done and fits your current company image.

By hiring candidates who can recognize these gaps, your company benefits from a diversity of thought that pushes your organization forward and challenges the status quo.

Diversify Your Sourcing Channels

If you’re struggling with hiring for culture add, it might be because your talent pool is too homogeneous. Take this as a sign that you need to add diversity to your sourcing strategies.

Start by getting acquainted with online job posting platforms that cater to diverse populations, such as the Professional Diversity Network and Diversity Job Board. Posting your job openings on these websites encourages historically underrepresented groups to consider employment at your company.

You can also seek out and hold events with local chapters and associations where diverse candidates meet. This way, you’ll form meaningful candidate relationships with job seekers who could add immense value to your organization’s culture.

4 Ways to Compete with Big Tech Recruiting for Top Talent

Posted on by Rachel Heller

The tech recruiting world is changing — and fast. 

Between the tumultuous years of 2019-2021, the tech recruiting landscape faced notable shifts. Tech hiring growth strongly recovered in 2021, with the overall advertisements for tech jobs in 2021 being nearly double the number for 2019 and 2020. Even though the world’s tech giants continue to expand their influence, non-Fortune 500 tech companies made up the bulk of recent hiring growth.

While tech hiring surges, applicant pools dwindle. Compared to the average candidate pool sizes from 2020, the sizes were 35% lower in 2021. Not only that, but amid the Great Resignation, candidates have had a change of heart. Candidates no longer want to waste time at organizations that don’t live up to their expectations of the ideal employer. In fact, three-quarters of candidates say they’re considering leaving their jobs.

It’s prime time for growing tech companies to stand out from Big Tech recruiting and snag the best candidates, but only if they can handle the shifting state of applicant pools and meet tech hiring challenges head-on.

To keep pace with the ever-changing world of tech recruitment and to differentiate your company from the competition, take a good look at your recruitment strategies — they’re probably long overdue for a makeover. 

Here are four key ways you can compete with Big Tech recruitment teams and land top candidates.

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1. Offer Remote Work Opportunities

The gravitational pull between candidates and remote work opportunities is undeniable. To stay competitive with the big tech recruiting teams, you need to consider making remote work a reality for your organization.

If you’re not offering remote opportunities, you’re missing out on candidates. 75% of tech industry workers say it’s important for their company to allow them to work remotely indefinitely. Despite the desire to work remotely, it seems that each day a top tech company discloses their plans for an eventual return to office.

The fact is that a growing majority of people don’t want to work unless it’s from home. Offering remote options is the way to go, but there’s one caveat: it’s common for tech industry candidates who seek remote work outside of Big Tech companies to expect Big Tech salaries. If your organization can’t meet these expectations, be prepared to upgrade other elements of your compensation and benefits.

2. Show Leniency in Degree Requirements

With a number of Big Tech companies no longer requiring degrees and 90% of employers reportedly open to accepting candidates without four-year college degrees, it’s time to change your expectations on a candidate’s education.

The idea that a college degree is the surest path to a career is now antiquated. Boot camps, digital badges, vocational programs, and self-taught skills demonstrate just as much, or more, competencies necessary to excel in a professional environment.

Removing your degree requirements isn’t just a way to keep pace with the tech talent competition — from a DEI standpoint, it’s also the right thing to do. A college degree is a pricey investment that a wide range of applicants cannot afford. By removing degree requirements, you’ll create an equitable playing field for candidates of all socioeconomic backgrounds, benefit from a diversity of educational experiences, and widen your talent pool all in one fell swoop.

3. Emphasize Your Company’s Continuous Growth

Working at a tech giant with a household name may sound alluring, but don’t discount how enticing it is to work for a company with much untapped potential. 

When carving out your employee value proposition, emphasize the immense learning opportunities that come with working at a company with a focus on growing and scaling. This may be just the thing that attracts the attention of Gen Z, the future leaders of the tech workforce.

Among Gen Z-ers  who plan on leaving their current roles, 76% of this cohort indicate that they’re looking for more opportunities to learn and gain new skills, which is more than any other age group before them.  To win the hearts of Gen Z, capitalize on the growth potential of your organization. Turn your growth potential into a selling point that speaks to the opportunities that you offer in thinking outside of the box and contributing to innovation.

4. Provide What Candidates Expect: Strong Candidate Relationships

If your tech recruitment team doesn’t instill energy into generating memorable candidate relationships, you’ve already lost in the competition for tech talent.

A great candidate experience might have won candidates over in the past, but not anymore. Today’s candidates expect something deeper. Candidates want to feel valued before, during, and after the hiring process, yet more and more companies find themselves losing out on desirable candidates due to their own impersonal processes.

Don’t make that the reality for your organization. GoodTime Hire leverages Candidate Relationship Intelligence to help you transcend temporary experiences and create the type of high-quality connections that win the best talent.

Request a demo to see how Hire provides the edge that talent teams need to need stand out from the competition.

The Candidate Relationship: Erick Green from Beamery

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Do you feel that? That’s the talent competition heating up. In today’s all-time competitive recruiting environment, your candidate relationships are more important than ever before. Creating a unilateral, fleeting candidate experience just doesn’t cut it; candidates expect something deeper. It’s time to create genuine connections with candidates.

For Erick Green, meaningfully connecting with the recruiters at Beamery made the interview process an overwhelmingly positive experience — one that transformed him from a passive candidate who wasn’t looking for a new job — to one of Beamery’s newest account executives.

After introducing GoodTime Hire’s Candidate Relationship Intelligence to their tech stack, Beamery’s recruitment team elevated their interview process to transcend temporary experiences and build genuine relationships with candidates like Erick.

Read on to learn how Hire helped Erick accept Beamery’s job offer by cultivating a top-notch interview process.

Sparking the Candidate Relationship 

Transparent Communication from Recruiters

Transparency in the hiring process is high in demand, yet low in supply. 63% of job seekers are reportedly dissatisfied with the communication — or lack thereof — that they receive from most employers. 

Before interviewing with Beamery, Erick had become all too familiar with this lack of communication. In most hiring processes, he found himself left with more questions than answers: What’s the next step? When will I get a call back? Didn’t the recruiter say they would follow up?

With Hire, Beamery removed ambiguity from the equation with automated, personalized interview invites and reminders.

“The hiring experience at Beamery really stood out to me because they really took the guesswork out of it. I knew when my next call was going to be, I knew who it was going to be with.”

— Erick Green, Account Executive at Beamery

No one likes to be left in the dark, especially when interviewing for a job. Leveraging your tech stack to transparently and consistently communicate with each candidate is a crucial step in crafting a candidate relationship that lasts.

Quick and Easy Interview Process

Interviewing for jobs shouldn’t be a guessing game — and it shouldn’t be a waiting game either. Stringing job seekers along through a lengthy hiring process is a surefire way to tarnish your relationship with candidates and miss out on quality talent. 

In fact, 57% of candidates say that the most frustrating part of job hunting is a long wait time after the interview to hear back from a recruiter, and another 57% say that they lose interest in the open position if the hiring process is too long.

Determined to capture and sustain Erick’s interest, Beamery used Hire’s intelligent scheduling automation to eliminate back-and-forth communication and extensive time spent playing calendar tetris.

“With GoodTime, recruiters don’t have to worry and spend time on entering dates into their calendar and scheduling.”

—  Erick Green, Account Executive at Beamery

When recruiters use tech to reduce the time spent on tedious scheduling tasks, they have more time to focus on the task that really matters: meaningfully connecting with candidates.

Learn More About Erick’s Experience

The companies with the most efficient hiring strategy are the ones that snag the best candidates, and Beamery is living proof.

For Erick, the quality of Beamery’s hiring process made accepting their job offer an easy decision. Thanks to the bandwidth that Hire gave back to Beamery’s recruiting team, the team had time to cultivate a meaningful bond with Erick that he wouldn’t soon forget.

“When you’re not worrying about the scheduling, you can worry about the one-on-one interaction which is going to provide a better candidate experience and ultimately, I think, more hires and quicker hires.”

— Erick Green, Account Executive at Beamery

Watch the video below to hear more about Erick’s experience with Beamery and Hire.