Category: Hiring Techniques

A topic that often pops up in the recruitment world is candidate experience. In Episode 97 of the Talent & Growth podcast we spoke to Mary Strebinger, who is the Global Talent Acquisition lead at Who Gives A Crap?, about how they ensure that their candidate experience is amazing. Read on to find out how Mary’s team is pushing for a great candidate experience. 

How do you deliver on your company’s mission to provide a positive candidate experience? 

Candidate experience is just as delightful for us as it is for the candidates. We make sure each and every touchpoint is absolutely delightful, inclusive and equitable. Everything from our application process to our talent communications is peppered with everything from toilet humour to information on what to expect from us when you start working here. We welcome you to push back. The candidate experience is really about a two way street, so we want to hear what you’re thinking about, what you’re curious about, what you need from us or if you have any concerns. There’s a lot baked in there about expectation setting and transparency. 

We’re all about uplifting the gold standard of what it is to be a good business. We put purpose, the planet and people next to a profit, if not a little higher. We want to do the same thing in our candidate experience, because that’s really what it’s like to work with us. Even the interview itself is really a series of conversations for candidates to get to know us. Most of our team grows with us for years because we have a lot of internal mobility. Our hiring process is a little bit longer, but it’s a really intentional process. Every moment that you have with us is a two-way street where you can get curious with us, meet all our people and peek under the hood to see if it’s a good opportunity for you.

How do you make sure that the candidate is getting the right experience with you?

We have really intentional hiring processes. The standard process is about five touch points. It’s all a series of conversations, not interviews, for you to get to know us as much as we’re getting to know you. We assess everybody at the start, and then the first step is a phone screen with a talent rep who talks about our people and culture. After that we do a hiring manager screen, and they’re going to be diving a little deeper into the function of the role. After that is the middle stage where you meet some peers, whether it’s within a function that you’re going to be working elbow to elbow with, or some hyper cross functional collaboration partners. After that, we have something called homework, which is a paid project. We give candidates anywhere between a week to two weeks to work on it with us. Finally we pull together an offer and give you an executive interview. 

We also have something on our job board called ‘dream job’. It’s an opportunity for you to put in your general application or tell us what your dream job is. Instead of just putting in your resume and a little cover letter saying how much you love Who Gives A Crap?, you’re telling us ‘Here’s what I love to do, and here’s how I think we can partner up’. We look at those and do an exploratory call. We’ll decide what working together could look like, whether it’s a full time or it’s an ongoing role. Sometimes it starts as more of a consultancy, but we’ll design a process together with those dream job candidates. 

What we look for with every application is the intentionality of it and the level of care and curiosity that someone is bringing to the table. That’s something we always reciprocate. 

What does candidate feedback look like in terms of the feedback which you’re delivering to candidates and the feedback you’re gathering from candidates on the experience they’re getting?

I’m at the intersection of feedback from both sides. When you interview with us, we’re training your hiring managers and teammates to be delivering real time feedback. When you’re with me I’ll tell you about what the next steps look like and prepare you for your next interview. I’ll be directly or indirectly providing you with feedback to set you up for success with the manager. I cover some of the questions that we tried to dig into, but we just couldn’t quite understand and help you get more clear and concise with your answers. We’re also offering emails or texts or phone calls in between meetings so that candidates have the opportunity to reach out if they’ve got questions or feedback for us. 

We definitely want to know how your experience was at each touchpoint. We ask ‘how are you feeling? Do you have any further questions? How is that interaction? Was it prompt? Did they show up on time?’ We’re asking it more in an open ended form, but I’d like us to get a little bit more standardised. We do reviews internally with our hiring managers and our teams, but we haven’t been doing that with candidates. I always want to hear from candidates, and I don’t know if I’ve gained a reputation or if what I’m doing is working, but candidates are providing feedback to me unprompted, which I really love. 

We also get a lot of feedback from our rejections. I make sure that anytime we reject someone that we provide really constructive, valuable feedback and let them know what the decision really weighed on. What that does is help someone upskill, puts them back on the job market and gives them a sense of direction. I have definitely provided feedback that’s either changed someone’s job search or helped redirect the career path that they were looking for. It’s helped provide them with interview prep and allowed them to move on in their journeys, even if it wasn’t with us. Our feedback is always based on core skills and behaviours. We get great feedback from candidates who say ‘Hey, you’re right. I could have answered that more clearly. I did feel like it was a bit too senior for me.’ That way it benefits both of us. 

To hear more of Mary’s insights on creating a great candidate experience, tune into Episode 97 of the Talent & Growth podcast here.

On Talent & Growth we speak to talent leaders about the challenges they face and their solutions for attraction and retention. If you’re interested in hearing about how companies are building a more diverse talent pool, how you can attract top people from the big players, ways to create a more inclusive interview process or learn about the latest and greatest automation software to make your life easier, then this is the podcast for you.

Recruiters are reporting being ghosted by candidates. While this is frustrating, it’s entirely possible that we’re part of the problem. On Episode 87 of The Talent & Growth Podcast we were joined by Helen Murdoch, the Talent Acquisition Manager at MPB, who explained the importance of feedback in building healthy relationships with candidates and improving their experience of the hiring process. Read on to level up your own recruitment practices. 

Why is improving the candidate experience through feedback so important? 

People want to do better. Giving candidates feedback feels like a really awkward thing to do, and asking them for feedback can feel uncomfortable too. There’s an element of the time that it takes. Without that, though, you don’t have the power to make changes. People get stuck in this cycle of doing what they’re doing and hoping for the best. Talent teams are stretched, talent partners are stretched, recruiters are stretched. It’s this constant cycle of not having enough time, but what feedback does is provide knowledge that saves me more time down the line.

When you’re gathering feedback, you need to get it from all of your candidates. If you get your feedback from the people that you’ve hired it’s always going to be positive, because they’ve got the job. What you’re missing out on is the person who was the runner up, or who you interviewed in your first cohort who didn’t get the position. Ask what they think of that process. It’s insightful to know that. I’ve been able to give solutions to candidates who want more personalised feedback, or for the process being faster. It’s about looking at that whole candidate journey, not just your successful people.

How can we use feedback from candidates to improve and impact the service we’re delivering? 

Feedback is powerful. I’ve been using a lot of the comments to understand what’s going well. People like the fact that we’ve got a real human touch to our process. They want more personalised feedback, so I’ve changed my automated email to include more information and give more personalised feedback whilst prioritising time as a factor. It’s been a rewarding experience to get the positives and turn the negatives around. It’s improved the service that I deliver, because I can engage with candidates as a human being. Feedback helps me develop as a person, and it’s giving candidates a voice. 

Understanding what your candidates want changes everything. It gives me an understanding of what they want when I’m posting a job. What it is may not be obvious to someone who doesn’t have the knowledge of the business that I have. When you’re in a job search it’s emotive because you might be living paycheck to paycheck, struggling mentally or things like that. When you get a rejection it feels awful, but if you have the opportunity to talk to someone and get some tips on how to improve, that can be a really positive thing. That’s why feedback is so important, because it helps us make the system better for the people who are going through it. 

What are your top rules for feedback?

Always be open to what candidates say. If you’re kind of scared about going on this journey, know that it will pay off in the long term, because you’re going to learn from it. Don’t take it personally, like I did. You have to step back and realise that it has nothing to do with you. Recruiters are massively empathetic people and we deal with people in a difficult transition of their lives, who do often give very emotional feedback. We are naturally scared of those negatives because we always want to secure someone that dream job that they want, we want to help our candidates achieve their goals. When they don’t secure it though, giving them feedback and asking how you can do better will either improve your process or reconfirm that you’re actually doing a good job, they just weren’t the right fit. It’s all about improvement, just remember that. 

To hear more about how Helen has implemented feedback to improve her own process as a recruiter, tune into Episode 87 of The Talent & Growth Podcast here. 

On Talent & Growth we speak to talent leaders about the challenges they face and their solutions for attraction and retention. If you’re interested in hearing about how companies are building a more diverse talent pool, how you can attract top people from the big players, ways to create a more inclusive interview process or learn about the latest and greatest automation software to make your life easier, then this is the podcast for you.

On Episode 77 of The Talent & Growth Podcast we spoke to Jonathan Durnford-Smith, who is the Portfolio Partner at Octopus Ventures, about how to implement hiring processes in your business, particularly those which are at an early stage. He gave us some really great insights for any company who is looking to put together a strategy around their hiring, what it should look like in terms of processes. 

If that’s something that interests you, read on for some of the key points from our conversation. We hope you enjoy it! 

We’re talking about setting up hiring process processes today. At what point should this be a focus for a business? 

That’s a great question, I think you should start thinking about it from day one – that being when you’re making that first hire. I would never advise people to start to put together a really rigorous or overly structured process at that point, but you should definitely start thinking about it. The core elements for a very early stage business are to take time at the very beginning to define the roles. A lot of people have jumped to the conclusion that they need this type of person, or a VP of engineering, or a VP of sales, and that’s largely influenced by somebody who has told them that they need that, or they think they might need that because they’ve read a job spec. Actually, what you should really do is actually think about, what are the goals of the business? What do we need to achieve? What are the skill sets that we need to be able to achieve in the next year where we’re only going to have 20 people? How do we think about where they fit? And then ultimately, what does success look like? Ask yourself, ‘if any person is in this role, what will they have accomplished at the six month mark? What will they have accomplished at the 12 month mark? How is that contributing to the broader organisation?’ That’s the best way of defining the role and I think that’s really important for the early stage. 

I also think the decision making element is really important as well, a lot of bias can creep in at the early stage. There’s the old adage where you just hire people who are very similar to yourself, or you hire friends or people that you’ve worked with previously. I get why people do that, because they’re known entities and people that you know will work well with you. It’s okay to hire some of those people, don’t get me wrong, but then I also think there is a real need for difference in perspective, and bringing in some fresh perspective. I think the other thing in decision making is to remove bias from that process wherever possible, when you’re actually getting to the point of deciding between one candidate or another. Don’t necessarily compare candidates, but compare them against the role. It’s a really hard thing to do, right? But a lot of people make the mistake of saying, ‘Well, we’ve got these two candidates, let’s compare them with pros and cons’. But actually, you shouldn’t really be doing that, you should be comparing them to the role that you’ve defined clearly at the very start and seeing which one of them matches the role, not which one of them is better than the others. I think that’s a really crucial point as well. 

Later on, as you start going beyond 20 employees to 50 or 100 people, that’s when you need a bit more scalability. You now need to build a structure around things because we’re hiring 20-30 people a year and we need that consistency. That will come with time. I think once you’ve made those first few hires, that’s when you need to slow things down. And startups are afraid to slow things down, obviously, but having the courage to slow things down even for a few months to take stock and think about the point where they need to be is so important. Make sure that before you start any of that you know how you’re going to approach those situations, and you know what that process is going to look like.

What is the blueprint for putting together hiring processes? 

Something that I’ve seen over the course of my career is velocity. Velocity in the sense of not hiring as quickly as possible, necessarily, but setting out a time to hire and knowing realistically what that looks like. I think fairness and consistency are really important, in the sense of are candidates doing the same type of interview? Are decisions being made in the same way? Are we avoiding any unfairness creeping into the process? 

I think candidate experience is like one of the very core pillars that everyone should think about. There are very quick and easy things that you can implement that can improve that.  A lot of people think, ‘I’ve got to have an amazing Glassdoor rating, I’ve got to have like an EVP consultant come in and do all of this kind of stuff’. I don’t actually think you do. The other pillar is diversity and equity. Inclusion is a massive thing that everyone is thinking about, quite rightly so at the moment, and thinking about that should be wrapped up in everything I’ve just said. All of those different elements should be created alongside your D&I view, so asking ‘how are we building D&I within that process?’ as you go. I think the second part is ‘how do we build it within the culture internally’, because what I have seen done is a company whose focus is only on D&I during hiring, but they don’t actually mirror it in the final culture. People are joining and they’re kind of thinking ‘this doesn’t match what I was told in the interview process’. That’s another thing to keep your eye on. 

Those are the core pillars; velocity, consistency, candidate experience and D&I. That’s what you should apply throughout when thinking about a hiring process.

What should the hiring process workflow look like?

In an ideal world, you’d have this perfectly shaped funnel, where it starts wide and it comes down and every single interview process serves a purpose. That’s what you should aspire to. It’s really important to always question the workflow. Every year, if not more often, review your processes, look at whatever metrics you can gather and see what that workflow looks like and try to identify what could be the weak points or the areas that could be improved. In an ideal world, you want that workflow to be very clear in terms of every single stage should have a purpose, and you would want to be able to measure how many candidates have been at that stage, and how many have then gone through to the next stage. I could probably talk for hours on how data can help inform your hiring processes, not enough people do it, but I think that’s a super important thing as well. Ultimately, if you spend enough time in your interview process, even if those numbers are lower but you’re ensuring that they’re quality hires, I do believe that 10 amazing hires are better than 30 okay hires. 

Another thing I’d always consider is that link with your people team or your HR team is there mapping what a hire’s success looks like over the first year. It can even start with the amount of people that are passing probation, which sounds like a brutal metric, but I think is one that that gives you a good idea of how well you’re hiring. Beyond that point, you can consider promotions, ratings and performance reviews as well. If you could afford to, I would say to track those as well.

What would be your message or advice to business leaders who are just starting to hire, what do they need to stop and think about and implement?

Take a step back and take a breather. Don’t be afraid to pause your hiring, even if it’s for a week or two. That’s an uncomfortable thing to do for a lot of people, but see what you’ve done, what’s worked and what hasn’t. Start from the very basics, like what are the main roles that we need to hire for this year? Let’s just take three of those roles and think about how we are going to hire those people. Who do we have internally that can help give us a read? If we don’t have those, how do we think about external help coming in to assess those potential candidates for those roles? 

Start small. I think a lot of people put a lot of pressure on themselves. Often you don’t need all of your new hires that quickly, and you can actually get them a lot quicker if you just take a step back, take a breather and assess what you can do a little bit differently. I’m a big believer in trying to get a recruiter into the company early on if you can. Allow for that. I think it’s super important in startups because it’s often their CEO or member of leadership who’s leading recruiting until they get somebody on board. They will burn themselves out by trying to juggle that with everything else that’s going on, or they just won’t do it that well, because they’ve got so much on. Get in somebody who can own that, that’s really important to do as early as you physically can. 

To hear more of Jonathan’s insights on how to streamline your hiring process, check out The Talent & Growth Podcast here. 

On Talent & Growth we speak to talent leaders about the challenges they face and their solutions for attraction and retention. If you’re interested in hearing about how companies are building a more diverse talent pool, how you can attract top people from the big players, ways to create a more inclusive interview process or learn about the latest and greatest automation software to make your life easier, then this is the podcast for you.

Episode 57 saw Jan Tegze, Author of Full Stack Recruiter join us on Talent & Growth. 

Jan gave us some fantastic insights into what a modern recruiter needs to do and be and we covered how we can better engage passive candidates, the blueprint for the perfect candidate process and experience and some advice for modern recruiters who want to be world class. 

Jan also gave us a ‘state of the recruitment market in 2022’ overview and we’ve pull together the headlines from this for you below. 

What are you seeing in talent acquisition recruitment and where are we heading? Have you noticed any trends? 

Companies and hiring managers are trying to expand their pipelines and are always pushing on team members with the same question: I need more candidates. But, companies are now moving from remote set ups to wanting people back in the office, meaning that a focus is being put on location and where they are based. Not only is their pool much smaller because of this, but people looking in the same location are probably also looking for remote talent. It will be incredible to see how this situation evolves. 

I believe that the companies who are forcing people to go back to the office will be bleeding talent which they will not be able to easily replace, especially considering their talent pool is much smaller than before. People will be actively looking for remote working opportunities. The future will be depressing for many companies and teams. 

I’m expecting there to be a new shuffle at the end of the year when there are people looking to change their jobs. There’s a chance that people will be unhappy in their new jobs because they had high expectations which were not met. I’m also expecting that TA teams will be shuffling due to the amount of pressure they are under. Lots of managers are pushing for more, but they’re not helping. It will be an interesting and challenging time for all of us.  

It’s a good time to be in Talent Acquisition in terms of being wanted. It’s a competitive market out there isn’t it? 

Yes – salaries are going through the roof. People who are working as recruiters for a year are expecting to be senior within a year – it’s crazy. I’m seeing that more and more people are entering the recruitment field but they are not getting any training which shows in how they are approaching candidates. Companies are so desperate that they’re hiring people without providing any training- but are they really expecting that those recruiters will help with their brand? In the end, they are hurting their brand, causing them to loose talent immediately as they are approached with awful messages such as “Hey, if you’re interested let me know.” Those kinds of messages are going to repel any talent on the market. So I wish more companies were providing better training.  

To listen to more from this episode click here.  

On Talent & Growth we speak to talent leaders about the challenges they face and their solutions for attraction and retention. If you’re interested in hearing about how companies are building a more diverse talent pool, how you can attract top people from the big players, ways to create a more inclusive interview process or learn about the latest and greatest automation software to make your life easier, then this is the podcast for you.

Matt Adler, Producer, and host of The Recruiting Future podcast joined us in the latest episode of our podcast. As an independent consultant who’s worked with large organisations on innovation projects for talent acquisition, he’s at the centre of everything that’s going on in recruitment technology, tele-acquisition, employer branding, and recruitment marketing. He spoke to us about the developments in these areas and shared his take on how he thinks the recruitment market is set to turn.  

You’ve recently released a book called Digital Talent. Tell us a little bit about that.  

Yes, I co-authored the book with my very good friend Mervyn Dinnen, who does a lot of writing and speaking about the HR space. Digital Talent is a follow up from our previous book, Exceptional Talent, only we now wanted to explore what was going on in the market with a particular focus on companies struggling to find the right skills to accelerate digital transformation in their businesses.  

We decided to pause the writing when the pandemic hit because we realised a lot of the things we were writing about that we thought might happen in the future, were actually already happening right in front of our eyes. Of course, digital transformation sped up dramatically. We saw a huge uptake in the use of technology across all aspects of talent acquisition and it as a really interesting period because it allowed us to compare people’s pre-pandemic thoughts on what was going to happen with what actually happened.  

It’s gone from zero to one hundred. Some candidates won’t even consider a position unless it gives them the option to work remotely.  

Exactly, we’re in a market at the moment where the employees have the power and they’re voting with their feet. It will be interesting to see how that develops because a minority of organisations have gone remote first, most are exploring the hybrid option, but it’s making organisations change the way they think about their employees.  

It’s an interesting time because companies are pandering to what talent needs because there’s such a labour shortage that they need to be competitive. So, at the moment, employees have the upper hand. Do you see the market turning any time soon?  

It’s difficult to make generalisations across every single industry in every single area. If we focus on the crisis in digital skills, it stems from education systems and governments and companies not being prepared to invest in the necessary training, coupled with the speed at which technology evolves. So, the conclusion we come to in the book is that the shortage of digital skills in particular, is only going to get worse, because the reskilling and training of people needs to keep pace with the changes in technology – organisations need to upskill people quickly. And I’m interested to see how organisations will respond to that; will they automate more of what they do and start to think of talent in a different way?  

Ultimately, a lot of the challenges we’re seeing companies face now will continue into the future, and because of that, we need to rethink how companies think about talent, technology, learning, development, talent acquisition, and their employer brand.  

You can listen to the full episode here.  

On Talent & Growth we speak to talent leaders about the challenges they face and their solutions for attraction and retention. If you’re interested in hearing about how companies are building a more diverse talent pool, how you can attract top people from the big players, ways to create a more inclusive interview process or learn about the latest and greatest automation software to make your life easier, then this is the podcast for you.

We had the opportunity to host Greg Savage on our podcast, who is one of the most influential and well-known individuals in the recruitment space. 

Boasting a wealth of experience, multiple accolades, high-quality content and a book, we picked apart a ton of topics in the recruitment space, and wanted to share some key takeaways with you in the blog below!

What’s your advice around how to attract candidates, how to build a pool of them and get their full engagement from the beginning?

“It’s a heady cocktail of things. There are no passive candidates, all candidates are active, it’s just a matter of timing. Right? There’s no one listening to this podcast who is not going to change jobs at some point. 

Maybe it’s tomorrow, maybe it’s in two years. But, at some point, pretty much everyone’s going to change jobs. So, recruiters need to take a longer-term view pool, which is not in our ethos.

That means building a brand on LinkedIn. They need to build their brand through a strategic approach to content. And then that can be a step to engagement.”

How can you measure success?

“So, I’m a great believer that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. And, of course, KPIs have got a bad name in recruitment. 

Nobody becomes good at anything without measuring. Do you think people who play sport don’t measure? A great KPI system should be part of someone’s job.

Additionally, you need to help that person with tactics and activities that lead to the outcome. Some of that might be, of course, candidates you have to get from the database. By the way, that’s another thing that recruitment companies have to do a lot better! There are candidate graveyards, and by that, I mean that full of people that aren’t being contacted or engaged with.” 

What are you seeing in terms of how those motivations have changed over the last few years?

“I wrote a blog on this, and I said, the skill of understanding a candidate’s motivations is now the skill for 2022. Because it’s so wildly changed, and so many recruiters were making assumptions about that. 

I was the worst when I was recruiting, I’d see a person and go, ‘oh, two years since your Charter Academy? Yep, I’ve got four jobs for you.’ That was me as a brash, 25-year-old. 

I think in this industry, we’ve got to be slow to understand. Purposefully slow to understand. Ask a lot of questions, build up rapport and trust and really understand their motivations, but, also how to rank them. 

You’ve got to dig deeper because what I’m finding is candidates are increasingly interested in the culture of the organisation, and that sounds a little clichéd. 

But, another thing I’d be counselling my clients on is, can you answer the question, particularly authentically? 

People are finding that candidates are much more interested in a company’s employers. What’s their attitude to climate change? And how did they treat people during the COVID lay-off period? And, how diverse is the organisation? 

People want to really have visibility to their learning path, what training and development they’re going to get, too.” 

Maybe this is a good time to talk through the valley of death, and how it should be effectively managed to avoid dropouts and disappointments?

So, the ‘valley of death’ is that time, between the moment your candidate accepts the job and the moment they put their derrière in the client’s seat, figuratively speaking, because most of them may not go to the client. 

First, when you get an offer and the candidate accepts, support and reinforce the decision, and do it with passion.

Then, I would go through the offer document with the candidate. So, that might be a letter of offer or contract. I’ve seen things go wrong with candidates plenty of times; so try and manage and control the process. If possible, like the old days – and by that, I mean two years ago, I would like to make offers face to face. I know it’s not always possible, particularly now, but certainly, do it if you can. 

Why would you make an offer by telephone when you can actually make it by video where you can see the person’s body language, you can see the eyes, you can see the hesitation? So, have that conversation face to face, and soothe any jitters. 

Once you confirm the start date with the candidate, get the documents signed. Coach, your clients on the key steps also for a seamless process from both sides.

To listen to the full episode, click here. 

On Talent & Growth we speak to talent leaders about the challenges they face and their solutions for attraction and retention. If you’re interested in hearing about how companies are building a more diverse talent pool, how you can attract top people from the big players, ways to create a more inclusive interview process or learn about the latest and greatest automation software to make your life easier, then this is the podcast for you.