Recruitment

Being named a Strategic Leader in the 2022 Fosway 9-Grid for Talent Acquisition for the second year in a row means a LOT!

It means we’re helping TA leaders successfully evolve and scale their talent functions.

It means our customers are successfully hiring the talent they need using our software.

It means more companies are on the journey to Hiring Success. 

It means great satisfaction for SmartRecruiters employees who are hyper-focused on customer success.

Why It Matters

It’s no secret that recruiting has never been more difficult. Recruiters are overworked. It’s taking longer to hire. Budgets are stretched. The pandemic has changed the candidate landscape. This is keeping leaders up at night wondering how they will fill crucial roles. 

We also know that recruiting has never been more important. The ability to hire is the biggest challenge most leaders face in growing their business.  It’s imperative for companies to attract⁠—and win⁠—the best talent, and fast!  

Because of this pressure, companies are re-evaluating their tech stack and recognizing how critical it is to evolving and scaling their TA functions. As companies level up talent acquisition, they want to partner with a technology provider that helps them improve hiring outcomes. Fosway’s report gives customers confidence in their choice of a vendor because they trust the company’s rigorous independent research. It provides transparency into the performance, potential, presence, and cost of different providers.

Why SmartRecruiters?

Being new to SmartRecruiters when we started working through the evaluation process with Fosway, I was blown away by just how much progress we’d made with our product and customers in just a year.

In 2021, we zeroed in on recruitment marketing because we understand how it’s SO CRUCIAL it is for achieving Hiring Success. We invested in SmartJobs for next-generation programmatic job advertising, and we added Attrax – known for award-winning career sites – to the SmartRecruiters portfolio. And we added more than 150 additional features and capabilities to our suite.

We continue to lead the industry in data security, privacy, and global compliance, with a growing list of internationally recognized security and privacy standards. We recently earned SOC 2 Type II Certification with a distinguished clean audit, adding that to the list of ISO 27001, GDPR, and CCPA. And we went multi-cloud – with our suite now available on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. 

Our ecosystem grew to over 650 partners. This doesn’t just make it easier and faster for our customers to build out the tech stack they need, but they also benefit from enhanced innovation driven by our partners.

As for customers, we added 300 new enterprises. And in total, our customer base has been able to accelerate hiring by nearly 400% in one year.

What’s Next?

Here at SmartRecruiters, we are relentless about exceeding customer expectations and leading the industry. We will continue to innovate, expand our platform and capabilities globally, and scale our team to deliver world-class customer success. 

As companies work to solve hiring, those best prepared for the future will be those who embrace modern talent acquisition technology.

We continue to believe the winners in this talent market will be those who evolve their talent teams and embrace modern talent acquisition solutions, like SmartRecruiters. 

Want to see SmartRecruiters’ talent acquisition suite for yourself? Click here to begin your journey towards Hiring Success.

The post What Does It Mean To Be A Strategic Leader? first appeared on SmartRecruiters Blog.

Staying on top of current hiring trends is one of the best ways to craft a successful hiring strategy. This is particularly relevant at the moment, as the US and global economies are trending towards an uncertain future.

The hiring landscape is constantly changing. At the same time, a range of external factors are impacting the U.S. economy and businesses’ ability to recruit. As a result, there’s more pressure on employers and staffing agencies to be on top of their game when it comes to sourcing top talent.  

A huge part of this is understanding the key trends that are shaping the market; and adapting your hiring practices accordingly. In this article, we’ll take you through what some of these trends look like, offering clear insight on how to maximize them to achieve the best results. 

1. Change in Working Patterns 

Gone are the days of the traditional 9-5; especially right now when more people are working from home than ever before due to social distancing measures. At the same time, according to the American Staffing Association, 16 million temporary and contract employees are hired throughout the course of the year; so clearly, temporary workers make up a big part of the U.S. workforce. 

There are a number of reasons why temporary staffing is getting more popular. For the most part, people want more flexibility and working part-time or on a contractual basis gives them the freedom to balance their personal and professional lives effectively. 

Alongside this, according to a study from TrueBlue and Emsi, the main reason why people take on gig work is to earn extra income; followed by a desire to get their foot in the door with a company. 

Additionally, findings from Staffing Industry Analysts show that an estimated 53 million people took on gig work in the U.S. in 2018, with 34% of all U.S. workers performing gig/contingent work last year. 

Clearly, the gig economy represents a shift in employment around the world. Professionals are opting to work on a contractual basis out of necessity and choice. Particularly as there’s little job security in the current economy. 

But what does it mean for your hiring efforts? Well, if you’re finding it difficult to hire full-time employees, it may be worth looking for gig workers instead. It all depends on what your company’s needs are. 

2. Data-Driven Recruitment 

Another trend that hiring professionals need to keep on top of is data-driven recruitment. With more pressure to hire the right people, both cost and time-effectively, many organizations have turned to data to help them make smarter hiring decisions; and avoid unconscious bias. 

It’s particularly useful if you’re working towards key metrics. For example, you may want to measure your hiring velocity to see how efficient your hiring process is; alternatively, you might look at your hiring budget to ensure that you’re not overspending on your hiring campaigns. 

Whichever metric you track, you’ll need to start gathering and analyzing data in order to do it effectively. Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) make this easy to do, but there are other tools you can use such as Google Analytics. 

The type of data you might capture includes: how long it takes for people to complete your application forms, how many clicks on your job adverts convert to applications, how long it takes for your offers to be expected, how much ROI you’re getting on your recruitment tools and so on. 

Once you’ve gathered this data, you can then use it to make informed decisions. For example, if it’s taking too long for people to complete applications (or they’re abandoning them altogether), perhaps you need to cut the form down or re-consider the questions you’re asking. 

Ultimately, you’ll want to use data to make informed decisions, save time and money, and of course, to make sure you’re making quality hires. 

3. Candidate Experience 

Candidates have held the power in the U.S. job market for some time now, and while this might be about to change as unemployment rates soar, the candidate experience remains important.  

After all, people are more likely to accept your offers if they have a positive route to hire; and reputation matters in the current market. For that reason, this is a key hiring trend you need to be on top of. 

This is especially true as there are more avenues for candidates to air their views online than ever before. Whether it’s social media, or employee review sites; people aren’t afraid to share any negative experiences with other prospective candidates, potentially putting them off applying to your jobs, attending interviews, or accepting your job offers. 

So, what makes a positive candidate experience? Well, it all starts with your job advert. You need to write this with the candidate in mind; what do they want to know? What would make them want to apply? Use engaging language and break the copy up with bullet points so it’s easy to read. If your advert is poorly-written or doesn’t make sense, you’ll fall at the first hurdle. 

You then need to think about the application process and next steps. If they have to jump through a number of hoops just to show their interest in the role, they’ll probably abandon it altogether. Similarly, if there’s far too many rounds of interviews, they may lose interest and go with another employer who’s willing to offer them the job quicker. 

Ultimately, communication is key. See it as a relationship-building exercise. In order to get candidates interested in the role and brand, you need to put the work in. Acknowledge applications, keep them up to date throughout the hiring process and don’t wait too long to offer the job. This will speed up your hiring process and improve their experience; it’s a win-win. 

4. Machine Learning & Automation 

We couldn’t talk about hiring trends without mentioning machine learning and automaton. Both have picked up across many industries in recent years, helping to take over some of the more menial tasks and improving the overall user experience. 

In the staffing industry, machine learning may not be something you implement yourself. Indeed, it’s something that industry suppliers are investing in to improve results for users. At Resume-Library, we’ve used machine learning to improve the relevancy of job matches for candidates, ultimately driving more applications to our clients’ vacancies. 

To do this, we manually rated the relevancy of hundreds of thousands of job postings against specific search terms, before feeding this information into a “machine.” The machine is then able to apply this logic to all jobs on our site, ensuring candidates are presented with the most relevant results. 

Another popular way that companies use machine learning and automation in their hiring practices is through resume screening. There are lots of areas of the hiring process that take up time and effort; with screening being one of them. ATS’s like SmartRecruiters are great for this and can help you to make effective, data-driven hiring decisions. 

There are plenty of other areas that can be automated or that can benefit from machine learning. For example, assessment tools can help you understand how well someone will fit in your company and team, and whether they have the ability to do the job. 

Alongside this, there are tools that can help with candidate engagement efforts. Chatbots, for example, are useful for answering any questions applicants might have and/or keeping them up to date on the progress of their application. Interview scheduling tools can help too and save a lot of back and forth between employers and candidates. 

It’s worth considering what areas of your process need streamlining and how you can do this; it might require you to invest in some new technologies. 

Stay on Top of These Trends 

Unfortunately, there are a range of external factors impacting companies’ ability to hire right now. But that’s why it’s more important than ever to stay on top of the latest trends and ensure your hiring process is fit for purpose. 

Take this time to look at its efficiency; are there areas that are slowing it down? Are you spending too much, or too little money? What do candidate say about your brand online and how can you improve this? These are all questions you should be asking yourself. 

Alongside this, it’s worth speaking to your suppliers to see whether they’re staying on top of these trends and how they can help you meet your goals. At Resume-Library, we work in partnership with Smart Recruiters to enable its users to post jobs onto our site directly from their platform; and we’re launching a Resume Search integration very soon.  

Both help to streamline the process and make it a lot smoother for candidates and hiring professionals. 

The post 4 Hiring Trends You Need to Know About in 2022 first appeared on SmartRecruiters Blog.

Talent Acquisition has changed forever. Rising volatility and competition have dramatically changed the way you source talent. Remote work has transformed the way you hire. The great resignation is reshaping how you manage and retain employees. Job openings have reached record heights, putting recruiters under pressure. Clearly, the first generation ATS hasn’t moved fast enough to meet the challenges of the day. What do you need to stay competitive in this new world?

Table of Contents

A traditional ATS is no longer enough
Compelling candidate experience
Engaged hiring managers
Productive recruiters
Take our ATS Quiz!

A traditional ATS is no longer enough

An applicant tracking system, often referred to as an ATS, is a software application that automates the hiring process. Applicant Tracking Systems were originally designed to store job applications and track applicants through the process. Over time, their capabilities expanded to incorporate candidate sourcing and hiring, among other recruitment needs. The problem is that many of these newer functionalities were designed to be process-centric rather than candidate and engagement-centric. Because these new functionalities were bolted on to the legacy solution, and not developed as an integrated tool, the UX is often clunky and not easy for recruiters to use.

Today, organizations need to be agile and engagement-focused to attract, select and hire the best talent at scale. This is achieved when the 3 pillars of Hiring Success are aligned: candidates have a compelling experience, recruiters are productive, and hiring teams are engaged. If you’re struggling to achieve this with your ATS, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s explore some of the critical capabilities you should look for to achieve your hiring goals.  

Compelling candidate experience

Qualified candidates are a lot like prospective customers. They have bargaining power and lots of options. Their entire experience matters – from how candidates learn about your company, to how you interact with them, to the tools they use to apply. To find and engage them, recruiters need to think like marketers. An ATS that only addresses the bottom of the funnel (candidates trying to apply for jobs) will not position your team for hiring success. Instead, you need to look for a robust set of recruitment marketing features that will help you attract passive candidates and engage them towards conversion. 

A career site that’s geared for conversions

Most ATSs offer basic career sites – static job pages with long lists of open positions. This might have worked in the 90s, but in 2022, your career site needs to do a lot more. It should be part of  your recruitment marketing tool belt, and it should be used in a more strategic way. Think about this: about 70% of job seekers start their search on Google. They do some high-level research. They want to educate themselves about the market and their specific role, and possibly your company and your product before they decide to apply. A career site that contains high quality, personalized content that’s optimized for search helps you attract them. We have seen companies using this strategy increase the number of organic search conversions by 40%. 

The success of your career site will also be determined by its ease of use. Candidates want to be able to apply quickly and easily, on the device they choose. Long and drawn out application forms are things of the past. 

Besides an optimized career site, you need tools to build a digital marketing funnel. That’s where programmatic advertising comes in.  

Programmatic job advertising and sourcing 

Your talent acquisition team needs tools that will help them discover top talent, understand what they are looking for and attract them with targeted campaigns. A first generation ATS should help you post jobs to your job page. A second generation ATS should post automatically to job boards, LinkedIn and other channels. A third generation ATS goes further: it intelligently places ads on job boards that drive the highest conversion for each job type, and dynamically shifts budget to the highest priority roles. Modern ATSs need to have a sophisticated job advertising capability that is pipeline aware, automated, and dynamically allocates budget to the highest-converting job boards.

Obviously not everyone who lands on your job postings will be ready to apply. But that’s ok because you can invite them to subscribe to your newsletter or job alerts. Once candidates make it into this talent pool, you need candidate relationship management (CRM) capabilities to nurture them towards conversion. 

Candidate nurturing and talent relationship management

According to Fosway, “Applicant Tracking System vendors without a TRM-offering are at high risk of being replaced.” An ATS with CRM or TRM capabilities helps you nurture candidates and match them with the right roles. This critical functionality should also help you track all touchpoints and candidate journeys in one system, just like you track customers. 

These recruitment marketing capabilities help you find the right talent and engage them with a compelling experience, so you can ultimately convince them to apply. This brings us to the second pillar of hiring success. 

Engaged hiring managers

According to recent findings from Josh Bersin, collaboration between recruiting and hiring managers is the number one indicator of high performance talent acquisition. This is where effective applicant tracking, evaluation and collaboration play a critical role. 

Applicant tracking

The original ATS was designed to move a paper or email-based process to a computerized system so that recruiters could scale. A modern ATS is more like a system of record, a single source of truth across the entire talent acquisition process. It should make it easy for recruiters to work with many different candidates and spot an applicant’s status quickly, across multiple workflows. It should include advanced candidate search functionalities. It should also help you screen and evaluate candidates faster. 

Evaluation

Modern ATSs come with chatbots and automated Q&A or screening tools to help you speed up the evaluation process at the beginning. Some also include AI capabilities that help you screen hundreds of candidates down to dozens, and create a shortlist of potential matches. Once the recruitment team sources the right talent and makes the key connections, it’s up to the hiring team to close the YES candidates. With the right data at hand, the hiring team is better positioned to collaborate with their recruiting counterparts. 

Collaboration

Modern ATSs should foster collaboration with hiring managers so you can make better and more informed decisions. For example, it should enable you to assign focus areas to each interviewer. It should allow interviewers to collaborate on their findings, in a way that minimizes bias and groupthink. It should come with a central messaging engine and let you configure tasks and notifications to keep your team on track. 

Productive recruiters

As we discussed above, talent acquisition teams that are highly productive operate more like marketing and sales teams. We talked a lot about the importance of collaboration throughout the process. Recruiter productivity and hiring optimization are just as important, especially at a time when job openings are at an all-time high. 

Analytics and AI to improve decision-making

Great recruiting teams know “their numbers” and leverage them to not only prioritize tasks across the hiring spectrum, but also provide accurate hiring forecasts and achieve desired business outcomes. A legacy ATS is not positioned to support this. Legacy solutions don’t capture nearly enough data to assess hiring performance. Much less to measure if your hiring process is working for or against the bottom line.

An ATS with robust analytics provides deep insights through trend analyses on historical hiring decisions and dashboards on pipeline performances, with all the data stored in one place. Josh Bersin’s latest study on global TA teams reports that high-impact TA teams are 6x more likely to use AI and predictive analytics and see 30% greater profitability compared to those that don’t use these tools.

Internal mobility

The great resignation is keeping recruiters and HR teams up at night. But according to a recent Sapient Insights survey, only 22% of companies have an internal mobility program in place. Recruiters should be looking for talent internally and externally. The problem is that they don’t have the right tools. Companies are at risk of losing their talent to the competition if they don’t compete on an equal footing. 

A modern ATS should enable you to build an internal career site and build talent pools of team members who are interested in different career paths. Match people to jobs using AI matching and set up internal interviews the same way you do external interviews. 

Onboarding support

Successful recruitment teams also know that the first 3 months of employment are the most vulnerable period. In some industries, a poor onboarding experience can lead to a 22% turnover rate. That’s why many are looking for a comprehensive solution that will address this critical part of the journey as well. Your onboarding process should not just be about legal formalities, it should facilitate a smooth transition from applicant to employee. 

The final word & our ATS Quiz

As Fosway explains, “standalone ATSs that only cover the lower part of the recruitment funnel are a thing of the past.” Your ATS should go beyond workflow automation and candidate tracking. It should incorporate recruitment marketing for active and passive candidates, and career sites that boost your employer brand. It should also facilitate enhanced HR decision making based on your desired business results. Moreover, it should be built for today’s complex talent market, offering you a competitive advantage with internal mobility features and a great candidate experience that’s optimized down to the onboarding stage. 

Take our quiz to find out if you should replace your ATS. 

The post The Benefits & Features To Look For In A Modern Applicant Tracking System (ATS) first appeared on SmartRecruiters Blog.

Most HR professionals can attest that manual reference checking is time-consuming and can become a bottleneck in the recruitment process. First, there’s the inevitable phone tag, and even when we reach someone, finding the right time is tricky. If your referee is on the go, between meetings, or simply focused on business as usual, it can be hard to get a quality reference that truly informs your hiring decision. 

So, how do you get the most out of your reference checks? The answer may lie in online-reference checking, a solution that saves time, money and resources while leading to better quality references. Here’s why. 

Table of Contents

Move fast to secure top talent
Customize questions to uncover the insights you need
Increase the quality of your references
Get more than a reference checking template
Collect references anytime, anywhere – not just on email
Tap into off-market talent
Know your references are genuine
All your information in one place

1. Move fast to secure top talent

According to leading online reference checking platform Referoo, online references can be turned around in as little as 12 hours compared to an average of 3 business days for a manual process. 

In a competitive recruitment market, where top talent may have other offers on the table, this speed can be a significant advantage. In addition, it frees up your HR resources for more strategic activities.

2. Customize questions to uncover the insights you need

Online reference checking allows you to customise questions for each role to elicit the information you need to choose the right candidate. This means you can plan your questions, and you won’t be derailed when the referee says they only have ten minutes. 

Most of us ask the standard questions: What was the candidate’s performance like? Are they a team player? Would you rehire them? But these are usually tailored to past performance, which isn’t always the best indicator. 

Referoo says that the best references come from questions tailored to the specific job at hand. They suggest asking specific questions such as ‘This role involves significant attention to detail. How do you think the candidate will approach this?” 

3. Increase the quality of your references

Catching someone on the fly is never the best way to find out about your prospective hire. With online reference checking, the referee can complete the reference when and where it suits them – and on any device.  

This means you are getting the referee’s full attention, which will ultimately lead to more detailed and considered answers. Exactly what you need to make the best hiring decision. 

4. Get more than a reference checking template

Many organizations look to other manual solutions to increase efficiencies, such as templated reference checking documents. However, these do little to speed up all-important turnaround time and often don’t lead to quality references. 

It’s a clunky way to ask someone to complete a reference too. They either have to go old school and print it, fill it out and scan it back, or complete it in a Word doc, where formatting often doesn’t play ball. In addition, these documents tend to be challenging to complete on mobile or tablets, a no-no in today’s on-the-go and remote world. 

However, with the right online reference checking platform, you can easily create customized templates and then quickly tweak them for candidate and role specifics. So you get all the benefits, efficiency, simplicity, quality, and speed, without any of the hassle. 

5. Collect references anytime, anywhere – not just on email

While we have seen a rise in email reference checking, the reality is that this alone doesn’t cut it. With online reference checking, reference checks can be completed via email, phone or SMS so you can work the way you – and the referee – prefers. 

Having these options is important for all workers in today’s world of flexible hours and remote work. But when it comes to jobs that aren’t office based, such as health care, manufacturing or transport and logistics roles, it’s vital. 

In these industries, your referee isn’t behind a computer checking emails. They’re on a ward, a shop floor or on the tools, often working shift hours, so alternate methods, such as text recruiting, are critical in these contexts. 

6. Tap into off-market talent

Gaining a referee’s full attention doesn’t only lead to more quality references. It also allows you to ask about their own career moves while engagement is high.

This can give you access to a talent pool that may be largely untapped, a potential goldmine in today’s challenging market. In fact, your question might be the prompt for them to realize it is time for a move, and there is a fantastic opportunity to be the first employer they consider.

7. Know your references are genuine

According to Referoo, one in every 17 candidates has lied to get a job, and reference fraud is one of the main contributors. And it makes sense. How do you know the person on the other end of the phone is who they say they are? 

That’s why Referoo offers unrivalled fraud detection features. From IP Address Matching flagging when a candidate and referee have completed the process from the same location to certainty of identity through document and digital ID checks to biometric solutions, for when the stakes are high. 

8. All your information in one place

Online reference checking also helps you remain compliant, making it easy to store and access reference checks. There are no messy notes, no phone call records, just all the referee’s answers precisely as they phrased them, ready and available for easy review on your candidate profile.  

SmartRecruiters has recently introduced an integration between your ATS and the Referoo platform to make it even simpler. This partnership means SmartRecruiters clients get quality references, lightning-fast, directly to their ATS, fully integrated with their existing hiring process. All while saving time, money and resources.  

If your reference checks are causing a headache, contact Referoo to find out how best-in-breed online reference checking could be a game-changer. They’ll even throw in a full, unlimited 14-day free trial for SmartRecruiters users so you can see the platform in action for yourself. 

The post Why An Online Reference Checking Platform May Be A Smart Choice For Your HR Teams first appeared on SmartRecruiters Blog.

Table of Contents

What’s the difference between outbound and inbound recruiting?
Which recruiting approach should you invest in?
Outbound & Inbound Recruiting Checklists
Finalize your inbound and outbound recruiting decisions

Normally, we’d start off an article like this reviewing recent challenges and breaking down buzzwords haunting the talent acquisition industry (hint: one of them rhymes with “Razor Sortage”). 

However, we’re all aware of recent challenges and would like to avoid any extra stress facing recruiters. In fact, it’s that same stress that has pushed talent acquisition professionals to research and consider every approach, practice, and tool imaginable for a return on recruiting investments. 

From those investigations, two approaches to recruitment have been discussed heavily: inbound recruiting and outbound recruiting. 

Now, if you came to this blog hoping that we would pinpoint one approach as the ultimate solution to every single recruiting dilemma, you will be disappointed. 

Instead, we’re breaking down the best use cases of both inbound and outbound recruiting in the context of different roles, industries, and how they address unique challenges. Then, you can decide which will make hiring easier for your organization in 2022. 

What’s the difference between outbound and inbound recruiting?

In essence, inbound recruiting represents a more passive approach to recruiting that relies heavily on talent finding an organization or open job. It prioritizes employer branding and recruitment marketing efforts in hopes that talent will apply for open roles. 

This approach takes shape in a few ways, including social media posts from employers, career sites, and job postings in places like LinkedIn and Indeed. Often, the target audience for this approach is active job seekers who are taking the time to look for and apply for new roles. 

On the other hand, outbound recruiting represents a much more proactive approach to recruiting where talent acquisition teams don’t wait for talent to find their organization – they go out and find talent. 

This approach can also take shape in a few ways, including open web sourcing for talent, directly emailing talent, and more. Often, the target audience for this approach is passive talent who needs to be convinced of why a new opportunity and organization are better suited for them. 

Which recruiting approach should you invest in?

If we look at the market as a whole, we’re definitely experiencing a time where there are more jobs to fill than candidates available. As a result, many talent acquisition teams will not have as many applicants as they usually would for open roles. 

While some organizations may not have faltered in terms of their results with their inbound recruiting approach, there’s an increasing trend towards outbound recruiting practices. Keep in mind your organization does not have to focus solely on one approach. 

Below, we’ve provided checklists that might help you decide how much you’d like to invest in inbound and outbound recruiting.

Outbound & Inbound Recruiting Checklists

Outbound Recruiting ChecklistIn industries, like tech and healthcare, roles are exceedingly difficult to fill. With a high demand for talent, recruiters are going to need to go out and engage talent with competitors doing the same. 

For instance, hireEZ provides access to tech-specific platforms, like Kaggle, GitHub, and Stack Overflow along with tech-specific search parameters to help technical recruiters proactively find and engage talent. If your organization has an ATS, you’re likely sitting on a unique pool of potential hires. Yet, most ATS platforms are filled with outdated information, including recent experiences, skills, and personal projects. 

EZ Rediscovery with hireEZ helps recruiters deduplicate, refresh and navigate candidate profiles during sourcing.If your company is interested in hypergrowth and hiring in short periods of time, relying solely on applicants won’t do the trick. It will be even more difficult for less well-known companies. 

Those organizations will need to be proactive in looking for talent.Looking to engage candidates directly in their inboxes instead of on platforms like LinkedIn? If you’re in a competition-heavy industry, you won’t be the only one reaching out to talent on places like LinkedIn. 

You’ll have to take the time to personalize outreach with access to candidate data and reach them directly.Inbound Recruiting ChecklistNot struggling to receive applicants for open job postings or do not have a time crunch on filling a role.

If you’re receiving hundreds of qualified applicants for each job posting, chances are you won’t need to spend the extra time going out looking for talent. Also, if you don’t have time constraints you can afford to wait for talent to apply.Vested interest in building an employer brand and marketing efforts over an extended period of time.

It’s never a bad idea to constantly keep talent informed about your brand (whether or not they apply for a role) in the long term this will help branding so continuing marketing efforts is beneficial for that. Whether on social media or through other marketing campaigns, continue to push out content about your company that will strengthen your brand and make yourself top-of-mind for future applicants.

Finalize your inbound and outbound recruiting decisions

With every organization having different processes, priorities and challenges, it’s tough to give a one-size-fits-all solution for recruiting. However, with reference to the checklist above, you should be able to determine where your organization may need to lean more heavily into either inbound or outbound recruiting. However, with today’s candidate-driven market, the proactive approach to outbound recruiting is one that more organizations will need to consider as they try to secure talent.

Interested in seeing outbound recruiting in action? Find out how hireEZ can help. 

The post Inbound Recruiting vs. Outbound Recruiting: Which One Makes Hiring Easier In 2022? first appeared on SmartRecruiters Blog.

Career sites are often neglected in the race to attract talent. Historically, they’ve been disconnected from the rest of the recruitment process. But they are a critical tool to build recognition for your employer brand and attract candidates. They’re also a powerful channel to convert qualified candidates into applicants, as well as to develop your talent pool with passive candidates.

The problem is that many of today’s career sites are static pages that present static lists of open positions. Companies are losing candidates to the competition because they have a poor user experience or they’re unimpressed, so they move on. Worse yet, they might not find the career site in the first place because they’re spending time researching on Google before applying, and the site is not optimized for search.

If this sounds all too familiar and you want to improve your hiring, it’s time to upgrade your career site with intelligent functionality. These are the 5 essential elements you need to bake in.

Content Marketing and SEO

A candidate’s journey is similar to a buyer’s journey. Approximately 70% of job seekers start their search on Google. They start by doing some high-level research and want to educate themselves about the market, their specific role, and possibly your company and your product before they decide to apply.

This means it’s now critical to develop a content marketing strategy for your recruitment efforts. If you can answer questions your candidates are asking in search engines with great content about the market, your industry and their profession, you can attract them even before they think about applying for a job.

To ensure this high quality content gets exposure, you need to optimize your career site and individual job pages (on-page SEO), and build up your site’s authority (off-page SEO). 

On-page SEO is about optimizing specific page elements on your career site and individual job posts to improve organic search traffic. For instance, making sure your site ranks high for branded keywords (like “careers at Company Name” or “Job role at Company Name”) and ensuring you use the job posting schema to increase your chances of getting listed in Google for Jobs. 

Off-page career site SEO is about building up your site’s ranking. This goes hand-in-hand with quality content. Start by using a keyword search tool to determine the top job search process queries within your industry. Build your content strategy based on these keywords. Then publish this content regularly on your career site and consider working with third party sites for distribution.  

Getting SEO and content marketing right can help you optimize your job board spend and source more candidates organically since they are engaging with your career site first and foremost. We have seen companies using this strategy increase the number of organic search conversions by 40%.

A Personalized Candidate Experience 

Speaking of content, different people will relate to different content types. Imagine a marketing person lands on your career site and it’s 100% engineering-focused. This will push them away. You’d never build static landing pages for your product to target different audiences. Why should it be different for candidates?

Personalization is a powerful capability to improve the candidate experience. Modern career sites include an intelligent search function, which displays results based on a candidate’s previous searches. Some are equipped with behavioral profiling so you can build real-time interest profiles on visitors. This data can be reported on and used to further personalize the candidate experience on the website. 

Let’s say your candidate is based in the Netherlands and previously searched for marketing manager jobs. With an intelligent career site, you can display country-specific jobs and related blogs about what it’s like to be a remote employee in your marketing team. 

With personalization, you can engage active candidates upfront, show highly targeted jobs instantly, and help them find the right one. It gives you a powerful advantage over the competition, enabling you to convert active candidates more quickly.

Personalization is also helpful to convert passive candidates over time. If you know someone is not actively searching for jobs, you can display a personalized call to action and capture their info in your CRM system to continue engaging with them by email. 

To deliver this type of experience, you also need proper integrations.

Candidate Nurturing with ATS and CRM Integrations

Not everyone who lands on your career site will be ready to apply. Some people might be there to browse your content. Others might want to learn more about your company before starting an application. Integrating your career site with your ATS and candidate CRM enables you to set up talent communities with different interests and skills, and send targeted communications to different candidate segments. Think, for instance, of engaging applicants that abandon their application, and inviting passive candidates to join your talent pool. The overall goal is to engage passive and active candidates with different strategies to get them to convert. 

A Dynamic User Experience Across Devices

Personalization can wow candidates. Nurturing can help you convert potential hires over time.  But you have to make the candidate’s experience easy. According to the Human Capital Institute, 70% of candidates search for jobs on mobile devices. Yet, research by Attrax shows that only 20% of candidates have their CV stored on their phone. Your career site needs to work flawlessly across devices and your user experience needs to be optimized per device type. 

Is the candidate using a mobile device? Give them the option to apply through a chatbot and upload a resume later. Applying on a PC? Let them apply using LinkedIn or upload their resume from a cloud service like Dropbox. 

The key is to make your candidate journey as convenient as possible.

A Direct Line to Connect to the Recruiter

A winning career site is not just high tech. It’s also high touch. Make your career site interactive by giving interested candidates a way to engage with hiring managers or recruiters. Often, the best candidates just want to talk to someone. Featuring the hiring manager for the role can have a big impact. This lets candidates apply or get in touch in a seamless way.

Ready to Build a High-Converting Career Site? 

If your current career site can’t meet candidates where they are in their job search, can’t show them personalized content, and is seeing low conversion rates, consider using a tool like SmartRecruiters Attrax. 

SmartRecruiters Attrax gives you the ability to turn your career site into a content engine and recruitment marketing capability. It helps you build an intelligent career site that provides personalized candidate experiences, while ensuring your web page and job openings are automatically optimized for search. Attrax customers report up to 90% of hires engaging with their company through their career site. 

Join our webinar on March 30 to see it in action. Save your spot.

The post 5 Elements Of An Intelligent, High-Converting Career Site first appeared on SmartRecruiters Blog.

In today’s tight labor market, hiring has become a top issue for HR leaders and even CEOs. Career sites are a crucial tool in the fight for talent. ​​Traditional career sites used to be static web pages with a nice video and job listings, but that’s not good enough these days. I’ve seen countless examples of companies spending lots of money advertising open positions to find great candidates, but falling short when candidates visit career pages that are hard to navigate and boring. Month after month, this leads to low conversion rates while pressure continues to grow for hiring teams. 

A strong career site is the front door to a successful recruiting strategy. It’s where Hiring Success starts. The site creates a first impression, representing the company’s brand and culture, and giving candidates a sense of what it’s like to work there. The problem is that career sites have typically been an afterthought; sometimes they are delegated to an overworked website team who don’t prioritize recruiting needs, or companies deploy the basic career site functionality that comes with HCM software. That might work for the simple task of posting jobs, but it doesn’t help with breaking through on the search engines or getting candidates to push the apply button once they do arrive.

That’s why I’m excited to announce that SmartRecruiters has acquired Attrax. Attrax is a leader in career sites, and has worked with customers to improve candidate traffic and conversion, with some amazing results. They do this by providing simple to use but powerful site building tools that recruiting teams can use directly. The resulting sites have dynamic and personalized content, and jobs can be automatically indexed by major search engines to make them easier to find. And, when candidates are truly engaged from start to finish, return on investment becomes that much higher. In this war for talent, we’re ready to help our customers win! 

But for me, the possibilities get even more exciting when we integrate these powerful Attrax career sites with the SmartRecruiters applicant tracking system that TA teams use to run the recruiting process. Just think, we can use information stored in SmartRecruiters, such as job posting priorities, hiring budget, or even candidate profiles, and update the career site in real time. We can take the data that we are collecting at each step of the recruiting process, including what we learn in the marketing phase, and get a better understanding of what is working and what is not. We can streamline candidate interactions, creating 1-click experiences to express interest or apply or even schedule an interview. The possibilities are endless. The integration of Attrax and SmartRecruiters will allow for the first time true Intelligent Career Sites that are optimized based on activity taking place in the ATS. 

Today, the first impression of a candidate is usually not a handshake, it’s your career site. You have the opportunity to inspire curiosity and action. To showcase your employer brand, the impact of their potential role, and the social mission of your company. To create a connected experience from the first moment they meet you (“Hi”) to the moment you make a successful hire (“Hired”). I look forward to seeing what we can do together.

To learn more about SmartRecruiters Attrax, view our product page.

The post Improve Hiring Velocity And Candidate Conversions With An Intelligent Career Site first appeared on SmartRecruiters Blog.