Recruitment Pitfalls to avoid for a Better Candidate Experience

Recruitment Pitfalls to avoid for a Better Candidate Experience

In the fast-moving world of recruiting, the main objective while searching for a new employee is to hire the best talent available in market for a given position as quickly and efficiently as possible while also reducing the hiring costs. Technology is helping the whole world in all aspects and it has come a long way in streamlining the overall recruitment process and also improving the candidate experience.

Automation helps to reduce unconscious bias, it gives job seekers the flexibility to self-schedule interviews, which makes communication between recruiters and the candidates much easier than ever. While all this sounds good to hear, it is a difficult task in reality. With progress also comes the challenge. There are recruitment pitfalls which can knock down all your recruiting efforts off course if you’re not careful.

Here are the top recruiting pitfalls to avoid for a better candidate experience

Improvised Automation

Automation has so many good things to talk about. But complete automation removes the human element completely from the recruitment process. Job search has an emotional side that recruiters should keep in mind. Automation should act as an aid your recruitment process not to completely replace it.

Automation should be used to handle all the behind-the-scenes functions like to do job postings, maintain candidate’s data etc. Don’t miss out on the actual human touch-points while communicating with candidates. Just getting automated feedback from your side will make candidates less engaged and finally loose interest in your position.

Falling Prey to Bias

Humans tend to like people who are similar to them in any way this happens while interviewing also but just because you liked a candidate for who they are doesn’t mean they are fit for the job role. Recruitment is about hiring someone who can bring in fresh ideas and new perspectives rather than someone whom you’ve considered in your head as right. With bias recruitment, diversity in the hiring process fades away slowly, crashing all efforts to build a balanced and multi-talented team.

With advancement of AI recruitment tools human biases against older workers, minorities or religious groups is reduced to some extent. But AI works on perceiving patterns of past behaviors, which might result in few hidden biases in your organization’s hiring that an AI solution will inevitably pick up.

Rushing the Recruiting Process

The ease of applying for jobs online helps recruiters to build a large pool of candidates. But this also makes it difficult to sort right candidates from so many applicants. If there are lot of resumes to look at, it’s tantalizing to toss each one aside at the first bad line. Obviously, you want the hiring process to be smooth and really quick in order to fill open positions fast, but not at the cost of excessively expensive or a bad hire. An in efficacious process results in multiple mistakes and ultimately, a wrong hire. Take time to understand and analyze each applicant before you decide he or she isn’t the right fit for the job.

Complicated HR technology platforms

There are enough human resource software solutions available that you can use to manage your recruiting efforts, to name a few: Workday, Epicor HCM, Oracle HCM Cloud, Dayforce, SAP Success Factors etc. But not all systems can do everything you need or want it to do. Many solutions have feature gaps that require to be augmented by additional point solutions for example CRM to interview scheduling to improve the candidate experience. It’s highly recommended to do gap analysis before integrating it to the rest of that platform to be make sure your team has the right tools to succeed.

The main goal in recruitment is to give all candidates a great experience while also ensuring the best candidates keep moving along the interview process and get hired. Technology certainly helps with the overall process. But relying on it too heavily, or without the right amount of thought and consideration will lead to certain pitfalls. If you avoid these pitfalls, you’ll be reaping all the benefits of the digital age hiring great talents and offering amazing candidate experience.

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How does COVID 19 impact different industries and ways to deal with it and overcome?

How does COVID 19 impact different industries and ways to deal with it and overcome?

The World Health Organisation has declared the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, and lots of firms are taking strict measures against the impact and unfold of the virus.

The corona outbreak is first and foremost a human disaster, affecting thousands of people across the world. It is additionally resulting in a growing impact on the global economy.

With all businesses and industries across the world in huge chaos, there has been the grave economic impact of coronavirus across various sectors from tourism to airline; from entertainment to education; from finance to healthcare; from retail to hospitality; from cruises to cars; from food to fashion; Luxury industry; staffing and recruitment and so on. Marketers across industries are attempting to revamp their business models.

a) Travel and Tourism

The travel & tourism industry is worst affected by the coronavirus outbreak. With COVID-19 being a pandemic, people are avoiding travelling to different countries and cities, which has created a negative impact on the travel business industry and has affected the tourism welfare of the affected countries.

The U.S. airlines proposed for over $50 billion in federal help due to the dramatic decrease in range of airline passengers.

b) Entertainment

Disney and Universal Studios have planned to close down their theme parks as large gatherings may cause the spread of coronavirus.

The NBA has suspended its season temporarily after a player was tested positive for coronavirus.

The entertainment industry is severely affected and suffering from the coronavirus outbreak. However, as more people stay at home, in self-isolation, and take quarantine measures, there is increased use of alternate entertainment services such as games, videos, etc. According to the Financial Times, the number of app downloads rises in China after the nationwide isolation measures were taken. Video streaming firms like Netflix, Amazon, Disney are expected to have a rise in the number of subscribers in the impact of COVID-19.

c) Retail & E-Commerce

Malls, shopping centers are temporarily shut down in effect to COVID-19. Also, since people distance themselves from social gatherings and crowded spaces, they choose to order their needs or necessities online. Similar is the case with the retail business.

On the contrary, digital commerce businesses are trying to make the most of this situation. Regardless, thriving in such an epidemic continues to be a difficult task for e-commerce businesses.

d) Recruitment

Recruitment in the time of the COVID-19 outbreak is a very tough and challenging process.

HR managers are scrambling to regulate recruitment strategies within the wake of this outbreak. Fortunately, technology is out there to assist minimize exposure while still producing quality hires. The time is now to shift to a virtual recruitment — one that protects both employees and candidates and erase risk while continuing to drive hiring efforts.

e) Luxury Shopping Malls

People are staying more at their homes and buying products online instead of going physically to crowded locations. In the long term, this may lead to a permanent change in the behaviour of consumers and online luxury buying may become usual.

Therefore, retailers must provide more meaningful online experiences in order to build a good relationship with consumers.

NOTE: Buying luxury things online will become more attractive in the future. This slowdown is the right time for luxury brands to facilitate themselves to digitize the processes and upgrade their systems and technology. This will allow them to develop operational efficiencies and provide personalized experiences to the end consumers.

The various ways to deal with it and how we can overcome:

The Covid-19 crisis has currently reached a critical stage where public health systems got to act decisively to control the growth in new places.

Clearly, the most importance is and should be on suppressing and diminish the disease itself. However the economic impacts are vital and plenty of companies are feeling their way towards understanding, reacting to, and learning lessons from rapidly unfolding events. Unforeseen twists and turns are going to be revealed with each news cycle, and that we will only have a complete picture in retrospect.

Yet, given the very different degrees of preparedness across companies, the further potential for disruption, and the value of being better prepared for future crises, it’s worth trying to pull out what we have learned so far. Being supported on our ongoing analysis and help for our clients around the world, we have refined the subsequent lessons for responding to unfolding events, communicating, extracting and implementing learnings.

  • Update intelligence on each day.
  • Use specialists and gauge carefully.
  • Flexible principles in developing policies.
  • Prepare now for the next crisis.
  • Reflect on what you’ve learned.
  • Prepare for a changing world.

The Covid-19 crisis can take time to be solved by medical science. The economic crisis can try to be solved now.

To fix this, the government could offer every American business, large and small, and every self-employed worker with a no-interest “bridge loan” guaranteed for the duration of the crisis to be paid back over five years. The sole condition of the loan to businesses would be that companies still employ a minimum of 90 percent of their manpower at the same wage that they did before the crisis. And it might be retroactive, so any workers who have been laid off in the past two weeks because of the crisis would be reinstated.

The system keeps virtually everyone employed and keeps firms, across different industries from restaurants to airlines in business without picking winners and losers.

Instantly, it would create a sense of confidence and relief during these turbulent times that once the scourge of the coronavirus was contained, life would come back to some semblance of normal. It would additionally help, encourage people to stay home and practice social distancing without feeling that they would risk losing their job — the only way to slow this disease.

Pragna solutions is taking a balanced approach to handle the situation and our first preference is the well being and safety of our clients and employees across the country. We remain committed and believe that our long term vision of business is strong.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you want to discuss your hiring needs and challenges. We are here to provide recruitment solutions and help to all your interim and long term requirements.

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How to Craft Highly Effective Job Postings

How to Craft Highly Effective Job Postings

Attracting great talent is the first step to hiring great talent. And one way to attract great talent is by jobs postings. Job postings are also called job advertisement, job description, job announcement, job ad, or needed ad. A best job description is a blend of position’s skill set and competencies, little about work culture and of course benefits and perks. Most recruiters fail to understand the main motto of job postings; it is to list out things that attract top candidates, instead of just listing requirements and qualifications. In this blog we are going to discuss few tips to design an engaging and inclusive job advertisement to attract and build a pool of right fit candidates.

Use a Killer Job Title

This is foremost the important part of a job description. Fun or uncommon job titles like Rockstar Developer or Marketing Guru don’t do a lot of to draw job seeker attention. Using such job titles will turn off candidates from applying to your job ads. Such job titles can confuse job seekers and often considered as symbolic of insouciant work culture.

The title should be as simple and unambiguous as possible. Main motto of a job title is to show a glimpse of the purpose and scope of the job. Use phrases that accurately describe the job and try sticking to standard experience levels like Senior instead of III or IV.

Describing the Position

A good job description usually contains 2 components: summary of the role and job responsibilities. A concise summary on existence of the job?  You must solely highlight the important points in these sections in order that the job description is compact and straight forward to digest.

This part of job description introduces your company and your employer brand to the job seekers hence don’t forget to include all the details about your company culture to outline why a candidate would desire to work for your company. Though content is important during a job posting, but stuffing excessive amount of information into one paragraph can easily bore the job seekers.

Focus on Growth and Development

Listing a bunch of daily tasks and avoiding a bulleted list of responsibilities or qualifications is old style is often boring to read through. Lists like these are often difficult to absorb until one’s actually doing the job. Instead you can group pointers things under smaller sub headings like “technical skills”, “management skills” and “Interpersonal skills” or may be hard or soft skills. Make the job ad exciting by explaining how candidate’s growth and achievements will contribute towards business excellence. Also stress enough on the new skills and technologies one can attain with this role. This will definitely attract carrier and action oriented candidates.

Mention Experience, Compensation and Benefits Info

Most job descriptions leave the candidates wondering if they are fit for the position as they miss out on clearly specifying the minimum qualification standards. This results in getting enormous responses from unqualified candidates. To avoid this establish clear trails of minimum education, any specific certifications and also the years the expertise or hands on experience on a particular skill required to succeed in the role.

And don’t miss out on listing compensation and benefits. Most candidates today are looking to work with employers that fulfill their compensation needs and often turned off if there is no mention of it in the job ad. You need to show that money is component of the opportunity. Give a salary range rather than a specific dollar amount to allow room for flexibility. Also provide a summary of the advantages like medical, dental, and vision coverage etc.

Express Urgency for the Position

Create the sense of urgency among candidates so that candidates are compelled to apply. This can be done by mentioning last date to apply or may be by mentioning start dates. Mention contact details of a specific person instead of a generic email id. This definitely results in increase in the number of applicants drastically.

Avoid Mention of Behavioral Traits

Most job ads list out personality traits like Proactive, dynamic etc.  This encourages candidates to impersonate these behaviors during interview even if they do not to have them. Also, mention of words like “hardworking,” essentially mean nothing in a job ad as you can never figure out these traits until put to test for certain number of days.  It only implies that a hiring manager wants to consider people who have a strong work ethics which is often misunderstood by candidates.

Knock Out Biases

If you want to widen your pool of applicants and speed up your recruitment and hiring process then you should not be limiting your reach to a particular gender or demography. Ultimate goal of a job ad is to encourage right people to apply for the job but usage of gender skewing terms within job descriptions turns away many potential candidates.  You might be promoting a gender diverse work culture but your ad speaks on the contrary. This will paint a totally different picture and all your branding efforts will go in vain.

Add Creative Touches

Active job seekers spend a lot of time going through job descriptions and reading through lengthy content can be boring and tedious. To attract those eyeballs add innovative touch to your job ad like a video attachment explaining the position’s daily responsibilities and employees explaining why it is a fun place to work at. This would create a major difference and your ad will stand out.

Finishing Touches

Consider this a fun task and don’t hesitate to express your creativity. Imagine yourself into the shoes of superstar candidate you want to hire changes and sail you boat in that direction. Job Ads reflects a company’s corporate style, but candidates respond well to job ad that showcases human touch. Boring ads don’t attract strong and vibrant candidates. Don’t forget to proofread your ad before posting it out. Several grammatical errors and misspelled words will not set the best image of yours.

Keep the content of your job posting transient and to the point to communicate your point in a streamlined manner. Steer away from fancy and fuzzy terms. Usages of in distinctive terms make it difficult for potential applicants to imagine themselves in a position.

Follow the hit and trial method. If you don’t succeed in first attempt, change, tweak, and check out again. Each business contains a totally different direction for succeeding; therefore don’t get discouraged if one technique doesn’t prove as effective. Keep fixing and modifying till you discover what works the best for you.

Follow the above tips to craft an effective job ad, and you are assured to stand out among the strongest candidates.

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Best and Successful Tips to Manage your Hyper Connected Workforce

Best and Successful Tips to Manage your Hyper Connected Workforce

Offices today are totally different from past few decades.  All the information you need is available at fingertips. Generations today are digital natives and traditional work systems do not match their expectations. Everyone is connected by technology online.

Technology has both its positives and negatives and so does the technology connected workforce. With help of technology many people are able to work from home and able to balance both their personal and professional life.

It has also cut down the need of business travels saving a lot of time and money. On the contrary tech connected employees also has its downside. So let’s discuss a few tips on managing today’s hyper-connected workforce.

1. Realizing the Importance of Real Communication

In the shuffle of Skype, emails, chats, and video conferencing people are forgetting the importance of face to face communication. People have misunderstood the whole concept of communication. Words are not the only thing required for it.

It is a compendium of small gestures, expressions and emotions that humans tend to interpret unconsciously and these can never be replaced by virtual expressions called emojis. You can learn a lot many things about a person from personal interaction rather by digital communication.

So if you wish to turn back disasters before it happens try to find time and get your employees in same room as often as possible. Weekly meeting or one on ones can also be effective.

2. Digital Detoxification

We all are aware of the fact that a detoxification show positive result on human bodies and same does the digital detox. For people who do not understand the term digital detoxification it is time period during which during which a person abstains from using electronic devices.

This is to reduce stress and focus on improving social interaction in the physical world. Motivate your employees to take a digital vacations every now and then. A team outing can turn out to be really fruitful.

Encouraging a digital detoxification is one of the best things you can do for your employees and your business because wealth of a company depends on the health of workers.

3. Encouraging Employees to Pull the Plug

It is a motivating problem that usually businesses expect their staff to be accessible throughout working hours. On the contrary, the requirement to be reachable at all times could cause employees to be less productive.

A recent study showed that employees spend most of their time in cooperative activities with their managers leaving them very little to no time to actually complete their work.

Permitting and encouraging your staff to turn off their phones or place them on “do not disturb” mode will result in more productive workforce.

4. Setting and Enforcing Boundaries

These days it is lot more easier to reach out to people wherever they are. But once it involves business, this same accessibility might create a riddle. Seeing boss’s emails in the evening might be tough for several employees to ignore till the following day.

This can be wherever setting boundaries can be extremely necessary. Simply because you can send emails or direct reports to your employees at 10:00 pm doesn’t imply you must. If it’s not an emergency situation or you seek an immediate response, it’s always better to send it the next day.

5. Using Preferred Mode of Communication

It’s likely that you would prefer a certain mode of communication and there are chances of you unknowingly force everyone else in your company to use it. Different people are comfortable using a different means of communication. For example Gen X will prefer email communication; Millennia’s and Gen Z are more likely to want to video conferencing, IM or text.

Older people will definitely like a face to face convo or connecting over a phone call. Using their preferred mode of communication with your employees will help you connect with them better in terms of understanding and establishing a rapo. Doing so will definitely take you much further with your workforce

Conclusion

Irrespective of your business type, your employees being on site or offsite technology and digital communication plays an important role to connect. But these two if not managed carefully can lead to devastation.

Managing your hyper connected workforce will help you in long run helping you and you employees to achieve and maintain good work life balance.

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How To Deal With Astonishing Growth in Global Talent Acquisition

How To Deal With Astonishing Growth in Global Talent Acquisition

In 2018, virtually 75% of employers struggled to fill positions with the proper candidates.Unfortunately, this talent shortage is simply worsening. Research by Korn Ferry predicts by 2020, the technology, media, and telecommunications industries alone may be short over one million complete staff globally.

Talent acquisition is growing globally at an astonishing pace. Considering global professionals, 70% of people in professional services work remotely at least one day in a week.  These numbers might be a bit shocking for people who still work in a traditional work space. As we intensify our understanding of the massive increase in global hiring, we must also endow ourselves to compete effectively.

Below pointers suggest a global talent acquisition strategy.

Focus on better employer branding.

Employer branding is one of the most important feature for successful talent acquisition. Talented candidates compare companies before they apply for any position; they tend to choose the organizations which have simplest values, culture, and which promote work-life balance. By cultivating a powerful leader, you may attract higher talent and notice a lot of long-run success. Always keep your current employees in mind while developing your employer brand as they can help strengthen your value proposition.

Workplace adjustments

An impactful onboarding process can be the key to a long-term success of remote employees. It can also help establish a collaborative environment that reaches to different time zones, geographies, and cultures.Both employees and employers are in the nub of a workplace alteration. Team members can join meetings and contribute via cloud-based tools and video conferencing, no matter which place they are at.

Need of global talent acquisition

Before we act, let’s understand clearly the need, supported by a review of global talent acquisition growth trends.Businesses of all sizes let it be giants, well established or just the beginners are entering or expanding their reach in the global marketplace. The number of Fortune 500 companies based in global emerging markets is expected to exceed 45 percent by 2025, according to a research by McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm.

According to 2018 survey by freelance website Upwork, less than 40% US hiring managers expect employees to do the majority of their work remotely in the next ten years, according to a 2018 survey by freelance website Upwork. All of these points in the same direction: With the increase in global workforce, we have to renew our commitment to cross-cultural and diverse communication. This applies to the full life span of talent acquisition, but it begins with your candidate engagement strategy.

A good talent acquisition strategy is always in transition

Designing a talent acquisition strategy is imperative to the success of your business and to ensure that recruitment as a process is conducted not merely on the need basis but as part of the strategy.

However, as you could probably discern from the points above, there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to a strategy for talent acquisition. Instead, a good strategy is one that is designed to tailor to your business and is flexible enough to evolve as the business and market change.

To succeed long-term, you must attract and retain talented employees regardless of vacant roles. Talent acquisition will assist you to do that while solving for long-term organizational needs.

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Embracing Gender Diversity in the Workplace for a better tomorrow

Embracing Gender Diversity in the Workplace for a better tomorrow

Diversity is imperative to all workplaces. People with completely different backgrounds and experiences, who come close together as a team, will develop innovative ideas that may keep your company alive and thriving. Despite this, companies in many industries and roles are not benefiting from this because they are dominated by a single-sex. For example, tech industry roles are typically filled by men, while nursing roles are typically filled by women. In each case, the customers are more diverse than the people serving them, which don’t bode well for understanding their needs. To better serve your customers, it’s important to cultivate gender diversity within the work.

Gender diversity doesn’t imply that an organization should have a 50/50 mix of males and females for every position in the company. However, it does mean that all the roles should have a fair representation of both sexes at every level in the company.

As leaders, we can employ a range of strategies to improve gender diversity in the workplace.

1. Encourage an inclusive and respectful culture

A survey report points out that though women connected with a lot of everyday slights and disrespectful behavior than men, 58 percent of all employees expertise some kind of micro aggression, suggesting incivility is common at work.

If things need to change, then it can’t just be about driving the culture and values of the company but also highlighting and communicating that there is no room for sexual harassment, disrespect, or bias, and when needed, stringent action will be taken. Communicate, communicate, communicate this a thousand times over, and start at the top.

2. Build a comprehensive workplace

Before making an attempt to hire for gender diversity, look at intervals and appraise your company culture. Is your company a decent place to figure despite gender? Do you treat people across the gender spectrum equally? Consult your employees to learn how you can build a more inclusive workplace, and put in the work to continually improve your company culture. An inclusive culture can facilitate build your employer brand, so you can attract and retain a diverse workforce

3. Restructure your pay and benefits program

To make your company as engaging as potential to a broader range of individual people, you want to erase pay difference between men and women within the same positions.

One way to try and do this is often to prevent asking a few candidate’s previous wage and offer the same pay range to every potential employee, no matter of what they made in an earlier position. Considering that asking candidates regarding their wage history is already prohibited in some states, this is good practice anyway.

When it involves to advantages, studies conjointly show that women in specifically value robust, family-oriented perks once seeking a new job. This means you should be as generous as possible with family leave, health insurance, remote work and flexible hours.

4. Analyze exit interviews

Exit interviews are useful to understand why people are leaving, so you can improve how you hire and retain talent. If you’re working toward gender diversity within the workplace, you‘ll conjointly poke into your differences in why men and women are leaving your organization. This can provide insights that are unique to your company, and allow you to monitor your progress over time. If, for example, you learn that women are less satisfied with compensation than men, you’ll take steps to enhance your compensation strategy and see however perceptions change over a year.

5. Reserve equal seats for women in a boardroom meeting

The higher they’re going; a lot of women realize themselves alone within the room, which typically makes them feel isolated. Companies need to stop having just two women in the boardroom because it checks a box. According to the report, companies need to examine and explore how they can move women through their organization.

The report explains, “One approach is to hire and promote women in cohorts; another is to cluster women on teams. As opposed to staffing one woman on several of teams, companies should consider putting groups of two to three women on teams together.”

And in to move far from reinforcing gender stereotypes, it recommends thinking twice before clustering women in functions traditionally dominated by women, like human resources and communications.

It additionally recommends making opportunities for the “only” women in a room to connect with other alternative women and to foster additional women’s networking teams inside organization.

Above discussed strategies are the few things companies can do for gender diversity and make more money while doing so. Promoting inclusiveness and variety at your workplace is one of the most effective ways that foster an open-minded, global company culture. Not only does this make good business sense serving your company to better understanding colleagues, clients, and customers around the world it additionally makes the workplace a lot interesting and personally enriching environment for everyone.

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