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How to Cultivate Great Candidate Relationships in the Distance Economy

Posted on by Rachel Heller

It’s no secret that the global shutdown in March 2020 forever changed the way we work.

For most, the first phase of this so-called distance economy meant physically distancing ourselves from people we’d previously worked with side-by-side. But as the pandemic continued, many workers made a permanent shift, and jobs that were location-agnostic from the start became widely accepted.

Since then, we’ve gone from working in close quarters with co-workers to collaborating online from different corners of the world. Yet while productivity has soared, erasing the misconception that remote work is inefficient, both social connections and company culture have suffered.

People are responding to the perceived void of human relationships by prioritizing the very thing they’ve been missing — genuine connection.

How can talent leaders foster genuine connections when everything feels so…distant? It starts by understanding how to build the candidate relationship, and how it ultimately drives the entire candidate experience.

Improve Communication

Despite its many benefits, remote work also created a disconnect that left people craving more human interaction — even if that interaction happens virtually. That’s why when job seeking, candidates are eager to see how they might fit into a new remote environment in a meaningful way. 

During the hiring process, modern candidates look for collaborative exchanges — where they play a role in the conversation as much as recruiters and interviewers do. How can you enable this?

Begin Important Conversations Early

39% of candidates say they want candid conversations on job compensation from the start. Begin critical, decision-making discussions — things like compensation, work schedule, and specific expectations — early in the hiring funnel, not the end. Then, weave the same transparency into your company culture.

Don’t Underestimate Responsiveness

In a 2020 study, 63% of candidates report that most recruiters do not effectively communicate. In remote hiring, it’s more important than ever to keep the lines of communication open. Especially when the talent market is moving at the speed it is now. Candidates want clear and frequent interaction — so check in regularly, give them the information they need, and take the time to make them feel valued. 

Leverage Digital Tools

The only way to keep up with candidate expectations and remain competitive in this job market is by leveraging hiring automation. With an automated hiring solution, candidates can schedule interviews on their time, eliminating the back-and-forth communication that slows down the hiring process. And with the best candidate experience technology in place, recruiters can focus on building genuine relationships with candidates, one of the most rewarding parts of their work. 

Advocate Well-being

Yes, remote productivity is high; but it comes with a price. 

Working from home took a major toll on health, with 40% of people saying it negatively affected work-life balance. People everywhere are experiencing burnout. As candidates begin to put their well-being first, they’re looking for employers who will encourage mental, physical, and emotional health. Beyond great communication, candidates want to see employers demonstrate their commitment to employee well-being.

Now is the time to show candidates that you have concrete policies to support them as their home and work lives collide. Make wellness a pivotal part of your hiring process and show candidates that you’re dedicated to helping them thrive, both in work and in life.

Offer Flexibility

For many, the distance economy provided the unique ability to balance work and personal life — if done right. Now that candidates know what’s possible, they expect future employers to continue to be agile. Whether it’s full company shutdowns to recharge, no meeting days, flex time, walking meetings, or coaching and mental health resources — candidates and employees are looking for support from their employers.

With 70% of people saying they want flexible work opportunities, offering a remote or hybrid interview process is the first step to proving that you care. Then, model that flexibility in your workplace.

Invest in Growth

During the height of the pandemic, offering security was the main goal. Now that we’ve moved past many of those fears, candidates are prioritizing their future. They want to find meaning in their work — and regular growth and development are part of that equation.

Create a learning culture, where growth opportunities are always present. And show candidates that you support their needs by outlining opportunities your company provides.

Share Company Culture

The isolation of the pandemic drove many to rethink what they value in company culture — and trendy perks are no longer it. Now, they want to be part of a place that gives them a fulfilling experience.

Demonstrate Transparency

With the isolation of remote work, 37% of people say they have a harder time trusting leaders. As people are meeting less in person and more online, lack of visibility is a big concern.

Candidates want to know that you’ll hear their needs — yes, even from afar — and that you are committed to creating transparent relationships between leaders and employees. Show them what you’ll do to create those relationships from the beginning, and how you ensure remote employees are visible for opportunities.

Give Them Space to Share Their Authentic Selves

People want to be a part of a company that reflects the things that matter to them. For talent leaders, giving candidates the space to share who they are and what’s important to them is critical. Then, create discussions around your company culture and your unique mission and values. 

Expand DEI Efforts

Three in four people say DEI continues to be a top priority — a topic that undoubtedly should be part of your candidate messaging. Many candidates will not consider a company that does not have a clear commitment to DEI. 

A commitment to DEI starts on your website, then continues through the interview stage and beyond. Ensure diversity in interview panels so your candidates feel like they belong from the start by using interviewer selection tools.

The Candidate Relationship Is the Way Forward

As the future of work is forever changed, and the distance economy becomes routine, one thing holds true — hiring leaders that prioritize the candidate relationship will have better hiring outcomes. It’s that simple, and there’s no way around it.

The best way to stand out from the talent competition? Create a standout candidate relationship by being transparent, and maintaining an authentic, empathetic hiring process.

Candidate Relationship: 4 Pillars for Creating Lasting Connections

Posted on by Rachel Heller

The candidate relationship is in style; but where did this concept come from?

For one, what candidates expect from their hiring experience is changing rapidly. This change is brought on by the “distance economy,” where an increasing number of people are working remotely, more and more jobs are location-agnostic, and fewer workforces have any kind of physical proximity to each other. 

Along with recent disruptions and ongoing uncertainties of the future, stress levels are high—and job burnout is even higher. And as a result, candidates all over the world seem to have decided that they want a chance to sit in the driver’s seat for a change.

Things that used to sway candidate decisions (remember nap pods?) are much less relevant in an increasingly virtual world. Now, candidates are looking for much more than a work experience that feels single-sided and staged; they want a genuine, mutual connection with their next employer, with plenty of opportunities to have conversations about what matters to them.

That’s why the candidate relationship is the new priority for talent teams and a critical piece of the hiring process that drives the entire candidate experience.

To build a strong candidate relationship, start by understanding these four key pillars:

Pillar 1: Genuine Connection

16% of remote workers cite loneliness and communication difficulties as their biggest struggle in this distance economy. The paradox is this: The further candidates get physically from their workplace, the closer they want to feel.

As a result, many candidates are craving more emotional connectedness from their professional relationships than ever before.

Yes — they still want remote and hybrid opportunities, but more than that, they want a company that creates digital experiences with genuine connections. Many conversations have moved online; in turn, people are missing the human engagement they used to get from in-person meetings and shared lunches.

With 72% of candidates rejecting job offers because they don’t feel connected to the company culture, now is the time for talent leaders to level up their candidate communication game.

Pillar 2: Transparency 

First impressions matter. And as remote hiring becomes the new norm, they’re more important than ever. Without face-to-face interactions, hiring leaders are forced to find new ways to reflect their company culture and outline job expectations.

One way to accomplish this is with abundant transparency. 39% of people say they want clear communication about pay in the initial job post so that they don’t waste their time applying for jobs that don’t match their financial goals. When companies are upfront and honest — from the beginning — candidates are more likely to trust that there won’t be unwelcome surprises down the road.

Beyond transparency in job expectations, candidates also want to see employers take a clear stance on fair practices that support diversity, equity, and inclusion. The desire for an equitable work culture continues to trend upward, with more and more candidates looking for open, action-backed conversations about the steps employers are taking to drive progress.

Pillar 3: Adaptability

Now interviewing at 4x as many companies as they were before the pandemic, candidates intend to be much more selective than they were able to be in years past. So even with companies promising sought-after benefits like flexibility and professional development, drop-off rates will continue to soar for hiring processes that are hard to navigate.

For candidates, the hiring experience is an indicator of what the employee experience will be like. When it’s clean and simple, and when candidates feel seen and valued, they can feel confident that’s how they’ll feel like an employee, too. A prime example is flexibility — a need that has grown by 12% in the last year. When flexibility is prioritized during the hiring process, candidates rest assured that it will be part of their future employment, too.

When hiring leaders leverage automation for both speed and simplicity, it’s a one-two punch: candidates are happier, and recruiting teams end up with the ability to adapt to every candidate’s need and focus even more on creating a genuine candidate relationship.

Pillar 4: Candidate Well-Being

Ever since the pandemic began, employee well-being has topped the list as one of the most important benefits candidates want out of future jobs. This should come as no surprise — the stress of the pandemic drove many to resign from their jobs and start putting their personal well-being first.

But quite often, there’s a disconnect between employee mental health challenges and the empathy employers show for these challenges; those who take action to understand and improve health and well-being are the ones that will attract the best candidates.

Companies that invest in benefits, such as more leave, hybrid work opportunities, flexible schedules, training and development, and mental and physical health programs will see enhanced productivity, loyalty, and engagement.

Make the Candidate Relationship Your Focus

In today’s candidate-driven market, candidates are interviewing you as much as you are interviewing them. 

To start building winning candidate relationships, it’s time to think beyond great scheduling. Hiring leaders need a full hiring solution that will give candidates flexible, professional experiences and unique insights into the company and the role they are considering.

GoodTime Hire’s automated interview scheduling helps you coordinate faster, hire more efficiently, and free up bandwidth for connecting with talent. (Plus, you’ll save major time and money along the way).

Discover how GoodTime Hire’s interview scheduling software can help you transform your candidate relationships.

5 Key Takeaways: Meeting the Expectations of Candidate Experience

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Since March 2020, talent acquisition leaders contended with near-constant changes in both how they approach candidates, as well as sourcing top talent. The question is how to approach the remote work environment efficiently and conduct not only effective interviews with candidates, but also run interview processes that build the candidate experience and create excitement over the new role.

Teddy Chestnut, Chief Revenue Officer from BrightHire, spoke with Scott Parker, Director of Product Marketing for GoodTime, and shared smart recommendations for interviewers faced with the ever-changing recruitment landscape. Here are the key takeaways from their LinkedIn Live, with actionable steps on improving how you train your interviewers and how your team approaches the recruitment process.

“Being remote is no longer an excuse for not having your hiring plan together.”

— Teddy Chestnut, Chief Revenue Officer at BrightHire

1. “The New Normal.” It’s Pretty Much Just Normal Now

The pandemic afforded hiring teams the opportunity (or challenge, depending on your take) to manage the interview process using Zoom and other virtual tools to connect with and communicate effectively with candidates. Teams and candidates alike are now accustomed to having remote communication for interviews, and reverting back to less efficient processes isn’t likely.

Teams have pivoted their plans to remote, hybrid, and flex models to capture top talent.  Having buy-in on a plan that speaks to the future of work is critical. “Being remote is no longer an excuse for not having your hiring plan together,” says Chestnut. 

2. Building Adaptable Teams Is a Non-negotiable

Companies that do not provide flexibility for their candidates are at a distinct disadvantage because now candidates prefer to have the option to work from anywhere.  Because of the new hiring processes teams have been forced to implement, employees are increasingly requiring more interviewer training, and teams need to update their tech stacks to optimize core hiring metrics.

Building a resilient team that not only thrives in a remote work environment, but also demonstrates to prospective candidates the positive culture created in a distributed workforce, makes all the difference when sourcing new talent in this ever-competitive market. 

3. Help Interviewers Avoid Distracti… Look at This TikTok!

Now that many of us work 100% remote and are far more accessible, calendars are filled to maximum capacity. Because of constant access to news and by social media, it’s harder to tell if a remote interviewer is distracted versus when they were in person, because they can’t just grab their phones in the middle of interviews. The challenge today is for interviewers to give their candidates full attention so that the interview process can be as effective as possible.

When the calendar is full with back-to-back meetings, and Slack, WhatsApp, and Gmail constantly send notifications, it’s much harder to concentrate in an interview fully. Candidates can quickly tell when their interviewer is not giving them their full attention, which can create a negative experience that they might write about on Glassdoor.

Those negative reviews could deter potential candidates from even considering applying for a position at your company. Teams need to help interviewers focus on the task at hand, and work hard to avoid distractions in order to create a positive candidate experience.

4. Great Candidates Have Lots of Options (And They Know It)

Since the start of the Great Resignation, it’s been clear that the hiring process has greatly changed. Almost all candidates have other offers, even when they’re sitting right in front of you in an interview.

Interviewers need to remember that candidates have other options, and probably have other people giving them offers for a job. This means that interviewers need to make sure that the company is communicating the value that it can add to the candidate. The candidate also needs to make sure that they present themselves in the best way possible. 

Things have drastically changed with the dynamic between the candidate and the interviewer. This creates a sense of urgency between the interviewer and the candidates and it makes the interviewer keenly aware that they have to make sure that the scheduling works well and they’re not skipping interviews. Otherwise, these candidates can easily take a different job offer because of a delay caused by the interviewer.

5. Training Interviewers Is the New Non-negotiable for 2022 

When you’re in a situation requiring an interview where you have to have over seven hours of interviewing a day, logistics become challenging. Interviewers have to take time to do candidate research, write the feedback, and have time for preparation even before the interview starts.

Interviewers must have the right training to know how to interpret what they learn about the candidates they’re interviewing. When the interviewers are trained with the skills needed to manage remote interviewing, the interview process will be so much more efficient than it would’ve been if they were not well trained — or worse, not trained at all. 

Time To Elevate the Candidate Experience With Interviewer Training

Train interviewers how to create an amazing interview experience— then teach them to trust the process.

The time is now to implement interviewer training. GoodTime helps you train interviews with ease, giving you one hiring experience solution that lets you track interviewers and their progress and train them at scale. GoodTime gives you the confidence that your selected interviewers evaluate candidates effectively.

Want to learn more about the positive difference GoodTime can make? Sign up for a demo now. 

5 Key Takeaways: Building an Employer Brand Strategy at Postmates

Posted on by Rachel Heller

How’s your employer brand strategy? 

Amid The Great Resignation, compensation and role alignment aren’t enough to snag top talent. 

Creating a smart employer branding strategy attracts more ideal candidates by providing a clear, specific, and unique point of view as to what life is like within your organization. Employer branding also demonstrates company values in a way that helps candidates see themselves with a given company. 

And now more than ever before, company values matter deeply to job seekers. This is why taking the time to build a solid employer branding strategy is the secret sauce in capturing top talent. 

Every TA leader understands the importance of company culture as it’s seen through the eyes of current employees. By leveraging that knowledge, hiring teams can develop an authentic employer brand strategy to appeal to their ideal candidates.

Here are five key takeaways from the webinar with Pete Lawson, former VP of Talent at Postmates, on building an authentic employer brand strategy at Postmates. 

1. Turn on the Discovery Channel

Discovery interviews are the first step toward building an authentic employer brand strategy. They provide the opportunity to see the company through the eyes of the employees. Lawson’s team asked employees questions such as:

What’s it like to be a part of the Postmates team?
What’s their background?
What are their goals?
What’s compelling about their organization?
What do you feel is working?
What do you feel is not working?
Where do you feel undervalued?

Determining the company’s strengths and weaknesses from an employee’s perspective was valuable feedback that allows them to continuously improve as an organization.

Talent competitor analysis was important for Lawson’s team to pinpoint who Postmates was competing against for talent, and how they are currently showing up in the market. The team focused on key areas including:

How’s their employee value proposition (EVP)?
What’s their voice or tone?
What’s their brand reach?
What does their community engagement look like?
What do their mobile apps look like?
How can they gain a competitive edge as an organization?

A digital audit was deployed and combed through their primary mediums including:

  • Career site
  • Job description pages
  • Corporate blog
  • Social media
  • Glassdoor page
  • Github

The team used this method to identify some of their biggest gaps, to gather opportunities for improvement, and to determine where they needed to build more infrastructure. 

2. Communication Is Key During Development

The second phase was to utilize all of the insights collected during phase one to develop a brand narrative, finalize a digital recruitment strategy, and iron out the EVP narrative.

Lawson and his team developed a methodology as to what makes the experience of working at Postmates so unique. They accomplished this through a series of workshops where employees from different departments across the organization provided a wide range and variety of experiences and opinions. 

Using this valuable employee insight, they delivered recommendations for the tagline, the brand’s voice and tone, and the EVP framework. Hearing directly from Postmate employees about what makes the company culture strong, unique, and conversely the areas in which they could improve, was one of the driving forces behind how they arrived at this EVP. 

At this stage, it was crucial to align with the marketing team to get buy-in from them early on in the process. Having meetings early on helps all members understand the end goal, and can provide a roadmap toward the final destination. Getting that buy-in at this stage ensured that they had the opportunity to collect critical information, and understand who on the team they should expect to meet with on a regular basis.

These early stage meetings also allowed them to gain a greater understanding of their concerns regarding this project, what they are most comfortable with, and even some aspects that they’d prefer to avoid during this development phase.

During these meetings, they created project milestones to hit along the way, and gave access to the branding toolkit, and any other materials they had from a branding standpoint. This helped them stay on brand as they developed their strategy and finalized the EVP. 

Having in-depth communication with the team from the start allowed them to build their treatment, and establish themselves as the experts. They were then able to communicate that they understood the objective, company mission, and the desired outcome.

3. The Execution

After all of the hard work that was put in during phases one and two, the execution phase is where they really started to have fun with it. During the execution, they:

  • Rolled everything out
  • Activated the EVP
  • Built out the content creation and analytics dashboard
  • Created the job posting guide
  • Implemented the technology for candidate experience

At this stage, they leveraged the EVP and brand narrative to establish their target audience. They asked themselves what kind of personae and personalities they hoped to attract.

At Postmates, one of the key targets was to highlight female engineers and employees wherever and whenever possible. By including testimonials and photos on their microsites, they increased female representation, which encouraged more women to apply.

This is a much more effective method than simply saying, “we are hiring female engineers.” It was important to them that they really represent the female population, and share their first-hand experiences working at Postmates. This was a great way for candidates to connect with and relate to actual employees, rather than simply hearing the information from a recruiter.

4. Recruiting Ideal Candidates

A job posting guide was built to help make job posts more candidate-centric and on-brand, outlining key sections, examples, templates, and messaging resources as they related to the targeted personae. These would ultimately empower hiring managers to write better job descriptions with the narrative they created. The team wanted the job descriptions to paint a picture of the impact the candidate would make within the organization, and provide more detailed descriptions of the role.

As they interviewed prospective engineers, the hiring team heard a variety of stories concerning the impact they’re making during the COVID-19 pandemic. They wanted to ensure that they’re intentionally highlighting what it was like being an engineer at Postmates during COVID-19, and how their employees were treated during this time.

Video content was key. The team created employee-generated video content during the pandemic, and highlighted some of the shared experiences of employees throughout the organization. They made it a point to highlight their female talent, and how they are empowered to make an impact by building technology to support at-home workers during the pandemic.

This powerful campaign allowed Postmates to give candidates an intimate look at the impact their engineers have in their organization, using raw experiences to generate a narrative to help articulate the company-wide impact engineers have at Postmates. 

The employee-generated video content provided a rare opportunity for potential candidates to build a virtual connection with the employees they’re seeing, who they could easily look up on LinkedIn to verify identity. They prioritized authenticity, and gave candidates an opportunity to envision themselves working at their company.

Candidate experience was next level with GoodTime. Postmates’ team hosted the material that was created during the first couple of phases to create content for their site. Each touchpoint that the candidates had throughout their interview experience was imbued with this new branding and messaging. GoodTime freed up time on the employee side, allowing more time to create content and take care of bespoke, personal details to further elevate the candidate experience. The goal here was to provide candidates with the same feeling that a customer would get from interacting with their brand. It was also important that their mobile app would make it quick and easy for candidates to schedule their interview.

5. Preparation Equals Payoff

After all of this planning and execution, the Postmates hiring team was excited to see the fruits of their labor. Theming the strategies described in the above sections, they saw:

  • 80% increase in applications between September 2019 and September 2020
  • 91% increase in female applicants, an essential part of their mission
  • 30% increase of minority applicants and a significant increase in candidate quality
  • 50% of their applicant pool either “met” or “exceeded” the job requirements, and 
  • 46% of applicants were considered a “strong match” compared to September of 2019

They saw a huge increase in engagement on LinkedIn, and were  honored with a number of awards, including:

  • Best Place to Work in the Bay Area
  • Company With Best Benefits – New York
  • Company With Best Benefits – Seattle
  • Company With Best Benefits – Bay Area
  • Best Paying Company – Bay Area

If you want to watch the full session, check it out here. 

2021 Wrap Up: Key Takeaways From Top Talent Leaders

Posted on by Rachel Heller
A talent leader using GoodTime.

Chief among the concerns of talent leaders in today’s hiring market is, of course, the growing talent shortage. 

With more jobs on the market than there are people looking for work, recruiters and employers are rightfully worried — so much so that most believe the shortage will negatively impact their business in the long run.

The best talent leaders are asking the right questions and rethinking their entire recruitment strategy. GoodTime recently sat down with several of them to discuss three of the hottest topics they face in this new world of work:

  1. Virtual recruitment and the hybrid workplace.
  2. Advancing diversity and equity within the interview process.
  3. Using data to make better hiring decisions.

What emerged from these discussions was an overwhelming agreement that the best hiring decisions start by understanding who candidates are and what they expect from their potential new employer. Here are five takeaways from each key area to help you navigate hiring. 

Virtual Recruitment and the Hybrid Workplace

  1. Competition for the most talented employees has skyrocketed since pre-pandemic times, with the average candidate interviewing at 4x the number of companies as they did before.
  2. The employer who’s first in line to make an offer to a candidate only has a 50% shot of having that offer accepted. And if you’re not first, that percentage goes down dramatically. 
  3. Companies are kicking hiring pipelines into high gear at 2.3x a higher rate to meet current hiring demands.
  4. 77% of employees want more flexibility to work when and where they want.
  5. Candidate searches for remote work have gone up by 460% since 2019.

Advancing DEI Within the Interview Process

  1. An overwhelming majority of job seekers — 70% — want to work for a company that prioritizes DEI.
  2. Failing to demonstrate a commitment to DEI during the interview stage, which lasts an average of five hours with your company for most candidates, is a huge missed opportunity.
  3. At least 63% of interviews do not represent women, which greatly reduces the likelihood that those candidates will accept an offer.
  4. Female candidates are 2x more likely to accept a job when a female interviewer is part of the panel.
  5. Emerging technology, like GoodTime’s Intelligent Interviewer Selection, gathers data and provides insights that continuously refine an inclusive interview process.

Using Data To Make Better Hiring Decisions

  1. Access to candidate data is imperative to understanding who candidates are and what they want.
  2. When there are five or more trained interviewers per role, candidates are 95% more likely to find an interview time that fits into their schedule.
  3. By empowering candidates to self-identify as members of a minority group, they can be matched to interviewers who represent shared commonalities.
  4. The majority of the talent leaders we spoke with emphasized the importance of leveraging data to get approval on spend for strategic hiring initiatives.
  5. Just as important as the interviewee experience is the interviewer experience. Leveraging technology to manage load balance guards against some interviewers carrying a disproportionate amount of the interview load.

The Bottom Line

When hiring teams have the tools they need to listen to candidates, effectively train interviewers, and assess the right data, better and faster hiring decisions are born.

GoodTime lets you do all of this and more.

How To Win Top Talent During the Great Resignation

Posted on by Rachel Heller

A wave of resignations has hit the job market as millions of employees leave their jobs. As per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4.3 million Americans quit their jobs in August 2021. What’s more, the scenario is spreading across the globe.

The pandemic has given many employees the chance to work 100% remotely. That shift in the zeitgeist that has significantly altered expectations away from the traditional workplace.

To say that the changing landscapes in the time of The Great Resignation have made recruiting top talent challenging would be a drastic understatement. 

Here’s the good news. There are steps that hiring teams can take to beat the competition for top talent. 

Promote Your Mission Statement

The Great Resignation has been a time where employees consider the deeper implications of a job and the value they offer in the larger context. Today’s employees try to find fulfillment through work in more ways than ever before.

A mission statement tells the world what  your company stands for, which gives both employees and candidates a sense of culture and camaraderie to align toward. It expresses the objective of a company and helps employees to focus on a purpose. A well-crafted mission statement helps employees stay engaged with the company in a way that can boost morale. 

A mission statement will also help develop the vision and values of a company. This will help employees get a clear understanding of what they’re working for.

Create an Authentic Interview Experience

Impressing the right talent during the interview is one of the best ways to make your company stand out from the competition. Here are a few simple steps with which you can impress the right candidates during an interview.

  • Send an interview agenda to the candidate with additional information about the brand and social media highlights.
  • To make the work culture stand out, prepare a short video about the future teams the candidate will be working with. Make sure to highlight the fun aspects of the work culture.
  • Stay authentic during the interview and be truthful about the present business scenarios. Highlight statistics that make the company a great place to work and share future visions.
  • Always provide a timeframe by when you will convey the results to the candidate. Even if the candidate is unsuccessful, connect with them or send a quick email with thanks. Explaining the interview roadmap clearly is also a good idea.
  • Keep in mind, the candidate will be excited if you show enough enthusiasm and make them feel wanted in the company.

It’s Work-life Harmony, Not Work-life Balance

In the past 18 months, the concept of work-life has undergone a tectonic shift as employees continue to essentially live at their workplaces. Developing a culture that supports harmonious work-life integration can be a key factor in winning the race for talent. 

This makes it important for companies to develop a flexible work culture. Flexibility makes it easier for employees to find the right harmony between work and personal life. In turn, this allows employees to be in their best condition, both physically and mentally.

Adapting a hybrid work culture offers employees the best of both worlds. Employees feel more empowered and the chances of retaining a talent pool greatly increase.

Invest in Leaders and Managers

Choosing leaders and managers with the right vision can make a big difference in retaining your talent pool. In fact, managers play a big role in improving employee productivity and engagement.

Leaders need to listen to the opinions of Gen Z employees and get to know them at a personal level. Since every employee is different, it takes time to understand what matters to them. 

But this knowledge can be a powerful tool for empowering managers. It can help them plan personalized career advancement plans for their team members.

This requires managers to interact and engage with the team and support the individual growth plans of the team members. Since there is no one-size-fits-all solution for retaining talent, training the managers in the right manner for this activity is extremely important

Focus on Employee Wellness

Two of the most common factors that lead to employee resignations are stress and burnout. Quite simply, overworked employees are not happy employees. When the majority of people work remotely, ensuring employee wellness can be even more challenging.

It’s important to connect personally with employees and engage in conversation. The tried and tested tools of praise and recognition can work effectively in all scenarios. Some other effective tools include hosting virtual wellness sessions, workout plans, offering vacations, and granting sabbaticals.

Quite simply, it’s important to create top-notch employee experiences across the platform. Make sure to gather feedback and follow up with data-driven decisions to improve employee satisfaction levels. A comprehensive employee wellbeing strategy is a must for higher employee engagement and performance.

Next Up: Candidate Relationships and The Great Reshuffle

The Great Resignation shows no signs of slowing down. Some say it’s evolving into The Great Reshuffle. Companies cannot remain complacent, lest they lose their competitive edge. In this hyper-competitive market, it’s essential to attract and engage talented candidates as quickly as possible, and keep them engaged continuously, regardless of whether they become employees.  

COVID-19 brought the need for hiring teams to gain a deeper understanding on the candidate relationship and the two-way street that’s developed in this candidate-driven landscape. It’s absolutely critical for TA teams to understand how wellness, culture, values, and mission come across to their candidates, and then reflect on the methods that deliver the best candidate experience.

Because their talent competitors? They’re not waiting to win.

GoodTime’s Ahryun Moon on Candidate Experience and the Future of Work

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Editor’s note: The original interview with WorkTech is from July 2021. Watch it in full here.

GoodTime CEO Ahryun Moon met with WorkTech’s George LaRocque to discuss how GoodTime does more than just automate the administrative aspects of the hiring process for TA teams. Ahryun discusses her experience raising funds in a pandemic, the GoodTime roadmap, and the impact GoodTime delivers on diversity and inclusion in recruiting.

“Candidates get almost a consumer-like experience when they schedule an interview.”

— Ahryun Moon, CEO at GoodTime

At its core, the hiring process revolves around hiring managers, based on availability and the employer’s timeline. With the rising demand for talent, especially tech-enabled hires, the pitfalls of the traditional recruitment model cannot be ignored any longer. Companies that take too long to hire miss out on high-caliber candidates, leading to potential candidate frustration and the risk of reputation damage. Paired with shifting priorities and more employees placing happiness over a pay raise, there’s a need to reshuffle the dynamics for better hiring.

“GoodTime transforms the interview process. First of all, we’ve completely removed the hassle of emailing back and forth. Candidates get almost a consumer-like experience when they schedule an interview,” Ahryun shared. 

Placing talent at the forefront of recruitment, GoodTime Hire makes the process easier for both recruiters and candidates alike. Besides scheduling automation, the platform goes one step further by using an AI-powered algorithm to provide tailored experiences.

Unlike legacy scheduling tools, GoodTime’s ultimate goal is to transform the way that interviews are made and conducted – starting from pre-interview processes like training.

“Our technology tracks the interviewer database, so you can store your interviewer’s relevant attributes. Based on those attributes, you can schedule the right interviewer to the given candidate,” Ahryun continued. 

Along with that, the platform provides interviewer training to fully equip hiring professionals with proper training. The system also uses data and insights that you wouldn’t get from an agent.

How this plays into the paradigm shift in the employment market is that candidates now get a say in who they speak to and their comfort levels. It also puts an emphasis on how interviews are a two-way street. Both parties play a part in contributing to a successful meeting. To illustrate this, Ahryun brought up an instance where clients would question the lack of female hires due to rejection, while not actually honing in on the root of the issue: when these candidates meet with an all-male board and get turned off by the job environment.

Scaling Relationship Building

“The real magic happens when candidates meet with interviewers, they hit it off, have amazing conversations.” Ahryun stated, when talking about how organizations scale their operations by building larger candidate pools and overlooking the actual candidate experience. On the other hand, an unstructured process leads to breakdowns and recruitment woes while scaling operations.

Building an optimal environment for candidates could also ramp up diversity and inclusive hiring, an important aspect for companies to stay relevant today. Inclusive hiring is a concept that has been long overdue, and can bring about multiple benefits to any organization. A more diverse workforce brings about a wider range of perspectives and skill sets, leading to more ideas for problem-solving and better decision making. Yet, some corporations still face issues in hiring diverse candidates. 

“Filling the top of the funnel, that’s definitely number one priority and one of the most important aspects. But usually those candidates don’t necessarily get a fair chance through the process, or at the end they decline the offer because they wouldn’t see themselves working there,” Ahryun explained, indicating the need to cater to candidates and improving first impressions. 

Raising Investments in a Time of Economic Volatility

GoodTime ended their investment round in November of last year. In a time of uncertainty and the global pandemic in full force, this was a challenging round for the company, Moon states. At the same time, with national conversations surrounding diversity and corporations seeing turnovers and new hires, it was time for a step toward a more inclusive workforce. 

This year, however, valuation is through the roof. “It’s pretty crazy now,” Ahryun said.

The funds have been used to refine GoodTime’s solutions and fuel the expansion of the team to over 60 members. According to Moon, “The hiring scene is changing so rapidly. The ‘future of work’ is a remote and hybrid type of work. We want to make sure our products help the journey.” Thus, the investments were used to further innovate and bring fresh ideas to life with a bigger team.

As hybrid and remote working transition from the ‘new normal’, to just normal,  GoodTime also seeks to provide the appropriate training for hiring in these areas. As more companies move towards a data-driven hiring strategies, Moon and her team are refining GoodTime’s data and insight features.

Customers who come to GoodTime acknowledged the complexity of the reality of work, and want to embrace this through their solutions. Leading by example, GoodTime aims to continue adapting to the new environment, hiring high-quality talent across geographical borders. 

The Future Is Candidate-driven

“Personally what makes me really excited is our product. We’re really excited to bring additional innovations. We try to keep our ear to the ground and try to work closely with our customers,” Ahryun said.

“As we figure out the best practices in this new world, we want to bring new innovations to our customers – interview training, additional insights, as well as new innovations around remote and hybrid hiring. We’d love to be the new transformation of this new hiring and crafting of a new candidate journey.”

To watch Ahryun’s full interview with WorkTech, click here.

5 Takeaways for TA Teams: Diversity Recruiting + Alto Pharmacy

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Neil Frye, Chief People Officer at Alto Pharmacy, was able to dive into the organization’s diversity recruiting journey in the past year in our DE&I 2021: Moving from Awareness to Action webinar.  You can watch the full, 45-minute webinar below, but for the quick rundown, here are five key takeaways from the session.

1. It’s a pivotal time for DE&I conversations in the workplace

Last year, the senseless violence in the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade, Jacob Blake, and other innocent POC underscored the need for systemic change. The #BlackLivesMatter protests, while long overdue, was a moment for action for organizations to address diversity and inclusion in the workplace. At Alto, the focus on diversity recruiting has always been in place. If anything, 2020 accelerated the journey by pushing practices to get a second look.

DE&I conversations are not new in the workplace. Organizations have formed policies and practices to address issues of their employees and their community. Yet, as US-based companies contend with with systemic racism as well as ongoing misconduct in the workplace, there are still faults and inefficiencies in their programs. Alto knew that this was the moment to drive actionable change – the goal here is getting results that mean something.

“We condemn the violence and systemic racism that has harmed marginalized communities, specifically Black communities, for far too long. At the same time, we commit to look inward and educate ourselves to continue to create safe spaces for Altoids and to act on what we learn.”

—Neil Frye, Chief People Officer, Alto Pharmacy

2. Diversity recruiting starts with self-awareness

The corporate world has always looked for ways to improve their diversity recruiting. Recently, the emphasis has shifted to systemic racism and gender inequality. While it may be easy to draft up policies, the task gets significantly harder when management has to actually implement, or encourage behavioral and mindset shifts. Perhaps what was lacking previously was the aspect of empathy. Coming from a place of privilege, the issues of the underrepresented communities may be underplayed or unrecognized by people in power. That’s where the problem begins. 

The corporate environment can only be as inclusive as its C-level suite. Neil Frye, Chief People of Alto Pharmacy, shares that he identifies at a cis-white gay man, and uses he/him/his pronouns. By establishing this, executives like Frye are able to uncover their hidden biases and prejudices that they may not have realized before. For him, the awareness comes from knowing that as a cis-white individual, he’s standing in a place of privilege, compared to marginalized counterparts that may be trans, a person of color, or female, despite also being a part of the LGBTQ+ community himself. Only when people understand their own identities, then can they empathize with their peers, before achieving advocacy.

3. Leaders must educate themselves

While diversity recruiting has always steered toward reducing bias, it is crucial that organizations have clear parameters of what DE&I means to take it forward.

Prior to talking to the teams at Alto, leaders of the organization had to educate and uncover the roles they played in the current DE&I landscape. Previously, in the fight towards equality, the burden of education fell on underrepresented communities to educate their privileged counterparts. Today, that responsibility falls on advantaged individuals to champion this change.

4. Being specific and defining diversity for Alto

DE&I in the workplace has never been one-size-fits-all. Each company considers factors like region, culture, and the diversity of teams. Because of this, it’s crucial for business leaders to build initiatives that meet the people where they are. From organization to organization, both workforce challenges and underrepresented communities differ.

Management and leaders have to start by putting themselves in the shoes of their workforces. The journey towards DE&I began with an internal audit. Alto tasked management executives to listen to the needs and voices of every employee through various listening sessions. Through this, they uncovered a series of complaints, experiences, and emotions. Parents, POC, marginalized groups told their stories about their communities, how they felt, and what their individual experiences were. The goal of this work was to craft strategies that truly reflect the communities they serve, rather than taking the page out of someone else’s handbook.

5. Alto’s strategic pillars for DE&I: Hire, Include, Develop and Invest

After months of planning, Alto developed a DE&I framework with four strategic pillars to drive real progress: Hire, Include, Develop, Invest. These four pillars were part of Alto’s aspirational goals and defined a specific action plan to produce tangible results. Prior to this, Alto has identified Black, Latinx, Hispanic, and women in STEM roles as the underrepresented communities they want to serve through their DE&I initiatives. Thus, the first pillar was focused on hiring, retaining, and promoting these individuals. Fleshing this out meant that they had to first define their current workplace diversity, which then set a benchmark for aspirational goals. From managers to directors, VPs and advisory board members, it was clear that these areas of the organization were lacking the various members that they identified earlier. Thus, Alto had to shift their focus to promoting internally, as well as hiring new members through GoodTime’s diversity recruiting solutions.

Companies must move past the awareness stage into advocacy. Acknowledgment alone of any issue, let alone one as complex as workplace diversity, doesn’t solve it. Alto Pharmacy’s journey into a more diverse workplace comes from taking actionable steps to promote, include, and achieve equality by listening to its employees, leveraging the right tools, and measuring success in an accountable way to continually move forward. That’s how progress starts.

Check out the full session here:

4 Things Recruiters Do That Destroy Productivity

Posted on by Rachel Heller

The traditional hiring process is dead. The roles within TA teams are expanding alongside increasing organizational expectations. Maxing output and efficiency while tapping into new opportunities to win top talent are table stakes for the new world order.

On an industry level, recruiters scramble to find high-quality, available talent amidst scarcity. Recruiters have to constantly deliver the right candidate experience to attract and secure the best candidates and maintain the employer brand.

Recruiters could do with a productivity boost, or several, since they’re usually swamped with interviews and job postings. On the flip side, overlooking the little things can often cost recruiters precious minutes that add up in a year, affecting their productivity and morale. 

Whether it’s outdated practices or doing things unknowingly, these four productivity killers can seriously stump recruiters’ workflow.

1.  Relying on Manual Interview Scheduling

Allocate time where it makes an impact, not on manual, repetitive tasks. Interview scheduling is just one of the many tasks that recruiters have to do over and over. Recruiters can easily spend half of their work weeks on interview scheduling alone.  Relying on an inefficient scheduling process will just continue to eat into work hours without bringing much value.

A good number of recruiters still rely on manual processes, such as calling, aligning schedules, sending out invitations and blocking out the calendar on the traditional pen-and-paper. However, because of the volume of interviews that they have, recruiters face the risk of making errors. For instance, they may indicate the wrong times, dates, or names. In other cases, they may forget to schedule other interviewers for a joint interview.

Automating interview scheduling can help streamline the procedure and lead to greater productivity. For one thing, it takes only a fraction of the time it takes to manually schedule an appointment. Most times, the recruiter wouldn’t even need to be involved in the back-and-forth discussion. A study by GoodTime found that relying on an automated interview scheduling tool can increase a recruiting team’s output by up to 200%.

2. Spending Too Much Time on Email Correspondence

Emails are probably a recruiter’s best friend. From contacting potential candidates to sending follow ups, recruiting teams send out tens to hundreds of emails every day. Email communication is still one of the main forms of communication for HR departments today, even with the rise of mobile. In the workplace, the average employee can spend almost three hours reading and answering their emails. This is a staggering amount of time, considering the typical work day lasts nine hours.

It may seem counterproductive when we recommend HR teams to spend less time on emails. After all, a cluttered inbox and draft folder doesn’t exactly scream excellent work ethic. Still, there must be a way for recruiters to cut down on administrative tasks like follow-ups and reminders without sacrificing efficiency. Automating follow-up emails is one recruitment hack, and most workplace tools utilize an automation feature also have various built-in templates to make emails more effective.

3. Overlooking the Value of Integration

As the workplace becomes increasingly digitized, organizations will begin utilizing more external tools to navigate the digital space. Given the various roles of HR teams, this can mean anything from video conferencing platforms, candidate assessment tools, applicant tracking systems, and recruiting analytics.

It could be a problem, since recruiters essentially juggle the functionalities over multiple platforms. Maybe you’re spending too much time figuring out the features of a certain software. Or it may just be an unnecessary amount of money to spend on this many tools.

One way to mitigate this is by selecting a robust recruitment tool that uses integrations. Leveraging an integrated platform helps reduce the number of external tools that recruiters use, from over a dozen to just two or three must-haves. This can cut down on a significant amount of time and cost, while maximizing the return on these tools.

4. Manually Sourcing and Screening for Candidates

The fact that it is time-consuming isn’t the only problem when it comes to manual screening and sourcing. The hiring process is subject to preconceived biases and distortion when not done objectively. While many workplaces have taken the stride in the right direction to a more diverse and inclusive workforce, it can be easy to fall back into old habits.

Ultimately, the top priority for recruiters should be candidate quality, rather than other characteristics. In the long term, inefficient sourcing can lead to bad hires and negative performance. 

Learn More

CodeSignal is an assessment company helping the world #GoBeyondResumes. CodeSignal created an advanced job simulation technology so hiring teams can assess skills with better fidelity, provide a better candidate experience, and hire the right talent for roles, at scale. Founded in 2015, CodeSignal is trusted by the world’s most innovative tech firms, including Brex, Databricks, Facebook, Instacart, Robinhood, Upwork, and Zoom.

GoodTime enables talent acquisition teams to create an efficient, equitable, and personalized candidate experience that lands top talent faster. GoodTime is the only HR tech solution that helps advance diversity initiatives, fostering measurable impact for every candidate. See why the world’s top talent acquisition teams, including Zoom, Instacart, and DropBox, rely on GoodTime to slash time to hire metrics and deliver up to 50% savings on hiring expenditure.

5 Ways Your Hiring Process Could Be Failing (And What To Do About It)

Posted on by Rachel Heller

To gain an edge in today’s competitive job market,  hiring teams must pull out all the stops. This means leveling up their candidate experience, maxing perks, and demonstrating company values as best they can. These teams are also investing the time to assess both what they’re doing right, as well as what needs to change.

And with only one in five new hires ever reaching success in their new role, it’s clear that something’s gotta give.

If your team experiences new hires who don’t last, or a shortage of candidates altogether, it’s time to take a long, hard look at how you can turn things around.

Here are five ways your hiring process could be missing the mark.

1. Your Hiring Team Is Burned Out

When interviews aren’t spread equitably across a team, the select few who bear the brunt will eventually wear out. 

Especially significant is the fact that oftentimes, the very people facilitating hiring duties double as a team’s highest performers; and while many take pleasure in welcoming new potential employees, burnout can have a negative impact on their productivity, engagement, and overall happiness at work.

Watch how much your URG employees take on. In an effort to meet a company’s DEI goals, employees from diverse backgrounds are often disproportionately tasked with hosting interviews. While diverse interview panels is something GoodTime makes a priority, risking the well-being of your top team members is never worth it.

What to do: Talk to all of your interviewers. How’s their sense of well-being? Is the interview load balanced in an equitable way? Are employees still able to do the job they were hired to do? Is diverse talent carrying a disproportionate amount of hiring duties? If you can’t answer yes to any of those questions, it’s time to make a change.

2. URG Candidates Aren’t Represented

Diversity doesn’t suddenly become important after a candidate starts a new job. It’s critical to blend representation into your candidate experience from day zero.

Your entire hiring experience should be designed to promote inclusion and reduce bias. This gives candidates the assurance that they would be welcomed to the team. The question to ask your hiring team: what barriers do candidates from underrepresented groups run into that give them pause, or cause non acceptance of employment offers?

What to do: Meeting DEI goals isn’t easy, but technology can help. With intelligent interviewer selection, both candidates and interviewers can self-identify as part of a minority group if they choose, then be matched during the interview to someone with common ground. The end result is more inclusion, better candidate engagement, and less biased hiring.

3. Your Interviewers Are Untrained

Nearly 70% of candidates claim that a terrific hiring experience would make them more likely to accept a potential employer’s job offer.

However, more than 1 in 5 hiring managers say they feel rushed to hire quickly, despite not knowing what they’re doing. The way in which interviews are executed — and how candidates perceive these interviews — is mission critical to a successful hiring process.

What to do: Training interviewers doesn’t have to be time-consuming. It simply takes planning and preparation. When armed with a structure to collect unbiased, job-related information, the do’s and don’ts of legal compliance, and an understanding of how to engage with candidates, trained interviewers just might be the edge you need to win over your favorite candidates.

4. Candidates Don’t Feel Empowered

Modern job candidates are looking for a highly personal, easy-to-navigate hiring journey — from start to finish. 

Consider the experience of your candidates. Is yours a seamless process, with plenty of touchpoints and status updates along the way? Or is it a clunky and time consuming one that leaves candidates in hiring purgatory for days or weeks on end?

What to do: One of the best ways to create an appealing hiring experience is to put the candidates themselves in the driver’s seat. With a self-scheduling interview tool, candidates select the best time for them, and technology takes care of the rest. By syncing candidate’s chosen times with the right interviewers, hiring teams can focus on more important work, like engaging candidates in meaningful conversations.

5. You’re Running Into Legal Trouble

But wait. There’s more to great hiring than having a fast, easy process. When rapidly growing companies need to hire quickly, too many neglect something as fundamental as complying with fair and legal hiring practices.

Hiring discrimination is strictly prohibited by federal law and can result in substantial legal fees. But too many interviewers know about hiring laws, without understanding how to comply with them. That’s why untrained interviewers can end up costing their companies an average of $40,000 in discrimination lawsuits.

What to do: To avoid legal fees and discriminatory practices, get serious about training your company’s pool of interviewers. Do your interviewers know what’s “right” and “wrong” when it comes to interview questions? Do they have objective, job-specific criteria to use in evaluations?

Make Changes to Your Hiring Process, Now

Good hiring is good business.

Now more than ever, it’s important to take a step back and reassess how your hiring process is going. When you take the time to build a solid foundation, empower your people, and engage with candidates, your team benefits from less burnout and more great hires.

The time is now to implement interviewer training. GoodTime helps you train interviews with ease, giving you one hiring experience solution that lets you track interviewers and their progress and train them at scale. GoodTime gives you the confidence that your selected interviewers evaluate candidates effectively.

Want to learn more? Download The GoodTime Guide to Interviewer Training