Recruiting & Hiring Blog for HR Professionals

We all know the importance of writing a job description properly. If you fail to have a top notch job description, you can attract the wrong candidates to your position, which does not benefit your company.

Let’s face it, recruiting is a race. You have to pace yourself so that you don’t fall behind at the beginning and don’t lose your steam at the end.

Humans are creatures of habit, we all have heard it before (and definitely will again). We tend to lean on the side of continuing the same old processes, even if we know it is not necessarily the best method. Why? Perhaps it could be because we are better at being reactive rather than proactive.

The workplace tends to move (at what seems to be) a hundred miles per hour. Since we are moving so quickly it can be easier to do damage control rather than take time to plan how to avoid mistakes. The good news is the proactive steps have already been taken - especially when it comes to streamlining your hiring process.

The recruitment process is generally thought of as applicants competing to get hired by an employer. This is usually the case, but there is another competition occurring behind the scenes: Employers facing off against one another to attract top talent. 

When openings become available in your company, you want to shout: “We are hiring!” far and wide. But before you start yelling from the mountain tops, take a step back and ask yourself: “Where should I start looking for candidates? Should I look internally or externally?”

After so many unqualified applicants and several unreturned phone calls, you may find yourself losing the faith you will come across your “diamond in the rough”. Don’t pack it in after a papercut or two! An Applicant Tracking System can bring the joy back to filling your next vacancy.

Spoiler Alert:  An ATS won’t give you a papercut!

Roses are red... 
Violets are blue...
We love HR pros... 
And you should too! 

Millennials are a generation that have been fascinating marketers for years. They behave differently than Generation X and Baby Boomers, but why are marketers interested so in Millennials? Answer: Now they have buying power! How do they have buying power? They are entering the workforce (and some have already been in the workplace for years), so marketers are definitely onto something by paying attention to them.

Generation Y (aka Millennials) were born between 1977 and 2000, and they tend to be more pushy and demanding than their parents, which is why YOU may need to update your hiring process to appeal to them.

HR has not typically been responsible for a sellable “brand” for applicants. In many respects, creating the company brand is something that largely falls on the marketing or public relations department. We have all heard of a video going “viral” and an average person shooting to instant Internet stardom. However, actions of the HR department going “viral” can have negative effects.

Social media has now turned the tables on employers. Millennials (who tend to be stereotyped as demanding in nature) grew up with the Internet in ways Baby Boomers and Generation X did not. They expect to have a lot of information available on the Career’s page, and they prefer updates throughout the recruitment process.

So with the stage set, and the stakes high, HR needs to create their own brand that offers value to potential applicants. The question is: How do you build a solid talent brand?

In our personal lives, we are obsessed with having the latest and greatest technological advancement to hit the market. Whether it is the new smart phone, tablet, or computer, we have to have it. Society has advanced to the point where we actually laugh at the “old-fashioned ways” we used to do things. However, in the world of HR, the question remains: how can we leverage new technological advances and incorporate them into our hiring practices?