Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

The Evolution of Recruiting from 2009-2019

In 2008, I published a book with ATD Press called Success for Hire. Since then, I’ve followed the field closely and for this article, wanted to consider some of the major recruiting changes that have taken place over the last decade.

The “Black Hole of HR” is No More

When I entered this field, I advised candidates never to blindly submit a resume to a job board or an applicant tracking system (ATS). At the time, doing so was often a guarantee that no human eyes would ever rest on your materials. Today, however, ATS are far more sophisticated in sorting and funneling resumes to the appropriate decision-makers, and whether the news is good or not, candidates are more likely to hear it. And, the job boards that still exist are no longer “boards” persay, but rather matching platforms offering a suite of helpful services to both job seekers and recruiters find one another.

Social Facilitates Passive Recruitment

Remember the days when recruitment processes happened in a very specific order – employer posts job, candidates apply, employer decides who to interview?  The rise of social media, especially sites like LinkedIn, has enabled employers and candidates to engage in a mutual selection process that often begins with the recruiter scoping out the skillsets and recommendations of and reaching out to people who aren’t looking for work. Passive candidates are also more likely to be spotted by recruiters via their participation in online communities, hosted events, and skills showcases.

Artificially Intelligent Software Mitigates Bias

Unconscious bias has always tarnished recruitment efforts. While most employers didn’t mean to discriminate against a candidate because of their gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, this often happened at the subconscious level. Now, though, some intelligent software programs remove resume details – such as names, photos, and education – that might lead to biased assessments. Others help recruiters word job descriptions in a certain way, and combat interview selection bias via structured conversational prompts and real-time video assessments of interviewer speech and body language.

The Total Employee Experience Starts with Candidates

Once, employers held all the cards and had all the power. If your company had a website or was in the news, you were golden. But in 2019, recruiters must work hard to convince top talent to invest their careers with an organization. To start, organizations must have a consistent, reputable, transparent, and compelling employer brand, and they then must showcase that brand through a carefully orchestrated hiring process that makes individual candidates feel respected, valued, and cared for. And – that process must transition into preboarding and onboarding experiences that make new hires feel good about their decisions prepare them to contribute right away.

If you’re interested in recruitment and didn’t catch last week’s webinar with SilkRoad client Sonepar, grab the replay here and let us know what you think!

Talent Assembly as Recruitment 2.0

For most of recruiting’s history, in some ways all jobs were created equal. If your organization needed a human worker, you solicited qualified candidates to work full-time, onsite at your location, with the expectation that they’d be there for the foreseeable future.

Traditional employees still exist, of course. But due to a combination of demographic shifts and technology advances, the recruitment role has become exponentially more complicated.

I’ve talked about the rise of the gig economy for a while, but new surveys keep supporting its growth. For instance, a 2018 NPR study found 1 in 5 jobs in America is held by a contract worker and predicted that within a decade, contractors and freelancers will make up half of the workforce. 

This shift means that instead of relying on traditional employees to perform most organizational responsibilities, most companies are moving to a hybrid approach that includes temporary, contract, and virtual employees, as well as consultants and subject matter experts. And recruiters, still housed mostly within the HR function, are being called upon to quickly construct teams in response to immediate business priorities.

Rapid talent assembly, which fits perfectly into the agile operations model embraced by many forward-thinking organizations, has many benefits. You can source talent when and where you need it, and it doesn’t matter that the best person for the job doesn’t live near your New York headquarters. When a project is finished, you don’t have to continue paying the employee. You don’t need a crystal ball requiring next year’s staffing requirements, and you don’t have to spend your profits on unnecessary overhead and benefits.

But how do you do talent assembly exactly? In my new book about the future of work, Humanity Works, I discuss an example of a network set up by an individual organization for the express purpose of talent assembly. The Washington Post Talent Network, which is part social network and part job board, was designed to give Post editors an easy way to solicit and hire external writers for blogs, breaking news, and long features across a variety of departments.

The system includes freelancer profiles, detailing professional experience and including work samples; story pitching, allowing freelancers to tailor ideas for specific departments and editorial initiatives; assignment posting, letting freelancers consider stories the Post would like to pursue; and location tracking, ensuring editors know freelancers’ primary work locations for quick deployment of breaking news.

If you don’t have or can’t build a network of your own, several excellent sites can help with your sourcing, including:

Freelancer.com: After acquiring vWorker and Scriptlance, this is the world’s biggest global outsourcing resource.

Upwork: When oDesk.com and Elance.com merged, Upwork was the result. Like Freelancer.com, the employer support and service are terrific and the site takes only a small cut for matched projects.

Guru.com: Going beyond the more typical freelancer occupations, this site matches subject matter experts with employers.

TopTal: If you need skilled software development talent, TopTal employs a rigorous screening system and matches the top 3 percent of tech applicants with short and long-term employer projects.

If you’d like to learn more about why recruitment is such a critical part of your overall talent strategy, join me and SilkRoad client Sonepar for a free webinar tomorrow, September 17^th at 2PM EST.

The Forgotten Transitions: New Managers, New Responsibilities

In an ideal world, every employee would be solidly prepared for a transition involving a promotion or new roles and responsibilities. And yet so often, we leave this to chance. We hope that the person in charge will make sure the employee has all of the right information, tools, and support to perform the new job effectively.

Unfortunately, this often doesn’t happen. Employees are expected to figure it out, and many get overwhelmed, burned out, and demotivated in the process. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that – due to baby boomer retirement and other workforce demographic shifts – rising millennial leaders are being promoted an average of 10 years earlier than prior generations and have a steeper learning curve as a result.

Fortunately, providing a high tech, high touch experience for new managers and others transitioning to new roles and responsibilities can be a relatively seamless extension to your existing strategic onboarding activities.  Here are a few things to keep in mind.

Provide relevant, on-demand learning content in a variety of formats

Whether you’ve created online courses in short or long format or have curated resources from other places, use your HRMS to offer employees their choice of training, being as flexible as you can regarding how and where they master the necessary information. Outline essential competencies, track training completion and skill acquisition, and suggest next steps.

Match employees with those already doing their new jobs

Your HMIS is a great place to pair newbies with seasoned managers or those performing especially well in a job function. Both formal and informal mentorship is useful in helping transitioning employees see a clear path forward and feel comfortable, supported, and confident in their new roles.

Document expectations and goals

Employees with new roles and responsibilities should understand exactly what they need to accomplish in the context of the larger organization, when specific goals must be achieved, how performance will be measured, and how other people (managers, reports, colleagues, etc.) will be involved. These details, highly customized to each new role, should be proactively communicated and reinforced.

Schedule and execute more frequent check-ins to accommodate assimilation

Managers of transitioning employees should be prompted to pay extra attention to those ramping up in a new position. This might include weekly in-person or video discussions that address both the personal and professional demands of the new job. Topics might include time management, cross-departmental rapport building, and leader-facing communication.

Demonstrate psychological comprehension

While there’s no substitute for a leader taking a new manager to lunch with inquiring after her well-being, software can go a long way in illustrating that your organization understands the obstacles and pressures of a new role and wants to be a partner in alleviating them.  For instance, an embedded app that serves up a motivational “quote of the day” could set an important tone for an employee’s new journey.

Did you miss last week’s webinar on managing effective transitions? Catch the replay here and let us know what you think!

How to Prepare for Leadership Disruption

As a futurist and the host of the Workforce 2030 podcast, I’m frequently asked the most important trait leaders need to develop to effectively govern 21^st century workforces. The answer is easy: agility. The business world’s only certainty is that the environment WILL change quickly, and the fastest way to organizational obscurity and failure is to deny that major disruptions are bound to occur and that regular strategy pivots will be essential.  These questions will help leaders navigate a climate in which an approach that worked yesterday is unlikely to work the same way tomorrow.

Is My Organization Agile Enough to Shift Direction Rapidly?

Many companies are bureaucratic and unwieldy, where one must wade through layers of hierarchy before receiving the green light to change a process. As we move toward 2030, the pace of change will demand real-time monitoring of markets and customer demands, as well as infrastructures and mechanisms to drive immediate action when an approved strategy no longer serves.

Have I Customized My Management Style?

We have moved from a workforce of many to a workforce of one. Today’s employees are more diverse than ever. They have different work arrangements, personal priorities, and career aspirations. Leaders must tailor their styles to the individual rather than insisting on a one-size-fits-all approach, and they must be willing to diligently supervise multi-generational, virtual, remote, and contract teams as well as traditional full-time, onsite ones.

For the rest of the article, check out the SilkRoad blog.