GoodTime GoodTime

Tag: Distance Economy

Remote Candidate Experience: 3 Simple Things You Can Do Today

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Remote work is here to stay. That means competition for top talent just took a hard left turn. Now more than ever, hiring leaders are stepping up their game to create a best-in-class remote candidate experience.

Over the past year, economic and social challenges drove many of us to reconsider how we spend our time, revisit our values, and hit the reset button on our lives. Our 2023 Hiring Insights Report found that 25% of hiring leaders found remote and hybrid work to be a major challenge this year.

Many high-performing job candidates who wouldn’t have previously considered remote work as an option now welcome the opportunity to work from anywhere.

That means if candidate experience mattered before…it really matters now. These candidates understand that the way they’re treated as a remote candidate is the way they’ll be treated as a remote employee. Do they have access to the information they need? Are their time and talents valued? Do they feel connected to the company’s people, its mission?

If you lead a remote team, here’s a quick guide to stepping up your game and creating a best-in-class remote candidate experience.

1. Make it easy for candidates to show off

Many of us became remote office pros over the past year. Creating lighting that flatters, troubleshooting our own technology woes, finding that elusive mute button, we’re doing it all. But that’s not the case for everyone. When interviewing candidates virtually, don’t assume they’re already remote work experts. 

Instead, when you’re hiring remotely, go overboard with clarifying the ins and outs of the virtual interview process. Make it easy for candidates to self-schedule their interview at a time they’ll feel their best. Give tips on background, lighting, and audio settings that will set candidates up for success. Take it from Blinkist, a nonfiction book summary service, who’s leading the way in remote candidate experience. 

Before interviews, a Blinkist recruiter sends each candidate an overview of what to expect, along with tips for a successful interview, information on the company’s mission and values, and names of the people they’ll meet throughout the process. As a result, candidates go into interviews confident, prepared, and ready to make their best impression.

Even better, the intention and thought they put into the process enables Blinkist to make a positive lasting impression on all candidates — even those who don’t get the job.

Expert take: The importance of the first call

We spoke with Socotra’s Head of Talent Acquisition, Dubi Ben-Shoham, about the role of candidate experience during a downturn. He shared that even in a so-called “employer’s market”, it’s important to prioritize candidates, and that starts with creating a great impression on your first call.

He shared with us, “Don’t underestimate the importance of having senior recruiters do phone screens. Connecting with a candidate on the first call is such a difference-maker when it comes to the candidate experience of the process. I have a lot of fun with that call. That is why we hit every single one of our hiring goals. Interviewing is stressful. If you can, get rid of the stress right off the bat.”

You can watch the highlights of our conversation with Dubi below.

Learn more about recruiting in a downturn or potential recession.

2. Can’t bring a remote candidate to the office? Take the office to them

Many candidates are most eager to learn about your company culture by touring company headquarters. When bringing everyone to the office isn’t an option, take the office to them.

Share company social media accounts with candidates so they can get to know you, send a video of colleagues introducing themselves, or put together a live employee panel event for post-interview Q&A.

Or, learn from Jet.com and their use of virtual reality to create a “show, don’t tell” experience for candidates. This online retailer’s immersive welcome experience enables candidates to get a full view of the company’s culture, people, and workspace—all through video. From observing a meeting with the CEO, to participating in a company-wide happy hour, this remote candidate experience leaves nothing lacking.

3. Be upfront about your commitment to DE&I

Representation matters before, during, and after the interview process. We built GoodTime to keep tech companies from losing top female tech talent when those women didn’t see females on interview panels. 

Demonstrate that your team is committed to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in your hiring process. Build diverse interview panels that prove your commitment to different points of view. Follow Intel, who diversified their interview panels and saw the number of female and people of color new hires jump from 32% to 45% in two years.

The bottom line? It’s beyond time to prioritize remote candidate experience.

Whether your candidate experience is in-person or online, one of the best ways to stand out is to respect your candidate’s time.

GoodTime makes it easy to deliver seamless interview scheduling, automation, and relationship building, helping you attract and impress today’s top-notch talent. 

Learn more about how GoodTime can supercharge your talent acquisition process today.

Automated interview scheduling at warp speed

Lean team? Sky-high goals? No sweat. Secure top talent 50% faster with smart scheduling automation that handles even the trickiest interviews.

Learn more

The Remote Interview Era: How Scheduling Must Evolve

Posted on by Rachel Heller

Anyone else still have whiplash from these past few years? The remote work era—and the changes that came with it—sent shockwaves throughout the hiring landscape. Four in five companies now offer remote or hybrid work, and 82% of employers now opt for a remote interview when speaking with candidates. 

Recruitment teams have had to alter their practices to adapt to this new normal, including their interview scheduling methods. How exactly has interview scheduling changed? One word: flexibility. 

As the rigid all-day onsite interview format fades away, flexible scheduling capabilities in your tech are no longer a nice-to-have—they’re a requirement. You can’t successfully coordinate a complex remote interview without incorporating flexibility into your scheduling.

But first, let’s examine how we even reached this current moment in time. 

The New Normal for Interview Scheduling: How Did We Get Here?

The way that recruiters hire people, the frequency of meetings, and the degree of candidate availability are now wildly different. These changes have introduced levels of complexity to the interview process that no team—without the proper tools—can manage effectively. Here’s what’s changed in the hiring landscape:

The Death of the Onsite Interview

Remember when employers would routinely fly candidates out to their companies for a packed day of onsite meetings and office tours? With the surge in remote work and remote recruiting, the onsite interview is now a thing of the past (hello, remote interview). 

In-person interviewing allowed panels of employees to swap in and out for multi-stage, all-day interviews with candidates. Now, remote hiring has laid in-person interviewing to rest. 

A New Meeting Culture

If you find yourself sitting in meetings more often than ever before, you’re not alone. Remote work created a culture of constant meetings; professionals spend up to a third of their workweek in meetings. 

Blocking off a full day to have large groups meet with candidates is now almost impossible. Interview scheduling becomes even harder when you have employees based across the globe, a reality that is increasingly common in the distance economy. 

Difficulties With Engaging Candidates

Candidates aren’t easy to come by; there are two jobs for every available worker. Many are passive candidates who are already employed, which makes it difficult to fit a complex series of interviews into their workday. 

Not all passive candidates can afford to take a day off of work to interview in an all-day session—and they certainly can’t show up in person. 

Interview Scheduling Must Now Be Flexible

Now, are we all caught up to speed? Due to the changes prompted by the remote work era, scheduling all-day onsite interviews is increasingly less common. 

The new norm of scheduling is evolving to look like this: scheduling a series of remote interviews spread out over several days.

Scheduling complex multi-day interviews comes with several challenges that didn’t exist with the all-day onsite interview. It multiplies the number of meetings to coordinate, broadens the interview timeline to keep tabs on, makes it difficult to reschedule or adjust specific meeting times, and more. 

This interview format isn’t easy to schedule—unless your scheduling tool has the right capabilities. Coordinating these remote interviews calls for a heightened level of flexibility. Here are several reasons why flexible scheduling is a requirement for today’s recruiting teams and candidates:

From Your Recruiting Team’s Perspective

With calendars more jam-packed than ever (on both the interviewer and candidate side), interviews must be spread out over several days. Without this flexibility, it’s incredibly difficult to find available times when key interviewers can get together with a candidate.

Working across teams and time zones makes calendar coordination all the more complex, once again prompting recruiting coordinators to schedule over the span of a few days to locate availability. Long story short: it’s tough to get an interview on the books without flexibility in scheduling.

From Your Candidate’s Perspective

Remember how we said that many candidates are already employed? With their limited availability, these candidates need to book their interviews over their lunch hour, in between meetings, or during any other free moment in their workday.

If you want them to go through a series of panel interviews, you’ll need to break it up over several days to make their participation possible. 

Above all, today’s candidates need to be accommodated if you want to attract and win the best of the bunch (it is a candidate’s market, after all). That requires talent acquisition tech that can adeptly schedule beyond the confines of the one-day interview structure.

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

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

Calculate Your ROI

Effortlessly Schedule Your Next Remote Interview

As the norms of scheduling interviews evolve, your recruiting tech stack must evolve with them. Recruiting teams now face a new remote recruiting reality, with new interview scheduling challenges requiring new tech. 

You need a tool with scheduling flexibility that can coordinate complex panels of interviews fast enough to keep candidates engaged. And as the cherry on top, you must provide a holistically compelling hiring experience. 

No existing tools can provide this—until now. GoodTime Hire delivers the flexibility that’s missing from your HR tech stack. Recruiting teams can schedule interviews over one or multiple days; they have complete control over meeting event times, dates, breaks, attendees, and priority.

Learn more about how interview scheduling software can revolutionize the way that you coordinate interviews.

Then, Now, and Beyond: What Matters Most in Talent Acquisition

Posted on by Rachel Heller

In a fast-paced field like talent acquisition, the name of the game is simple: evolve or die. Talent teams can either keep pace with the ever-changing rules for hiring, or get left in the dust. 

The worldwide events from the past few years (COVID-19, anyone?) have revolutionized the ways that companies snag top talent. But here’s the question of the hour: amid all of the commotion in the talent acquisition industry, what really matters right now? And what will matter for talent teams in the future? 

We sat down with our Head of People Strategy, Jenn Oswald, to hear her thoughts on how we found ourselves at this current moment in the industry, where talent teams should focus their attention, and where the future of talent acquisition is heading.

Then: How Talent Teams Reached This Moment

Before we dive into the current state of the talent acquisition industry, let’s take a stroll down memory lane, shall we? 

The Pre-COVID Hiring Era

Jenn recounts how before the pandemic, the well-known, large companies typically had a major leg up on the talent competition, garnering a plethora of applicants. The vast majority of these organizations conducted company-driven hiring processes. 

“Their focus on talent was, ‘We’re going to put you through these processes, and we’re going to decide if you deserve to be here,’” Jenn said. “Candidates were at the whim of these processes; processes tended to take much longer.”

Research shows that getting hired in the U.S. took twice as long in 2014 as it did in 2010. The length of hiring processes—and their complexities—continued to increase from there.

However, as time went on, companies started to change their tune. Employers recognized their difficulties with filling certain roles and resolved to clean up their drawn-out, company-centric processes.

COVID’s Impact on Talent Acquisition

Bam. COVID hit, and hiring screeched to a halt. Fast-forward a bit, and companies slowly revved up their hiring processes again—except things were far from business as usual. Remote work surged in popularity, and soon hiring surged as well.

But beyond the rapid changes happening on the employer side, the mindsets of candidates began to evolve as well. 

“There was definitely a mental shift of people examining what’s really important to them,” Jenn said. “Companies had to drastically start looking at things that they never thought of before, like their hiring philosophy. And, ‘Do we follow our values? How do we talk about our values?’”

Company-driven hiring processes were out, and candidate-driven hiring processes were in. And with a shortage of candidates and an abundance of open roles, companies raced to hire the best talent in the fastest time. 

Now: What Matters in Talent Acquisition

Here we are in the present day—and things are a bit shaky. Companies have started to break into a cold sweat, worrying that they’ve overhired and overpaid what the market can bear (queue the layoffs and hiring freezes). 

Now that we’ve entered this new phase, where should talent teams concentrate their efforts so that they can rise to the top and snag the best talent? 

What matters most right now?

Balance Quality and Speed

With hiring slowdowns and freezes popping up left and right, now is the perfect time to get serious about optimization. Delivering a high-quality hiring process as fast as possible is key to standing out among the talent competition. 

But, before teams optimize their operations for speed and quality, Jenn recommends for them to do some inspecting.

“What matters most is first understanding what your current state is,” she said. “Analyze your data, look at your current process, map out where things work and where things maybe don’t work.” 

Then, once teams understand their process, they can double down on eliminating any bottlenecks that wreck the interviewing experience. 

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

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

Calculate Your ROI

Convey Mission & Vision

“People want to work for a company that is mission and vision-based,” Jenn remarked. “Make sure that your company walks the talk.”

The number’s don’t lie: a survey found that 79% of adults would consider a company’s mission and purpose before applying. 

In many cases, culture—another important element for job hunters—goes hand in hand with mission and vision. Candidates seek out companies with a culture of practicing what they preach in their mission/vision statements.

Emphasize Flexibility

For candidates, flexibility is top of mind—and that’s not changing anytime soon. Yes, this can mean offering remote work arrangements, but that’s not the only way to emphasize organizational flexibility.

Many candidates simply want their future employer to promote work-life integration. They want the freedom to coordinate their schedules in and out of the office to best fit their lives.

Jenn hopes that we’ll see more companies adopt flexible results-driven environments. These types of workplaces possess a strong focus on each employee’s outcomes, rather than just the number of hours that they clock in.

Demonstrate DE&I

“Candidates are asking companies to be more transparent about their DE&I numbers and achievements,” Jenn said. 

She adds that this can be a particularly difficult task for startups, since it takes a while to gather meaningful DE&I-based statistics.

Nevertheless, there’s a multitude of ways for companies to prove that their commitment to DE&I isn’t just lip service. Ensuring that their interviewer panels are diverse and inclusive is a great start.

Beyond: What Will Matter in the Future of the Industry

Now, it’s time to peer into our crystal ball and see what’s on the horizon for the talent acquisition industry. It can be difficult to predict what will matter in the future, but lucky for us, Jenn has some thoughts.

Establish the Core Purpose

From a macro level, Jenn says that establishing the purpose behind the hiring process—from both the candidate’s perspective and the hiring team’s perspective—will likely be of utmost importance.

“If you don’t have the core purpose of why you’re hiring, and if the candidate doesn’t have the core purpose of why they’re talking to you, then without those two things, it’s really not an interview,” Jenn said. 

Then, Weave Key Elements Into the Hiring Process

Once the hiring team’s purpose and the candidate’s purpose unite, teams can shift their energy towards building up the important micro pieces of their operations.

These pieces include several elements that hold significance in the current talent landscape: DE&I, the candidate relationship, interviewer training, and employer branding, to name a few.

But yet again, if hiring teams neglect to align with their candidate’s purpose, then no supplemental elements can truly give their interviews substance.

Optimize Your Hiring for Whatever the Future Holds

Leveraging the right talent acquisition technology is essential when preparing for whatever the industry has in store.

And the key to building a robust tech stack? Adding GoodTime Hire into the mix.

Hire automates coordination, improves your relationships with candidates, and provides actionable insights to continuously optimize the entire hiring process. 

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

How HR Leaders Expect the Talent Acquisition Landscape To Evolve

Posted on by Rachel Heller

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

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

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

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

Candidate Relationships Grow in Importance

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

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

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

Challenges With Talent Retention on the Horizon

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

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

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

Improving Hiring Efficiency Remains Paramount

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

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

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

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

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

Calculate Your ROI

How To Succeed in the Talent Acquisition Landscape

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

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

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

Keep Up With the Latest HR Trends

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

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

4 Companies Pioneering the Future of the Distance Economy

Posted on by Rachel Heller

In the Distance Economy, work transcends beyond physical offices and across time zones. “It doesn’t matter where you live” is now the new hiring mantra. More and more employers recognize that candidates want freedom, autonomy, and trust—all found in flexible and remote work arrangements. 

While our new world of work widens the talent pool, it also widens the employer pool. Companies must offer applicants the work models that they seek, or get lost in the competition. After all, if your organization doesn’t give candidates what they want, another organization will.

Here are four trail-blazing companies that have reimagined what the workplace can be.

Spotify’s Work From Anywhere Program

In Spotify’s opinion, work is something you do—not somewhere you go. The streaming powerhouse uses their Work From Anywhere Program to allow employees to work wherever suits them best.

How They Navigate the Distance Economy

  1. Allow employees to choose their “work modes” (mix of home and/or office).
  2. Set up multiple registered entities in different locations across the globe for employees who want to work in the office. 
  3. Focus on creating virtual experiences, rather than in-person events, to emphasize belonging across the company.

Why This Work Model?

On their HR blog, Spotify described how the flexibility within their work model benefits everyone. Flexible companies not only retain existing employees thanks to a better work-life balance, but they also attract large sums of candidates.

Spotify’s thinking in the right direction. Our latest data shows that 32% of HR teams expect to struggle with retaining talent in the next 12 months, and 28% believe that they’ll face difficulties in attracting qualified candidates. The way forward is clear, and it’s offering flexible work.

Zapier’s Long Remote Work History

Remote work is nothing new to Zapier. They’ve been remote-first ever since their inception in 2011. The software company’s employees are spread across over 18 different time zones and 38 countries.

How They Navigate the Distance Economy

  1. Establish a 100% distributed workforce.
  2. Create a global community founded on DEIB principles. Hold candid conversations on the experiences of employees and take active steps to boost diversity and inclusion.

Why This Work Model?

Zapier cited that on multiple grounds, remote work just makes sense. From a financial perspective, they don’t have to handle the significant expenses that come with maintaining a physical office. After all, flashy office perks are old news. 

Their model also increases the amount of time that each employee has at their disposal. Without the distractions that arise in a traditional office space, Zapier allows for more valuable focus time. (And not having to sit in traffic during a long commute is a pretty sweet deal.)

HubSpot’s Flexible Work Options

“Work isn’t a place” defines HubSpot’s flexible work philosophy. In 2021, they shifted to a hybrid remote-office model.

How They Navigate the Distance Economy

The company offers three work arrangements to choose from, called @office, @flex, and @home.

  1. @office: Work from one of their offices for three or more days per week. Employees receive a dedicated desk space in the office.
  2. @flex: Work from one of their offices for two or fewer days per week. Employees get a “hotel desk” rather than a dedicated space, but will receive support in setting up a WFH office space.
  3. @home: Employees do the majority of their work from home and within a HubSpot-approved area. The company assists in assembling their home office.

Why This Work Model?

Before the switch to their current work model, HubSpot considered themselves a “remote-ish” company. However, the feedback from an internal survey signaled that they needed to evolve. Back when HubSpot closed their offices due to the pandemic, two-thirds of their employees reportedly planned on working remotely more often once their offices re-opened.

Determined to elevate their commitment to DEIB, HubSpot also cited how remote work serves as a crucial component in diversifying their community of talent and future employees.

Pinterest’s Pinflex Initiative

Two principles guide Pinterest’s work model: flexibility and collaboration. Their Pinflex initiative champions an autonomous workplace with a healthy dose of in-person interaction.

How They Navigate the Distance Economy

  1. Encourage employees to work wherever feels best, whether this means working at home, in an office, or another virtual location.
  2. Allow U.S. employees to live anywhere in the U.S., and international employees to live anywhere within the country or region where Pinterest employs them.
  3. Create in-person experiences for all employees to attend throughout the year.

Why This Work Model?

While Pinterest recognizes that most work can be completed anywhere, they also see the need for in-person collaboration to drive innovation and connection. Pinflex kills two birds with one stone.

Occasionally bringing employees together in person is a smart move. Studies show that remote workers feel isolated at higher rates than those that work on-site. Like Pinterest, companies should include strategies to foster human-to-human experiences within their flexible work plans.

The New World of Work Means New Hiring Tools

Spotify, Zapier, HubSpot, and Pinterest embraced flexible work in varying ways. But the common thread that unites them? They all use GoodTime.

The Distance Economy flipped recruiting on its head, but GoodTime Hire helps talent teams win candidates throughout each challenge. Hire harnesses Candidate Relationship Intelligence to build connections with every single applicant.

But don’t just take our word for it. Hear from HubSpot, Pinterest, and more in our customer testimonials.

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

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

Calculate Your ROI

DEIB in Hiring: Data Shows Talent Teams Fall Short

Posted on by Rachel Heller

DEIB is a hot topic among HR professionals, and rightfully so. Conveying a commitment to DEIB in hiring not only attracts candidates, but also benefits your bottom line.

Companies that emphasize DEIB come out on top. However, our 2022 Hiring Insights Report shows that these companies are few and far in between. The report features responses from 560 HR, talent, and recruiting leaders across the U.S. on their most critical challenges. We found that despite the buzz surrounding DEIB in hiring, active commitments are scarce.

Few Companies Prioritize DEIB in Hiring

Take a scroll through LinkedIn and you’re bound to come across at least one post on the importance of DEIB. No matter the industry, people keep talking about how crucial it is for organizations to prioritize diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. 

…But is this all just talk? Or is there action behind these conversations? Unfortunately, the responses from our report aren’t too hopeful. When asked to identify what they improved in their hiring process over the past 12 months, making DEIB a measurable priority was the least selected option (31%). The next 12 months look just as bleak. Only 33% of companies plan on prioritizing DEIB in the year ahead—still the least selected option. Oof.

Failing to prioritize DEIB is simply bad for business. In fact, diverse teams produce 19% higher revenue. But finances aside, focusing on DEIB just makes sense. Today’s Distance Economy opens the talent pool to a wide range of diverse candidates. Those candidates don’t just want to see an emphasis on DEIB in the hiring process—they expect it.

Disconnect Between DEIB and Employee Well-being

Sorry to be the bearer of more bad news, but the data doesn’t lie. Our report shows a disconnect between employee well-being and DEIB—a crucial component that goes into creating that well-being. 

When asked what they communicate to candidates during the hiring process, the lowest percentage of companies (32%) selected a commitment to DEIB. But here’s the catch: the highest percentage of companies (59%) chose employee well-being. 

DEIB and employee well-being should go hand in hand, especially when it comes to recruiting diverse candidates. If a candidate is part of an underrepresented community, is a company really considering their well-being when their commitment to DEIB is last in line?

The smartest companies communicate DEIB to candidates. Need proof? The average time-to-hire among the 179 companies that communicate DEIB to candidates is two and a half weeks, shorter than average (three weeks). A lack of communication on DEIB leads to fewer applicants, rejected offers, and less diverse teams.

Remote Companies Pick up the Slack—Slightly

While our report pinpoints multiple areas where remote talent teams falter, committing to DEIB isn’t one of them.Thirty-eight percent of remote teams plan on making DEIB a priority in the next 12 months, making them more likely to emphasize DEIB than their in-person counterparts.

When considering the previous bleak data points on DEIB in hiring, this statistic seems like a sign for hope. In a way, it is. But let’s be real: companies could do better. Much more than 38% of remote workplaces should focus on DEIB. This percentage is a fine start, but if remote teams want to draw in diverse applicants, more teams need to kick DEIB initiatives into high gear.

All in all, with 63% of remote companies agreeing that the hiring landscape will become more competitive in the coming months, keeping DEIB top of mind is the best decision. A commitment to DEIB is high on the average candidate’s wish list. The companies who openly convey this commitment possess a major advantage in snagging the best talent.

The C-suite Must Step Up

Let’s make one thing clear: despite the needs for improvement, making a high-quality DEIB program is a lot easier said than done. Uplifting DEIB across an organization can be a big undertaking, especially for companies with limited resources and people to get the job done.

Yes, the data shows that most talent teams stumble in conveying DEIB to applicants, but this isn’t all their fault. DEIB must start at the top. Having a CEO who includes DEIB in their company roadmap is a major asset. In order for talent teams to fully breathe life into DEIB, the C-Suite needs to partner with them.

Want the Latest Insights? Read the 2023 Hiring Insights Report

Keeping up with the latest happenings in the hiring landscape is the key to staying ahead of the game. Lucky for you, we have plenty of information on the most crucial hiring trends. 

Want the latest hiring insights? 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.

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

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

Calculate Your ROI

GoodTime’s Ahryun Moon Talks the Evolution of the Hiring Landscape

Posted on by Rachel Heller

A word of advice for the modern-day hiring team: get comfortable with change. Because if there’s one thing that we’ve learned in recent years, it’s that the hiring landscape can evolve in an instant. GoodTime’s Co-founder and Head of Company Strategy Ahryun Moon met with RecTech Podcast’s Chris Russell to discuss recent and upcoming shifts in the hiring industry, and how GoodTime helps teams adapt to the changing times.

If you’d like to hear the conversation in full, the podcast episode can be found here. Read on for a quick rundown.

“Everything has shifted so quickly and so fast over the last couple of years. Even the most tenured HR leaders with multiple decades of experience are still trying to figure things out.”

— Ahryun Moon, Co-founder and Head of Company Strategy at GoodTime

Tumultuous Recent Years in Hiring

A lot has changed in the hiring industry and job market—where do we even start? For one, companies felt the sting of the Great Resignation back in 2021, and the phenomenon is still going strong. A record-breaking 4.5 million people in the U.S. quit their jobs in March 2022.

Ahryun noted that based on GoodTime’s conversations with customers, the “big quit” isn’t limited to just the U.S. It’s happening across the globe. And that’s not the only worldwide hiring trend; the entire world is also facing a severe shortage of knowledge workers. In February 2022, there were 5 million more job openings than unemployed workers in the U.S. alone. This all culminates into a hyper-competitive job market.

On top of these changes, job seekers have drafted up new demands, heralding the next era of recruitment tactics.

“Now that we’re working remotely and in hybrid mode, all the past lure of office spaces, the physical spaces, those perks are not very relevant anymore,” Ahryun said. 

Instead of placing value on in-office benefits, candidates now vet employers on elements such as DEIB, work-life flexibility, vision, and mission. Above all, candidates want to connect with employers.

Upcoming Changes in the Hiring Landscape

An outpour of hiring freezes, slowdowns, and layoffs characterize the latest changes in the job market. Major tech companies like Uber and Twitter slowed their hiring, while startups like Klarna and Carvana laid off employees.

Ahryun’s take? The market is correcting itself. She noted that it doesn’t look like these recent events in the market will remain as permanent trends. From her view, it seems that the market will stabilize over time.

All things considered, the market’s recent volatility shouldn’t come as a surprise. In many ways, 2021 created an unsustainable environment.

“Last year was crazy, a whole slew of unicorns had been born,” Ahryun said. “Some companies are extremely solid companies that are worthy of becoming unicorns, and some probably not in terms of the metrics.”

In opposition to the downturn in Silicon Valley, there’s several forces at play that will keep other companies hiring. A severe lack of knowledge workers remains within an extremely competitive hiring market, Ahryun added. Companies will continue hiring—just not as recklessly. The smartest companies will implement the best TA tech to hit the ground running and prepare for future growth.

How GoodTime Has Adapted to the Shifts

Talent teams aren’t the only ones that must adapt to the ever-changing hiring landscape. In order to solve the most pressing issues facing companies, TA tech must also evolve with the times.

GoodTime Hire has changed quite a lot to respond to the latest customer needs, Ahryun said. Hire uses Candidate Relationship Intelligence, which includes two main focus areas: speed and relationships. The focus on speed comes from the increasingly fast-paced talent competition. 

“Nowadays, candidates get about four offers on the table within about 18 days of their job search, which is crazy,” Ahryun said. 

The fastest talent team is often the team that snags the best candidates. On the flip side, a slow hiring process heightens the risk of losing qualified candidates in the middle of the funnel. To satisfy the need for speed, Hire’s automation removes any time lag that occurs on both the recruiting team and candidate side.

Hire’s focus on relationships stems from the need to form meaningful connections with candidates to win top talent. As a way to cultivate these connections, Hire makes data-driven decisions to place the right interviewers into each and every interview. Better yet, one of the latest features, Candidate Pulse, gathers candidate sentiment throughout the interview process to help teams better understand the quality of their relationships.

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

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

Calculate Your ROI

Want the Latest Insights? Read the 2023 Hiring Insights Report

Keeping up with the constant flow of changes in the hiring landscape can feel overwhelming. Luckily, our 2023 Hiring Insights Report is now available. 500+ HR leaders, 1,000s of real findings, 1 industry-leading report. Read the report today.

Remote Companies Stumble in the New Hiring Landscape

Posted on by Rachel Heller

The rise of remote hiring stands as one of the most influential trends impacting today’s hiring landscape. What started as a way to adapt to the pandemic has evolved into a method to combat the talent shortage and deliver on the work flexibility that many candidates now desire. The problem? Most remote companies have stumbled rather than soared.

For our 2022 Hiring Insights Report, we surveyed 560 HR, talent, and recruiting leaders across both remote and in-person workplaces. We learned that compared to their in-office counterparts, remote TA teams fall flat on multiple grounds, from hiring efficiency to connecting with candidates.

And to top it all off, most remote TA leaders don’t even have full confidence in their own operations. When rating their overall recruiting process, 25% of remote leaders rated it as excellent—compared to 42% from in-office leaders.

Let’s dig into the data.

Candidate Relationships Take a Back Seat

Applicants expect to form a relationship with your company and your TA team that’s founded on trust and mutual respect. Our report’s data shows that fully-remote companies are least likely to create bonds with candidates—though if anyone should, it’s them.

Among fully-remote workplaces, just 25% will look to build relationships with candidates in the next 12 months. This is 11 percentage points lower than in-person workplaces.

Remote employees report higher rates of isolation, yet connection is at the top of most candidates’ wish lists. When hiring at a distance, it’s even more important to invest in these connections—and the data shows that these companies have a lot of work to do.

With the lack of emphasis on candidate relationships, it’s no wonder that 63% of remote workplaces reportedly struggled with retaining talent in the past 12 months. Talent retention begins once a future employee has their first conversation with a recruiter. The secret to turning candidates into long-term hires lies in creating authentic connections with new hires from the start.

Remote TA Teams Struggle With Efficiency

The efficiency of remote companies’ TA processes leaves much to be desired. But at least the majority of them aren’t blind to this; just 38% of remote workplaces rated their TA process as very efficient, compared to 56% of in-person companies.

In today’s intensely competitive job market, hiring fast is essential. The best candidates disappear from the market in just 10 days. Yet here’s the kicker: a shocking 100% of fully-remote companies said that their rate of time-to-hire increased in the past 12 months. In comparison, 65% of in-person companies said the same.

Even worse, remote talent teams said it takes them an average of five weeks to hire a new employee—contrasted against three weeks for in-person teams. With a hiring process that lengthy, remote employers shouldn’t be surprised when their star candidates lose interest and look elsewhere.

Remote companies reportedly spend 41.6% of their time scheduling interviews, three percentage points higher than in-person companies. Yet while remote companies spend a bit more of their time on interview scheduling, they’re way behind in-person companies when it comes to the number of interviews that they schedule. On average, remote workplaces schedule 50 interviews per month, versus 125 for in-person.

So what’s the hold up? It’s possible that remote teams haven’t equipped themselves with the proper TA tech to get to where they need to be in scheduling volume. But if anything’s certain, it’s that if remote TA teams don’t get to the root of their efficiency issues, they’ll only continue to struggle.

Does interview scheduling automation make sense for my team?

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

Calculate Your ROI

DEIB Efforts Show Grounds for Hope

Want some positive news for a change? On the bright side of things, fully-remote companies are most likely to emphasize DEIB in the near future. Thirty-eight percent of remote workplaces surveyed will make DEIB a priority in the next 12 months, two percentage points higher than in-person workplaces.

This is a good move, especially considering how 25% of remote teams reportedly expect to struggle with a lack of qualified candidates. A broader talent pool comes with more diverse candidates, and an increased need to improve—and communicate a commitment to—diversity.

While the stats on DEIB and remote companies are promising, all companies surveyed could—and should—make greater strides in championing DEIB. Diverse teams that feel welcome and supported boost revenue and innovation. Smart companies make DEIB a top priority.

Want the Latest Insights? Read the 2023 Hiring Insights Report

Remote companies, you have your work cut out for you. While some assume that remote workplaces have it easy thanks to a wider talent pool, they forget that the Distance Economy also widens the employer pool. This makes it even more critical for remote TA teams to take meaningful, calculated steps to attract, win, and retain candidates.

From connecting with candidates without physical interaction, to conveying intangible company values through a Zoom window, it’s not too unexpected for newly remote workplaces to trip up. Hiring remotely comes with a learning curve. Yet despite the challenges ahead of them, remote TA teams must act fast to avoid getting swallowed up by the talent competition.

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.

Meetings Suck. Here’s How to Fix Them.

Posted on by Rachel Heller

You know the feeling. You’re sitting in a meeting, watching the clock, and before you know it, the conversation goes sideways. You ask yourself, “Why am I even here? Why are any of us here?” 

Your mind wanders to the multitude of tasks that you’d rather be dealing with. Finally, the meeting ends and your real work begins. You start crossing off items on your to-do list, and then—

Bam. The calendar notification of doom: time for the next meeting.

How did we get to this point? Why are we up to our eyeballs in meetings?

Some argue that the pandemic created our current avalanche of meetings—and they’re not completely wrong. Since 2020, companies have gone from holding 40 to 66 million daily meetings in the U.S. alone. And given the meteoric rise of remote and hybrid work, the amount is sure to increase.

But that’s not the full story. The phrase “this should’ve been an email” made its way into our lexicon long before the pandemic. The truth is that we never mastered meetings. The pandemic accelerated the issue, and now we’re finally facing the consequences of our haphazard meeting culture.

We need smart meetings, and we need them now. It’s time to stop the meeting mayhem.

Meeting Mayhem by the Numbers

The data doesn’t lie: our meetings are broken. Like, really broken.

We waste a whopping 24 billion hours each year due to unproductive meetings. The majority of professionals now spend up to a third of their workweek stuck in meetings.

And the financial costs? They’re devastating. U.S. businesses reportedly lose a grand total of $37 billion a year due to unnecessary meetings. Bad meetings mean bad news for businesses.

Unsurprisingly, the general consensus is that meetings suck. Working professionals ranked having too many meetings as the biggest workplace distraction. Research shows that 90% of people daydream in meetings, and 73% use meeting time to get other work done. To make matters worse, 75% of people haven’t even received training on how to conduct a meeting.

If all of that wasn’t bad enough, there’s now a term for the negative effects of meetings: “meeting recovery syndrome.” This phenomenon refers to the feelings of fatigue and frustration that arise from a bad meeting.

“No Meeting Monday” Won’t Save You

To mitigate the onslaught of meetings, companies resorted to establishing “No Meetings” days. Blocking off days for uninterrupted heads-down work sounds great in theory. But in practice, workers end up with back-to-back meetings the following day to make up for their singular day of meeting-free bliss.

Eliminating meetings isn’t the best way forward. After all, there’s a reason why people hold meetings. Meetings can be extraordinary; they’re where collaboration moves mountains, and where big ideas find their legs. With less than one-third of knowledge workers coming to the office each day, meetings offer one of the only opportunities for coworkers to connect face to face. 

Meetings aren’t the problem. The problem is how we conduct them. Instead of getting rid of meetings, the solution lies in making meetings smarter. So—how do we do that?

Fundamentals of Smart Meetings

The hallmark of a smart meeting is if a meeting is attended by the right people, at the right time, in the right place for a clear goal. Attendees of these meetings make bigger accomplishments and more meaningful progress than ever before. And, most importantly, smart meetings cultivate the type of genuine relationships among attendees that no other form of communication can replicate. 

Luckily, you don’t have to create smarter meetings on your own. A Meeting Optimization Engine handles the entire coordination, relationship building, and insights gathering process to make smart meetings come to life. 

Let’s dig into the three foundational elements of smart meetings:

The Right Attendees

Meetings are breeding grounds for collaboration and connection. And in the distance economy, where 98% of today’s meetings reportedly include at least one remote attendee, meetings stand as optimal spaces to form bonds in the absence of physical interaction.

However, problems arise when meetings don’t include the right key players. When the wrong people are placed in meetings, frustration builds, which erodes any sense of community within a team.

That’s why smart meetings include the most suitable attendees. When the right people join forces, teams accelerate towards their goals and meaningful relationships blossom.

The Right Time and Place

Smart meetings are “smart” from the get-go, and that means before any meeting even takes place. Smart meeting scheduling involves identifying the optimal time and place for all attendees to connect. Smart meetings should work for everyone’s calendar.

Overall, the time and place of your meetings should be conducive to productivity and success. If a meeting takes place too frequently, or not frequently enough, it isn’t smart. Likewise, if a meeting’s presence just takes up space on a calendar, it’s not a smart meeting—it’s a time sink.

Achieves a Clear Goal

If you aren’t meeting to achieve a clear goal, ask yourself why you’re even meeting. Your meetings need to be purposeful. The goals of your meetings should be clearly defined, and all attendees should be firmly aligned on what they must achieve.

Each and every meeting should move your team closer to your pre-defined goals. If your meetings don’t generate progress, they must be reengineered.

More on Smart Meetings

Okay, so we’ve laid down the fundamentals of smart meetings. Ready to dive even deeper?

From meticulously crafting meeting agendas, to thoughtfully selecting the best meeting structure, making your meetings smart is a fine art. Here are several elements to consider when crafting your meetings.

The Perfect Meeting Agenda

Far too often, meeting organizers come with an agenda that’s just a list of topics. Even though there’s likely several crucial topics that you want to cover in your meetings, agendas that are just bullets after bullets of topics set your meetings up for failure.

The most purposeful agendas include specific, pre-defined questions for attendees to discuss and answer. Starting meetings with the knowledge of exactly what you must resolve gives them a strategic edge.

Even better, narrowing your agenda topics into questions promotes meeting efficiency. Starting meetings with topics to discuss opens the door for irrelevant conversations that don’t get to the heart of the issue. But when you start meetings with questions, attendees know exactly what they’re there to hash out.

Aside from fine-tuning the content of your agenda, make sure that you’re practicing proper agenda etiquette. Share the agenda with attendees well in advance, always include the agenda in the meeting invitations, and hold yourself to following the agenda’s main points.

All in all, now isn’t the time to just “wing it.” Use your meeting agenda as your road map to delivering smarter meetings.

Selecting the Meeting Structure

There’s plenty of useful meeting structures out there to leverage—when they’re appropriate. When choosing the right structure, consider several factors: the purpose, the attendees, and the group size.

For quick status reports, consider holding daily team huddles. These meetings are normally 10 or 15 minutes. They keep your team aligned throughout the week on their priorities. Attendees provide updates and talk through any obstacles. The brevity of these meetings provides teams with ample time to execute on high-value tasks.

Have a crucial project or campaign that’s in the works? A weekly campaign planning meeting can be a productive time for all of the campaign’s stakeholders to talk through the goals for the weeks ahead, what’s in progress and what still needs to be kicked off, and any roadblocks. However, stay vigilant on the importance of this meeting each week. Some weeks of a campaign may be smooth sailing, with nothing significant to discuss.

If you feel like your projects tend to remain stagnant, it may be time to establish Level 10 (L10) meetings. An L10 is a weekly meeting that takes place at the same time and same day each week. It’s recommended for these meetings to last around 90 minutes, yet the length will depend on your team’s needs. Dedicate the bulk of each L10 to discussing any outstanding priorities.

Know When To Say No

Say it with us: not everything needs to be a meeting. Some meetings are just emails in disguise. In order to truly live by the smart meeting code, learn how to sniff out unnecessary meetings.

Useless meetings come with common red flags. If a meeting doesn’t include even a loose agenda, it’s time to start asking questions. And just because a certain weekly meeting has always taken place on your team, doesn’t mean that it’s needed. Have these conversations moved your team closer to a goal? How has your team progressed thanks to these meetings?

Don’t be afraid to question a meeting’s purpose, or if the meeting needs to occur at all. Your entire team will be better off without these questionable meetings. Ask what’s the desired outcome, or question if the frequency of a meeting is necessary, if applicable.

Maybe a meeting feels necessary for certain members to attend, but not you. Be direct—ask the organizer what value you would add, or why your attendance is important.

Making Every Minute Count

For years, we’ve made attending useless meetings a punchline for office jokes. We bond over these jokes because we all know the feeling of counting down the minutes for a meeting to end. Yet the consequences of wasting precious time in inefficient meetings are no laughing matter.

Every once in a while, we attend a meeting that reminds us of how powerful meetings can be. We connect with our teammates, smash through roadblocks, and can practically taste how close we are to attaining our goals. But then this meeting passes by, and we’re back to facing the aimless meetings that we’re accustomed to.

Imagine if every single minute spent in meetings actually mattered. To create this reality, meetings just need a fresh, new approach.

Together, we can stop the meeting mayhem—but only if we make meetings smarter.

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.