We’ve improved our technology!
At Talentoday, we are focused on continuous improvement and in order to offer users with a more intuitive representation of candidates’ and employees’ Target Profile matching scores, we have slightly altered the science behind them. The new technology provides actionable data that is easier to understand and analyze.
We have improved our algorithm for our clients and in turn enhanced our performance. Our new method for computing the matching score allows us to be consistent with the matching visualization. This change allows for the following:
- Easy to understand matching score and improved analysis process.
- Users will know which criteria are the most essential because the criteria are now numbered in order of importance.
- Increased value for our candidates and employees, who will now be be able to better understand the the skills that are most important in their current or future role.
Matching Score vs Matching Visualization: How they come together
The matching score was initially built by taking into account the 28 criteria scores we measure at Talentoday. In comparison, the matching visualization, based off the Target Profile, considers the 8 most predominant criteria for the targeted population. This technical decision was originally made to obtain a matching score as precise as possible, which takes into account the subtle variations provided by the whole pattern of criteria scores. Because the score was measured against 28 criteria and the visualization on 8 there was some unneeded discrepancy.
To simplify things, we will now compute matching scores and matching visualizations based on the 8 predominant criteria from a targeted population. This will then ensure that we have matching scores that are consistent with the matching visualization. This is achieved through a proximity calculation, i.e. the matching score computation is only based on the 8 most predominant criteria previously identified by our machine learning algorithm.
Another cool aspect of the new technology is the numbering of criteria in order of importance. Recruiters and managers can now easily pinpoint the essential criteria for a given role which can aid in the final decision making process.
If users experience questions we would love to chat. Please feel free to reach out to our support team. With this positive technology modification, some changes in matching score are to be expected.
This update will make the peoples’ experience more consistant and intuitive without changing users interaction with our platform.
We have much more to come as the year draws to a close. Our roadmap is packed with new ways to make our customers lives easier, and we look forward to sharing these with you soon.
For more information on other recent releases feel free to check out our blog. As always, your feedback is so important to us. If you wish to share and get in touch with us, give us a shout out on social media!
Personality is the catalyst for career performance.
Personality at work has never been more important. More and more recruiters are using personality assessments to evaluate candidates for hiring and job placement.
Although personality represents a small portion of what we’re like at work, it is the catalyst that leads to positive outcomes within an organization in the long run. Afterall, happy employees are motivated employees that drive success to a company.
Understanding a person’s natural specific traits and behaviors at work is essential for two reasons:
- First, it can predict how the individual will interact and behave with others in a group or team.
- Second, personality data identifies whether the individual fits with the tasks and responsibilities required for the position.
Consider traits such as communication and decision-making — for example. Both crucial performance elements for understanding and predicting work performance at an individual and organizational level.
Let’s take a closer look at the two traits mentioned:
Communication
We all know that communication is very important. And spending 8+ hours a day with coworkers certainly requires great communication skills.
A recurring problem we see in recruitment these days is recruiters heavily relying on resumes to screen candidates. Meanwhile, candidates are attempting to convince recruiters of soft skills they do not actually possess. Some will go out of their way to say that that they are “fantastic communicators” simply because they want the job… uh-oh!
So now what? Recruiters are finding that experience and education do not determine the way employees communicate with each other — but in fact, their personalities.Communication is a fundamental element in coworker relationships. The ability to express and communicate can make or break a team.Therefore knowing and understanding the traits and behaviors that form a candidate’s character is essential for predicting how he or she will interact and behave with others in the long term.
Decision making
Personality plays a huge role in the decision making process. Many of us are aware that there are multiple ways to make decisions. From a logical point of view, a decision should be made based on a high potential of achieving success. Yet this is not always the case, as decisions could be colored by a person’s values and motivations. For example, a daring and adventurous employee, may be quick and even impulsive in making decisions. While on the contrary, an analytical employee may need to contemplate every angle before weighing in on a decision.
Hence, organizations are beginning to recognize the importance of personality when looking for candidates to fill job openings. Different roles require different skill sets and aptitudes, and most certainly different personalities. Not everyone is meant to be in leadership position; not everyone has the grit to be a customer contact; and not everyone has the drive to hit sales quotas.
Research studies show that the relationship between personality traits and job performance, using data from tens of thousands of employees significantly predict job performance (Barrick & Mount, 1991). To add, some jobs more than others are sensitive to the affect personality has on performance. Those jobs include positions in sales, customer service and leadership.
Therefore, paying attention to personality traits and motivation drivers is not only prudent but mandatory when hiring or developing talent. Matching the right personality along with the right skills to each job is as important as evaluating a person’s training and hard skills set off of a resume.
By identifying individuals who have a matched personality profile to a job, sourcing becomes simpler.
Try screening employees within your company and select someone that has the soft skills to get the job done right and can be trained to acquire the hard skills. You may be surprised and discover potential high performance sales professionals that are hiding in your organization; and personality assessment tools will help you identify them!
Curious to find out if your candidates have the right personality traits for the job? Start your free trial today and test your candidate quickly & effectively for free!
Talentoday Manager updates
We’ve improved a few core features that we hope you’ll love. Our biggest updates are improved candidate communication, report file transfer, and Talentoday Analytics changes. Here are the headline features in the last month:
- TM analytics is now available for all Talentoday managers.
- Talentoday account owners can now see individual details by the manager to help monitor usage and results.
- Managers are now able to send a reminder email to all candidates who have not completed the personality assessment.
- Managers can now send the personality report directly on the platform.
- Lastly, we have now extended our Snapshot report to all users including those who do not have a Talentoday Manager account.
TM Analytics
Talentoday Analytics allows managers to monitor their usage on the Talentoday portal. Managers are able to easily keep track of the number of individuals they have assessed, the number requests they have sent out and the reports they have downloaded. This feature also includes analytics on the Target Profiles that managers have used and created to match people against a profile.
The owner of the Talentoday Manager account can also keep tabs on their other managers and see a break down of the requests being sent and the reports being downloaded by each manager. A number of other features are currently in the works and will be released in the coming months!
Candidate Communication
In order to save our managers time and improve communication between them and their candidates we have added a couple features to make life easier.
When managers send out a link for their candidates to take the test they expect a swift response. The last thing most busy managers want to do is keep track of who has taken the test and who has not. Talentoday does this automatically and now offers the ability to send a reminder email to the individuals who have not completed their test. This is a pre written email that can be sent and is automatically personalized with the click of a button.
In response to customer feedback, we have also made it much easier for managers to send reports on the platform. In the past managers would have to download the report as a PDF before sending out to candidates. Now on the platform you can simply click send and an email will automatically be filled and sent to the individual.
Snapshot Report
A few months back we launched our new Snapshot report, a 1 page report on an individual’s talents, development areas, professional behaviors and motivations in the workplace. It was created to help recruiters and managers understand their candidates soft skills quickly so they can spend more time speaking with the right individuals.
Although we have not changed the report itself, we have now made this available to all of our Talentoday users. Now when individuals take the test, they will have access to their personality radar & their snapshot report, for free.
For more information on other recent releases feel free to check out our blog. As always, your feedback is so important to us. If you wish to share and get in touch with us give us a shout out on social media!
The new Target Profile visualization
Talentoday has committed to its customers a digital platform that is current and dependable. In that spirit we would like to thank our 100+ customers for their loyalty and feedback over the past year. With input from our clients and hard work from our designers, psychologists and data scientists we are excited to announce our new visualization for the Target Profile. Here’s an overview of the headline updates:
- Analysis of the clusters is easier than ever due to the visual consistency between our personality and motivation radars with our Target Profile radar.
- Introduced a new color and increased contrast of the motivation cluster.
- Target Profile zones allow customers to easily draw conclusions about the results.
- Target Profile traits are now ranked by degree of importance. In other words, you now clearly know the most essential traits that contribute to a profile.
- To simplify the radar we have now made it standard to show 8 traits for a profile, no more, no less.
Visual consistency
Target Profiles empower our counselors and trained users to make the links between the personality reports and their decisions. We have changed the cluster colors displayed on the target profile to increase the visual consistency of all the radars we use at Talentoday. Why is this important? Our Target Profile technology matches personality & motivation radars against a profile from our library to create a Target Profile radar. The new visualization allows our clients to quickly analyze the results and make deductions from the data to make strong and confident decisions.
Increased contrast on Motivation Radar
We all know that keeping employees motivated is essential to fully functioning teams. This is one of the key features of our motivations radar and a big reason we have spent time on its look and feel. We have introduced the orange motivation color and increased contrast to ensure that our users do not confuse colors on the two radars.
Introducing: Target Profile Zones
Take a look at the graph below. See that yellow thing there? That is a trait. This new look provides a clear way to analyze the data. This “zone” shows us that a specific trait for this Target Profile must score between 6 and 8 to be a good match. Clients use this visualization to understand if their candidates’ scores are falling within the zone of the trait. In conjunction with these zones we have included a legend and explanation at the beginning of Target Profile reports. Our clients are now fully equipped with the training they need to read and analyze the report.
TP key traits are ranked by degree of importance
We have now added more information regarding ranking of important traits for each Target Profile. This new information helps you understand which traits are most relevant for a Target Profile. We emphasize the essential traits and motivators and list the additional traits we see as valuable for a given position. Customers are able to understand what is important within each profile and what traits to focus on while interviewing candidates for an open position or considering how to motivate/satisfy a current employee.
8 traits are displayed and ranked
Lastly, in order to standardize the Target Profile we now limit the number of traits shown in a Target Profile to 8. This allows for relevant comparisons between Target Profiles and makes drawing meaningful conclusions about candidates & employees quick and successful. Clusters are also ordered clockwise based on their accuracy. In the photo below, “CREATIVITY” is the most important zone, “EASE IN PUBLIC” the second most important, and so on.
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The Target Profile visualization is a free update for everyone with an active license. If you need to renew your license, you’ll get Talentoday Manager with this in addition to many updates we have released in recent months.
Do let us know what you think of this new visualization — we’d love to hear from you. If you have questions or feedback, you can get in touch with us via our support page or join in the conversation on Twitter, or on our Facebook page.
Stay tuned for news about V2 of the Target Profile Visualization— we’re already working hard on it!
Top 3 worldwide recruiting trends in 2017
We recently hosted Silicon Valley Recruiters Association (SVRA) at our San Francisco office. The highlight was the panel of 6 experts who spoke about the top problems recruiters face, the importance of data driven soft skills analysis, and the overall trends they foresee for recruiting in 2017 and beyond. Watch the full replay here.
Today we will be featuring the insights of panelist Sankar Venkatraman who has been the Group Product Marketing Manager at LinkedIn for the last five years.
Venkatraman presented data from LinkedIn’s 2017 Annual Global Recruiting Trends Report in which over 4,000 recruiters spanning 35 countries were interviewed about challenges they face, the trends that will define the future of recruiting, how they spend their budgets and where they would like to invest in the future.
Biggest Challenge Recruiters Face: Competition for Talent
According to LinkedIn, by far the greatest challenge recruiters face is competition for talent. Venkatraman simply described this as “how do I stand out in the workplace?” He talked about how he believes LinkedIn initially created this problem because it made it very easy for people to source and find people. The problem is no longer “how do I find a java engineer” but “how do I make it clear that my company is the best place for this java engineer?” He made an interesting connection between this problem and a future trend of recruiting, soft skills, connecting the dots of problem and potential solution, stating that “Talentoday is in the right space for the upcoming 5 years”. Understanding and valuing a candidate’s soft skills and professional motivators will be more important than ever when placing people in the right jobs.
Top Trends that Define the Future of Recruiting
In addition to the biggest challenges recruiters will face, Venkatraman walked us through the top trends projected by LinkedIn. He focused much of his attention on automation. The data shows that recruiters report limited headcount and budget yet hiring demands are growing. Let’s take a closer look at the top three trends you can expect to see in the next 5 years of recruiting.
1. Diversity of Candidates
Not only does hiring diverse candidates boost innovation and creativity in the workplace, but by focusing on diversity over time, recruiting success is increased. As we mentioned earlier, competition is the greatest challenge we face as recruiters, and research indicates that diversity attracts talent. According to a Glassdoor survey, two-thirds of people value diversity as important when deciding where to work, the numbers increasing up to 89% of minority job seekers.
It is important to implement this now as it takes time to build a diverse workforce; culture doesn’t pop up overnight. Having a diverse set of employees can also help decrease turnover rates. The same Glassdoor survey said the majority of people wish their employers were doing more to foster diversity — don’t let lack of diversity be the reason your talent is walking out the door early.
*We will be doing a follow up blog with more tips and tricks on how to recruit a diverse population as other panelists went into this in detail, stay tuned!
2. Soft Skills Assessment
When talking trends, soft skills assessment paired with automation were the meat and potatoes of Venkatraman’s presentation. He started by stating the obvious — recruiters are busy. Their teams typically aren’t growing while other teams at their companies’ are. What does this mean for recruiting trends? In this conversation, it boiled down to the screening process. Recruiters need less “noise”. According to Venkatraman, it’s not about how many applicants you have but how many quality applicants you have. Data can help reduce the workload of recruiters and narrow down the quantity of resumes to fewer quality candidates.
There are two main ways that data can help with screening. The more obvious being automated screening which we will get to next in our third vtrend, innovative interviewing tools. The second is that automation can offer a more precise soft skills assessment.
Understanding the hard skills of an individual is pretty straight forward. They have the skill, or they do not. But what is more important these days is an individual’s ability to learn. You can teach someone to code in Javascript but you cannot teach them to have a strong work ethic, how to lead or how to be creative. These are innate traits that are formed over the course of a lifetime, traits that would be nice to know about when hiring for your company. The future, as Venkatraman mentioned will rest on assessments that allow you to measure these traits quickly yet thoroughly.
3. Innovative Interviewing Tools
The other piece to the automation process is innovative interviewing tools. As we mentioned, automation is key. Venkatraman stated how it is imperative for efficiency that recruiters are not screening through millions of candidates for a single job. Automation brings speed and also minimizes human bias which may increase diversity (see how these are all related). Utilizing platforms like HireRight to automate background checks or Hireart to preform video screening of candidates are just a few examples of the tools out there to help simplify interview success.
To summarize, large companies will be focusing on big data to help them attract the most diverse and best talent in the future of recruiting. If you would like to watch the interview with Sankar Venkatraman or the full panel of talent speakers, you can watch here. Stay tuned for more blogs on the other panelists.
— Talentoday
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Talentoday Snapshot is now live
Since the recent release of our customizable personality report, our team has been hard at work with a brand new feature. Recruiters and managers have been asking for a summary report where they can quickly and efficiently get a high level overview of their candidates.
According to Forbes Magazine, 118 candidates apply for a given role. That is a lot of resumes. With more and more applicants coming through the system, less time is spent going through the details. In order to simplify the process of understanding a candidates personality and soft skills we have come out with Snapshot.
Snapshot is a 1 page report on a candidates talents, development areas, professional behaviors and motivations in the workplace. It was created to help recruiters and managers understand their candidates soft skills quickly so they can spend more time speaking with the right individuals.
For those who are new to Talentoday technology, we have a quick yet full scale personality assessment, based on psychometrics, that is sent from our online platform. Recruiters and managers can manage their employees and candidates from the platform and can leave comments, reviews, download a fully customizable personality and motivations PDF or the new 1 page Snapshot.
They can also create Target Profiles which they can then match a candidate against to see if they are a good fit for the open position. We have recently released new updates to our Target Profile technology and creating job profiles is easier than ever.
Stay tuned for more product news. In 2017 we have recommitted to providing our customers with a product of excellence.
Curious to find out if your candidates have what it takes? Start your free trial today and test your candidates quickly & effectively for free!
Fully customizable personality reports
We are pleased to announce that we have launched a time saving feature to our personality and motivations report. The report (scientifically formulated for managers, counselors, HR professionals, and recruiters) provides information to better understand the person you are assessing. It is an in depth look at the individual assessed with our science and contains insights on an individual’s personality, motivations and predictive professional behaviors.
In the past, downloading the whole report produced a lengthy document, which was great, but customers have been asking for the option to have a more refined document.
We seek to make your life simpler. So we have taken our in depth report and made it completely customizable. This means you can pick and choose the sections you would like to include in your download. If you only want to see the personality radar* then great! We will pop out a nice 3 page report for you. If you want the whole kit and caboodle, thats great too! Your wish is our command, in just a matter of seconds.
*personality radar: is a look at an individuals soft skills and is provided when someone takes our questionnaire.
This new feature also comes with a slick new design that is easy to present and easy for users to read. Kevin Lanceplaine US Engineering VP for Talentoday explains:
“By engaging with our clients frequently, we are constantly improving our products. Using cutting-edge design and internal communication tools we are able to translate this valuable feedback from our customers into actionable design changes, rapidly. The latest iteration comes with a sleeker design and next level customization”
This release is one of many updates our team has been working on early this year. We have also expanded our Target Profile Library and launched a new labels technology that allows you to easily tag and build large profiles in just a couple of clicks. Stay tuned for additional product updates and releases over the coming months. We are excited for what is to come.
Curious to find out if your candidates have what it takes? Start your free trial today and test your candidates quickly & effectively for free!
We Expanded our Target Profiles
We are excited to announce the addition of 25 Target Profiles to our growing library. For those of you that need a refresher, a Target Profile is the special sauce of our recruiting and HR management technology because it allows professionals to compare employees and candidates against a pre made profile. These 215 profiles range from Sales Associate to Graphic Designer and were created by combining an algorithm with our database of over 3 million individuals. The addition of the new 25 profiles means you can measure candidates against even more pre made profiles.
Want to see what one of these profiles looks like? Scope the picture below, it shows the Sales profile which was derived from all sales professionals in our database and then analyzed for similarities in personality and motivation. Sales people tend to have high determination, are at ease in public and have a lower* score in vision. (*At Talentoday there is no such thing as a negative score but rather a score that is going to help you do your job more efficiently) So when you are hiring someone to fit this role you want to be sure they have the essentials.
At the end of the day, our goal is to make your job easier so that you have time for the things that matter most. We have improved the project management process for our clients and using our science we have expanded the reach of the library.
The science behind the profiles is explained by Matthieu de Beaucorps, Data Scientist for Talentoday. “A profile is created by regrouping at least 30 customers’s assessment results that have the same job title. We then use this group’s data to train a binary classifier whose role is to distinguish, given some new questionnaire answers, this particular job from all other jobs. The two dozen profiles were built with our training algorithm which uses decision tree classifiers.”
All that to say that our Target Profile technology is constantly evolving and we are excited to continually add to the growing database. Want to learn more? Check out our science page to get the full scoop.
Curious to find out if your candidates have what it takes? Start your free trial today and test your candidates quickly & effectively for free!
Put more money in your wallet $$
How to Narrow the Qualified Candidate Pool and Increase Millennial Retention Rates
There are two simple ways to increase your commission as a recruiter. One, place more candidates. Two, increase candidate retention rates. While you may have heard these before, what you have not heard are the following secrets to actually put the money in your wallet. So, let’s dig in.
Place more candidates by talking to less of them.
I know what you’re thinking, there is only so much time in the day, so placing more candidates seems impossible with the workload you’re already carrying with your current volume of candidates. The biggest issue with recruiting productivity is that we are talking to far too many candidates on a surface level. A study done by Deloitte on US spending in recruiting stated it takes an average of 52 days to fill an open position, up from 48 days in 2011. The issue we are facing is that hundreds of qualified candidates are applying to several jobs with a few clicks from their laptops at home. On average, each corporate job opening attracts 250 resumes. Of these candidates, four to six will be called for an interview and only one will be offered the job.
The way that candidates automate their job hunt with job databases is matched with a lack of automation on the recruiting side — hence the backup. It’s no surprise that 90% of recruiters say the market is candidate-driven in 2015, up from 54% in the second half of 2011.
It’s easy enough to talk to less candidates, but the fears arise — how do I know if I’m leaving a qualified candidate behind? How do I get a read on candidate soft skills without some sort of interview? Would you believe me if I told you these processes are becoming automated? Companies such as Talentoday, a people analytics solution, provide an automated personality test that is backed by data science and psychology to help you weed through your pile of 250+ candidate applications. They provide you with a job fit percentage that helps you quickly determine which candidates are most compatible with the job you are seeking to fill based on soft skills. Go ahead and re-read that, I did indeed say soft skills!
They do this with their speedy yet effective personality test. It will drastically narrow your candidate pool by comparing candidates against a job profile that you create online. Quality time with fewer qualified candidates means dollar signs on your end.
Finally, something to even the playing field for recruiters in response to the surge of applicants! So what to do with all this extra time… well, you can finally get back to talking to the people who are truly interested and equipped for the position. Another important plus is you now have room to take a extra time to coach your candidates into retention, because nothing is worse than doing all of the work to get someone in the job to find out they left and see that commission refunded.
Increase retention by coaching your millennial candidates on how to ask for what they want.
If you aren’t already, you are bound to be working with a majority of millennials and this generation has no problem leaving jobs, unlike their baby boomer parents. Most Baby Boomers (41%) said workers should stay with an employer at least five years before looking for a new job — only 13% of Millennials agreed.
So let’s get to know our millennial audience and what they want. Here are a few facts from Glassdoor:
- Nearly 80% of Millennials look for people and culture fit with employers, followed by career potential. (Collegefeed, March 2014)
- 64% of Millennials would rather make $40K a year at a job they love, than $100K a year at a job they think is boring. (The Columbus Dispatch, Study Conducted by the Intelligence Group, 2014)
- 46% of Millennials left their last job due to lack of career growth. (Glassdoor survey, March 2013)
What is the theme here? POTENTIAL and GROWTH! Millennials are young and starry-eyed. They think they can have their dream career and they will keep moving until they are happy.
So how do we get them to stay? The first step is understanding how they are motivated. If you end up using a tool like Talentoday they provide you with a complete motivations radar that will give you an inside look on what makes your candidate tick. You can then encourage your millennial candidates to have conversations with their managers about growth within the company.
Tell them that instead of “peacing-out” of the job because they are bored or unhappy, to ask for things that keep them motivate them to come into work in the morning. Drive home that candidates should not be afraid to ask for what they want in the job they are in whether that be pay, flex time off or the ability to work from home. Not only will they possibly stay longer at their job, but they will love you as their recruiter for giving them some much needed career success advice!
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.
Target Profiles with labels
As our Target Profiles evolve, so does the flow we use to create it. Talentoday Managers are now able to assign labels to groups of people, allowing them to easily create Target Profiles and match candidates to those profiles. When our customers expressed interest in quickly assessing high volumes of individuals we responded with a workflow that is fluid, fast and completely user friendly. So what does all this mean? Well, it means your job just got a whole lot easier.
Here is how it works:
1. Invite candidates
You can invite up to 500 candidates at a time to take the personality assessment. Just copy and paste from excel and the invitation to take the test is sent in just on click.
2. Label candidates
Once you have invited individuals to take the personality assessment, you are prompted to add a label to the group. This will help you easily navigate to your group when creating your target profile in the next step. When you are assessing 200+ people this can be extremely useful and save you loads of time.
3. Create a Target Profile (in just a few clicks)
Now its time to create a Target Profile so you can match candidates or employees against it. Target Profiles allow companies to see the traits and motivations of a selected group. This can be extremely useful for measuring if someone fits with the company culture, if they fit in a role, or if they mesh with the team dynamic.
4. Match candidates against the profile:
Matching candidates against a Target Profile is the true essence of Talentoday’s technology. Our matching technology gives you a high level overview of who will excel at your company.
Features built for a quick comparison
Using labels creates a seamless and automatic experience. We understand that time is money, which is why we are always looking for ways to make your processes more efficient.
Suffice to say, this launch is just the beginning of our vision for Talentoday. We’d love to hear what features you think we should consider building next, so drop us a line on Facebook and Twitter.
Curious to find out if your candidates have what it takes? Start your free trial today and test your candidates quickly & effectively for free!