HR Academy Live – Event Key Takeaways

Last week, Smart Recruit Online hosted our first free HR Academy Live event.

 

This is the first of a series of live online events bringing HR & Recruitment thought leaders and specialists together to share insights around the biggest topics impacting the industry, and giving attendees the chance to have their questions answered with a live Q&A.

 

This week’s session covered three trending topics affecting the recruitment and HR space: Talent Attraction Strategy, HR & Recruitment Technology, and Diversity, Equality & Inclusion.

 

Talent Attraction Strategy

So many businesses struggle to attract quality and a high enough quantity of applicants, even for mainstream unskilled roles. Our first session covered the art behind a truly effective talent attraction strategy.

 

Measuring how effective your current talent attraction strategy is, is the key to improving it. This all depends on your business goals, measuring meaningful metrics around these goals, and then highlighting where improvements can be made – for example, is recruiting at any cost more important than keeping costs down?

 

Here are just some of the meaningful metrics highlighted:

• Cost per application
• Time to offer
• Cost per hire
• Applicant drop off
• First-time fill rate
• Attrition levels

 

Based on their own experiences, our panellists also discussed the most counterproductive pitfalls in talent attraction. Common ones included advertising your roles on the wrong channels, poor job advert copy, and redirecting applicants away from a job board onto a careers page, causing drop-offs to soar.

 

Top tips on what to implement into your talent attraction strategy included:

• Choosing the correct job title using keyword research tools
• Avoiding job titles exclusively used internally
• Adding ‘work from home’ after the job title if you offer it
• Ensuring to include a salary banding
• Use of automation to fast track you to the best applicants e.g. CV parsing, AI ranking, bulk candidate communication tools
• Using email and SMS communications in conjunction to create a seamless candidate journey
• Regularly re-engaging with your talent pool with creative forms of communication

 

Poll Results

 

HR & Recruitment Technology Selection

The second session covered vendor selection strategies for HR & Recruitment technology. Choosing the right technology for your business is challenging, but anyone who takes talent recruitment seriously knows it’s essential.

 

Our panel looked into the reasons vendor selection has become harder, including the volume of solutions now available in the market, and the need to select a solution that works for your business.

 

A simple Google search won’t work, and recruiters need to do their homework to find the technology that solves their issues.

 

Other key frustrations of recruiters include:

• Lack of platform flexibility
• Lack of configuration options
• Expensive development costs
• Lack of ongoing support from vendors
• The cost of add-ons like additional reporting tools or email templates

 

Selecting a recruitment technology can be broken down into several steps:

1. Map out every part of your candidate journey and the touchpoints e.g. what communication tools you’ll need, who is responsible for each part, the impact on the candidate experience
2. Define your technology must-haves and nice-to-haves
3. Stick to your list throughout the vendor selection process. Don’t get side-tracked!
4. Look at the core products the system offers, what’s included in the initial package, and any add-ons
5. Look at the ongoing customer support, training and implementation plan offered. How will your hiring managers be supported? What are the cost implications of training? Would your team work well with the vendor on a regular basis?
6. Ensure it will be a smooth adoption process for your whole team. Are managers happy with the system? Does it add or improve upon what they’re already doing? Will they actually use the system?

 

Poll Results

 

Diversity, Equality & Inclusion

The final session covered DE&I in the workplace. Diversity and inclusion are more than just making tick box hire and filling a quota – no candidate wants to feel like a token hire, and will likely be able to tell if they aren’t being hired on merit.

 

The benefits of hiring a diverse workforce are numerous. People want to work with good people, but they also want to work with different people; showing how diverse your company is will attract more talent.

 

It also enables your team to think more innovatively, and has been shown to improve employee retention. These all point towards a much more profitable business that reflects the kind of customers you’re serving.

 

Some top tips to improve your workplace diversity include:

• Training staff to accurately understand what diversity and inclusion is, and how to avoid bias
• Don’t rely on referral recruitment, as you may end up with all the same types of people
• Ensure your job descriptions are inclusive
• Reflect any values around having a diverse and inclusive workplace in your culture
• Don’t make assumptions that candidates don’t have a protected characteristic – some disabilities are invisible!
• CV anonymisation tools are useful for removing bias in the initial stages, but education needs to take place with your recruiters on diversity

 

Poll Results

 

If you didn’t get a chance to attend HR Academy Live this time around, you can watch the recording here.