Harnessing the Full Power of People Analytics

We all know that recruiting has inherent risk. A CareerBuilder survey found that nearly three in four employers have hired the wrong person for a position. Bad hires not only have a negative financial impact, but can reduce productivity and be a blow to company morale. Even if your initial hire is spot-on, keeping talented employees on board can be extremely challenging. That’s where people analytics comes in. It’s likely you’ve heard or read this phrase before — but what does it really mean?

People Analytics — The Short Version

HR Technologist defines people analytics as “the deeply data-driven and goal-focused method of studying all people processes, functions, challenges and opportunities at work to elevate these systems and achieve sustainable business success.” Simply put, people analytics is:

  • Data driven — you need to gather data and use it
  • Goal-focused — you need to know how the data will be used and what you want to improve

For human resource and staffing professionals, people analytics has the ability to transform the entire talent lifecycle, from recruitment, assessment and hiring to team building and development. McKinsey data shows that people analytics can lead to an 80% increase in recruiting efficiency and a 50% decrease in attrition. It can also help reduce bias in hiring by bringing in a diverse slate of candidates and create more inclusive workplaces by identifying discrimination.

It’s Only as Good as the Data

As with all science-driven solutions, people analytics is only as good as the data it’s being fed. While certain hard skills and experiences are easy to quantify, understanding soft skills and behavioral factors that determine lasting success requires sophisticated technology.

To get good data, you first need to identify your priorities and objectives. Are you trying to reduce the cost of candidate screenings? Improve the quality of your hires? Create a more diverse workforce? Upfront planning allows you to develop a rigorous candidate assessment, including customized interview questions, that gets to the root of each individual’s personality traits and behavioral and motivational factors. Some data points you may want to consider include:

Once the data is gathered and analyzed, it needs to be compiled in such a way that is accessible to the people that use it. For most of us, visual data representation provides a clear and concise picture that captures our attention and allows us to process the information more quickly.

How Can it Help Your Organization?

People analytics is critical for making better, more informed hiring decisions. While intuition is a valuable tool during recruiting, it shouldn’t be used in a vacuum. Instead, combining your gut instinct with science that uses algorithms and predictive analytics to develop a more accurate and complete talent profile will yield greater success.

Beyond hiring, people analytics is valuable for any area where people are involved in your business, including how you can leverage employee strengths for both the organization’s advantage and the individual’s career growth. Here are a few common examples of areas that businesses can benefit from gathering and using data throughout the employee life cycle:

It’s also important to note that people analytics should never be static. It needs to be a dynamic activity that evolves with individuals and teams as they move through the employment life cycle. The more employees and talent leaders use it, the more value and insights it delivers.

Where do I start?

If you’re looking to make a better placement, team building, and development decisions for employees and teams, assessing soft skills using people analytics software is a great place to start. To learn more about our scientifically-backed assessments, including MyPrint® and Talentoday Manager, email us at customer@talentoday.com. We believe that once you have more information about the personality and motivations of your employees, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions grounded in science.


Better Assess Your Workforce Using Group DNA

Every living organism is made up of a unique genetic code of DNA. Although the same organic components are used the outcomes can be vastly different from one another. The same thing goes with teams. Think of your work team as a strand of DNA. Some team members might share certain common traits with one another, and those become a prominent part of your overall team behavior. Similarly, having variety in your strengths can also increase team synergy. Losing parts of your team, rearranging responsibilities, or adding more members to your group can all impact the outcomes, and being able to effectively measure and assess your workforce enables you to understand and guide your team to reach their full potential.

Assessing for hiring

There are multiple things to consider when assessing a new hire for your team. Having a thorough understanding of their background and skills, for example, are important for making sure that the individual has the ability to do the job. These things can be assessed using various methods such as Structured Interviews, reference checks, and based on education or previous experience.

Another important aspect to consider when hiring for your team are the soft skills that an individual possesses. Finding the strengths that they will bring to your team and seeing how they will fit in with your team’s current soft skill DNA are important to maximize each person’s potential and help your team to stay engaged and successful in their work.

When assessing individuals’ soft skills be sure to use a valid and reliable tool rather than going off a gut feeling. The MyPrint® is a scientifically backed tool that is both valid and reliable for use in the workplace. The 155 item questionnaire provides detailed insight into an individual’s personality traits and motivations as well as their professional behaviors. This information can be used when hiring a candidate to see if their strengths fit in with what the role requires, as well as to get a better understanding of environmental or culture fit.

Assessing your current workforce

Assessing your current workforce helps to ensure that employees are receiving the proper guidance and support they need to do their jobs well. This can be done through performance reviews, measuring key metrics, or frequent 1:1 check ins with your employees.

In addition to goals and performance, understanding your team from a soft-skill point of view is beneficial for working as a group and engaging your employees. Once your entire team has been assessed using the MyPrint®, you can view their results via their individual reports, or by using the new Group DNA feature that is coming soon to the Talentoday Manager platform. Being able to see where your team as a whole falls in terms of their soft skills can help you to ensure that your team is using their strengths as well as figuring out where the gaps are that you need to fill. In addition, being able to see the common motivators among your team helps to come up with ways to motivate and engage your workforce from a global perspective which is helpful in certain situations where you can’t tailor the work environment for each individual.

First look at the Group DNA feature

Below is a sneak peak of what the Group DNA feature looks like! This example was made using 10 members from our very own Talentoday family. You can see that our team is made up of individuals who are Extroverted and Positive, which is always fun when we have team celebrations! We are also Confident, meaning we are self-assured in our abilities (rightfully so, we have very talented people on our team!) and we are Big Picture thinkers, always keeping those long-term solutions in mind as we continue to innovate and create new features.

Group DNA sample of Talentoday team using MyPrint data: Green (left) displays Personality; Orange (right) displays Motivations.

When it comes to motivating our team, the most important things are that we have Personal Responsibility for our work, but still have a Need for Affiliation and to share common interests with our peers. We also like to be kept on our toes with a Need for Adventure and Diversity — we like to spice things up around here!

Why this is important

The purpose of the Group DNA feature, and assessing your team’s soft skills, is to help visualize the data. The information provided is not necessarily indicative of work performance, but it can be used to understand the work culture of a population.

By understanding this data and keeping up to date with the DNA of your team, you can work to create an ideal work environment by setting relevant goals and rewards, as well as by solving conflicts the right way!

Are you interested in learning more about the upcoming Group DNA feature, or are you looking for additional resources and support? Email Talentoday at customer@talentoday.com to learn more about our assessment and services!


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:

  1. First, it can predict how the individual will interact and behave with others in a group or team.
  2. 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!


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.

Data pulled from the 2017 Annual Global Recruiting Trends Report

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.

Talentoday’s new Snapshot feature is available now for Talentoday Managers customers

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.

Talentoday Team

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.

We now offer fully customizable PDFs for Talentoday Manager customers

 

You can now pick and choose the sections of the report you would like to include in your download.

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.

Talentoday Team

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.

Target Profile for Sales professional

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.

Talentoday Team

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.

 

Motivation radar from Talentoday.com

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!

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.


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.

Assign labels to a group of individuals who have taken the test

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.

 

Creating a Target Profile

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.

Match a candidate against the Target Profile

 

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.

Talentoday Team

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


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:

  1. Analytics serve as trustworthy future-casters (think HR’s crystal ball)
  2. It increases ROI
  3. It take out the guesswork
  4. Hiring becomes more efficient and effective
  5. Promotes more in-house promotions
  6. 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.