December 2016 – Talentobe

Quick and easy tips for getting ahead of hiring in the new year

As the cyclic trends of hiring goes, there is typically a lull in hiring at the end of the year. Despite the temptation to leave things until next year, this is in fact a critical time to get your ducks in a line for a peak hiring season in January.

With extra time on their hands away from the office, job seekers are going to be on the hunt for their next job. While hunting down candidates is not ideal during the holiday season, ensuring that your job needs are visible online can ensure you have a pile of worthy resumes in your inbox come January 1st.

1. Utilize social media platforms

Social media platforms are for the most part free, easy ways to connect with job seekers. Before you head out for the new year, take time to post something on your company’s LinkedIn stating that you are hiring, or better yet post a link to the careers page on your website with the specific jobs you are hoping to hire in the new year.

Not sure what positions you will be filling or what your numbers will be until year end? You can still use the platforms to build your brand identity. Job seekers, especially millennials, care about the culture of your company and will be looking for that when searching for their next job. Team up with your marketing team to show a little of your company’s unique personality. Better yet, post a personality test that is designed to show employees motivations and help them find the right job, increasing job retention, talk about a win-win! Not only will you be attracting people who care about being in a job where they are happy and inspired (therefore performing best) but you will be showing that you care about them too.

2. Be quick to respond

If you don’t get a flood of applicants through the holiday season or you work for a smaller company, I would consider dedicating a small amount of time bi-weekly during your time off to respond to applicants. It can be a one-lined, quick response with the applicant’s name saying something simple like: “Thank you for your interest in the position, Andrew! I am out of the office until 1/2/2017 but will get back to with what’s next then. Enjoy the New Year!” Reaching out in this way will create a positive first impression with the candidate who is more likely than not applying to several other positions at different companies.

If you work at a larger company where a personal response to each applicant would take a team the entire vacation to respond to, make it a goal to prioritize getting back to the candidates as soon as you get back to the office. Do not worry about filtering through the resumes or the available positions first, or you will not be responding until weeks, maybe months later.

3. Consider using HR analytics in the new year

The new year is the perfect opportunity to pitch your vision for what hiring will look like at your company in the new year. Hiring analytics are becoming increasingly popular and for good reason. Below are a few reasons to jump on the hiring analytic train. Here’s what Forbes thinks about it:

Analytics serve as trustworthy future-casters (think HR’s crystal ball)
It increases ROI
It take out the guesswork
Hiring becomes more efficient and effective
Promotes more in-house promotions
It pays for itself

As you coast into the new year, remember that a little bit of planning for 2017 can have big payoffs. Happy hiring in 2017!

— Allie Powers

Curious to find out if your candidates have what it takes? Start your free trial today and test your candidates quickly & effectively for free!

Let’s face it, recruiting can be difficult. Let us help. Check out our other posts about hiring trends, tips and tricks.

by Alessandro Lambiase

Magical Beasts and how to hire them.

Hiring for your start up? Become a hiring wizard with this free webinar and these recruiting tips.

If you are an entrepreneur you want nothing short of mystical candidates. Individuals that make something out of nothing and can conjure a lead out of thin air. Whether your company has been around for one month or one hundred years, when you’re expanding into a new market, you have to hire with a start-up mentality. Hiring is an incredible opportunity, but it’s also a risk. As a start-up, you have fewer resources, so if a new hire doesn’t work out, it causes significant burden to the rest of the team. And if you’re managing a new team from a distance, the stakes are even higher. No pressure, but who you hire can make or break your start-up’s success!

If you want to learn all the ins and outs of recruiting for small companies and large companies alike tune into our free webinar on December 14th. Not only will you leave with valuable knowledge on how to assess your candidates soft skills & hard skills but we will also delve into the interview process and how to detect what is beyond the curtain. A professional recruiter give you her insights and you will leave with the tools to play psychologist and truly choose a candidate for the long haul.

But wait there is more..

In the mean time, lets discuss the traits you should look for in a candidate so you can land the perfect person for your company.

Interviewing is obviously the biggest tool recruiters currently use to find the right fit for a team. Interviewing candidates is an art, both from the interviewer and the interviewee standpoints. Some candidates are great at selling themselves, others more reserved. It could be they grew up in a culture where self-promotion was considered a vice, not a virtue, and not indicative of how well they’d perform in a role. Some recruiters are better than others at bringing out the best in candidates in a conversation.

So how do you know if a candidate will fly or flounder in your company’s entrepreneurial culture? Look for these traits:

Accountability: Determine how the candidate owns his or her work. Notice if he or she answers questions with “I” or “We”. It’s imperative in a start-up that employees take full responsibility for their roles, tasks and actions.
Self-motivation: In a start-up you don’t have as much time for rah-rah speeches and trying to light a fire under your team. You need an employee who has an intrinsic desire to work hard and perform well.
Flexibility: One day the goal might be sales, the next traffic. Mission statements and organization charts evolve quickly. To succeed in a start-up, one must be able to adapt to change.
Skill/Education: Certainly, having the right skills and education for a role brings results. The closer a candidate matches the expertise you need the less time they’ll need to be trained.
Passion: Believing in the mission of your company and having a passion for the work you’re doing is key for start-up company employees. It’s what will keep them going in the middle of the night before a big launch.
Resourceful: An ideal start-up employee knows how to solve problems, often with little resources. Like business Macgyvers, they can make big things happen with Excel and a couple of paper clips.

You don’t have to rely on hours of subjective interviews to figure out if your candidate is “the one.” Identifying a candidate’s personality traits objectively can be done using a people analytics tool like the Talentobe Manager. Here’s an example profile of a real person who is currently successful at a start-up. As you can see, with one glance you can identify areas of strength to match the profile you need.

Talentobe further identifies her as a great start-up candidate with these insights:

Creativity 8 / 10: She likes to be innovative and find original solutions. She is not very conventional.

Stress Management 8 / 10: She finds it easy to keep her cool in stressful situations. She performs well under pressure.

Motivations — Security 1 / 10: She does not need security in her work; she likes to take risks.

Motivation — Need for Relations 9 / 10: She is motivated by teamwork and relations with others are very important.

The most important asset a start-up has is its people. When reviewing your candidates, identifying their personality traits is even more important than evaluating their skills. With the right personality traits, an employee can gain experience and move up the ladder, developing into exactly the long-term magical beast you always dreamed of.