Eliana Willis

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    “Buckle Up and Ride the Economic Storm” Says Veteran Recruiter 

    As the UK heads towards yet another recession, the common mistakes business leaders make are the knee-jerk reactions of lowering headcount, freezing hiring, and sticking our heads in the sand when it comes to finances. All of which are a sure way to hinder future business growth and undermine overarching business goals. Of course, human beings’ fight or flight mode exists for survival reasons, but these tactics are a very temporary fix to a very long-term problem.
    While we are all guilty of receding to our safe place in times of trouble, business leaders should be buckling up to ride the economic storm to the best of their abilities, with the ultimate aim of coming out the other side ahead of competitors.
    Protect your assets
    While it may be tempting to knee-jerk into headcount reduction during tough economic times – especially with inflation hitting a 40-year high at 9.1 percent – this may end up being more damaging to businesses in the long run.
    Now more than ever, employers should be doing all they can to protect their most valuable assets – their staff. History has taught us time and time again that those who recognize this will be the ones who benefit later down the line. As the market recovered from the 2008 crash, reports showed employees felt their employers had ‘lost sight’ of the support they needed and subsequently, left en masse once things improved.
    Don’t let your talent pipelines dry out
    Staff retention should be a priority during rocky times but hiring managers should be seizing the opportunity to look for talent while the rest of the competition’s heads are down. Ensure that your job adverts are appealing to the correct audience, put some money behind LinkedIn advertising or use the services of a recruitment partner.
    Anything that you can do to raise the profile of your business, communicate your messages with your networks and demonstrate yourselves as an attractive employment prospect, will be crucial to future-proofing your business. It may seem counterintuitive now, but when your competitors are clutching at straws on the rebound, you’ll be thriving.
    Mind out for salary inflation
    The cost-of-living crisis’ grip is tightening, and as such, it may be tempting to raise pay for your staff to offset costs. Triggering a ‘wage-price spiral’ should be approached with caution, as inflationary pay rises are inflationary in itself – and companies will only raise consumer prices further – becoming a vicious cycle we may never venture out of.
    The recent news of management consultant giant PwC announcing a 9 percent pay rise for thousands of staff to offset the costs of living is setting a dangerous precedent. A popular move with staff, of course, but once other businesses follow suit there’s no sight at the end of the tunnel. PwC may well have the best intentions at heart (although remember they are also fighting in the war for talent), but it is a major player, and where it leads, others are sure to follow.
    Understand your finances
    Ensuring that you fully understand your income and expenditure is crucial to remaining in control. In a recession, remember that cash is king. Watch costs like a hawk and ensure that your business has sufficient liquidity to operate for longer than you would expect in normal times.
    The challenge during a recession is always to balance your costs and revenue to ensure that you can still generate profit as well as nurture and protect your valued clients and staff. This may require looking at different outlets for your products or services or mining existing relationships more intelligently (more likely a combination of both).
    What’s next?
    While it’s difficult to predict what the next six months have in store for us, especially with the ever-unstable government, there are already signs in the US that inflationary pressures are beginning to ease. One might expect a leveling off or even the beginning of a decline in inflation in the last quarter of this year.
    Of course, nothing about this economy and the job market is easy. The financial challenges are completely new to some, and ‘yet another hurdle’ for others, but the strategy remains the same. Be cautious but buckle up for the long term. The last thing you want is to emerge from your bunker in six months’ time to find your business landscape decimated.
    If the last two years have taught us anything it’s that we can be agile in the face of uncertainty but also that risks may be well worth taking. After all, it should be a walk in the park compared to navigating through the uncertainties of the pandemic.
    By: Dominic Wade, co-founder of specialist HR and Finance & Accountancy recruitment firm, Wade Macdonald. He founded the firm in the early 90s and since has weathered three financial crises and a pandemic. 
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    What Should Your Facebook Budget Be When Targeting Your Next Candidate?

    As one of the ‘original’ social media platforms, Facebook broke the mold when it came to market in 2004. Initially, a place for friends and family to connect – while that’s still the case – many businesses are noticing how effective it can be when engaging a relevant audience.
    And for organizations and HR teams that are wanting to attract candidates and grow their teams, social media is proving to be a highly proactive, and cost-effective talent acquisition tool.
    While many employers might head straight to Indeed or LinkedIn to set their job ad live and wait for responses, that’s fine – and several brands will see success via this route – however, they also shouldn’t write off Facebook completely.
    Nearly two decades since the platform went live, today it’s the third most-visited website in the world. Millions of business owners still swear by it when raising their brand credibility and selling their products and services successfully. And many are doing it all extremely efficiently without bursting their marketing budget in the process.
    So, for the organizations that have a recruitment drive being managed from start to finish by the HR team – and there’s some cash to spend in order to engage and nurture the right candidate through to the application stage – how much should be set aside for promoted posts on social media that ensure their latest vacancy is being seen by the right person, at the right time?
    In truth, it comes back to how much the organization can afford. And while that might sound a bit, ‘how long is a piece of string?’, here’s the good part – brands can get a better message out via social media compared to using a costly third-party platform.
    Saying more via social media
    For example, an organization can roll out a Facebook Ads campaign that’s focused purely on recruitment – including ads that cover more detail about their company culture, information on what the vacancy entails, and Corporate Social Responsibility commitments that set the business apart from competitors, and exactly how a talented individual can positively impact their growth ambitions.
    And none of this has to cost a fortune.
    If HR teams are still unsure as to how much they should spend, firstly compare the rate that it’d cost to engage a recruitment firm and divide it by half. So say, for example, there’s $2,500 to spend in total – firstly, that’s a lot of money which will go very far with Facebook Ads.
    Of course, it’s dependent on the industry and also who is managing the engagement throughout the campaign roll-out.
    But, sticking with the example of a $2,500 budget to play with, HR teams can break this down even further. By putting in $550 per month, the daily spend can be around $40 to not only create a top-of-the-funnel ad to draw people in but also leave enough room to interact with candidates without worrying it’ll go over budget.
    For example, from the $40 a-day spend, $25 of it could be specifically used to target a relevant demographic of jobseekers. The remaining £15 may then be purely dedicated to nurturing those individuals who have engaged with the ad – perhaps asking them to input their details or upload their CV.
    Quick tips – dos and don’ts
    Do…
    Use image-led ads, as well as some other content formats such as:

    Videos: these could cover existing employees talking about the company culture or showcasing a ‘day in the life’ of a specific role.
    Carousels: maximizing as much content about the vacancy as possible in a digestible way – from testimonials to client logos showing who the employer works with, the employee perks, and salary. Different CTA links per slide should encourage applications – such as ‘Apply Now’, ‘See Job Description’, ‘Find Out About Our Culture’, and so on.

    If the company’s tone of voice is quite quirky or chatty, think about newsjacking opportunities – everyone’s seen the Lionel Richie (‘Hello, is it me you’re recruiting for?’) meme for example.
    Could this creative be in keeping with the brand as the main image and therefore be more engaging for the target audience?
    Finally, make sure the copy used is accessible and to the point:

    Join Our Team
    We’re Hiring
    Could This Be You?

    If employers are beginning their Facebook Ads journey and need something straightforward and quick – tap into the platform’s simple-to-use form.
    Don’t…
    Use a landing page. While that might be the first choice for many organizations when requesting candidate information, unfortunately when users are sent ‘away’ from Facebook, the platform can’t see the analytics and so it’s difficult for recruiters and HR teams to understand engagement rates.
    Another benefit of the Facebook form is that it’s pre-populated, so when a candidate clicks on an ad, that information is far quicker to retrieve than someone manually sending a CV or covering letter.
    And a quick note for recruiters when using Facebook Ads during talent acquisition too is to make the content relatable. Use real people who can tell a story to the audience, build brand credibility through testimonials, and create a sense of authenticity with the comms that are designed to make job seekers ‘stop the scroll’.
    Overall, the advice is to almost work out the budget by reverse engineering what the organization wants to achieve and where they want to be seen. Facebook has many benefits compared to third-party platforms and can often be a more cost-effective option, so don’t write it off when the next recruitment campaign is ready to be rolled out.
    By James Urquhart, Managing Director and Co-founder of Let’s Run Marketing
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    Ageism in Recruitment: Why We Need to Change the Way We Think

    While both older and younger generations have suffered the effects of ageism in the workplace, those that sit within older age groups seem to have borne the brunt of this harmful way of thinking in recent years.
    The ageism trend has only been accelerated by the repercussions of Covid-19. After the pandemic, Baby Boomers and a significant portion of Gen X took early retirement, deciding against returning to full-time work due to the shortage of opportunities available to them.
    With individuals over 50 leaving work due to lack of support having been identified as the biggest cause for labour shortage across the UK, ageism has the potential to have a detrimental impact that extends far beyond the damage to individuals and businesses.
    The issues with recruitment in the UK
    Hiring managers’ bias towards employing older individuals has been known to be one of the main causes of ageism within recruitment, and with only 24% of HR leaders between the ages of 25 and 30 saying they felt motivated to recruit workers in the 55 to 75 age category, younger generations’ preconceptions seem to be one of the main problems.
    The new generations’ bias is causing them to miss out on the plethora of benefits that working hand-in-hand with people of different ages can have, but also contributing to existing issues within the recruitment industry.
    The recruitment crisis is still rampant in the UK, as the number of unfilled positions has risen to a new record of 1,300,000 between March and May 2022, up from 1.295,000 in the February and April quarter.
    And retention is a problem too, with figures revealing that around 994,000 individuals moved jobs between January and March 2022 in the UK. This shows that businesses are not putting enough effort into retaining their workforce, making them feel valued and presenting them with a path for future progression.
    Additionally, if we are only willing to offer employment to the younger generations, older age groups will naturally feel there are no longer any opportunities available to them, opting for early retirement instead, which is likely to cause the recruitment crisis to become worse in the next few years.
    Why are current recruitment practices not working?
    The implications of ageist hiring practices are multi-faceted, but their effects have undoubtedly been felt by many job seekers within older age groups.
    A research project investigating ageism in recruitment in the UK revealed that around 30% of individuals between the ages of 50 and 69 felt the application process itself put them at a disadvantage because of their age, while around 23% of those who participated said that it is the way that job adverts are written and marketed that is particularly problematic.
    These findings provide interesting food for thought for recruiters: biased screening processes and job descriptions could easily put off certain individuals from applying for a job, causing businesses to lose a potentially perfect candidate. For instance, hiring processes that are entirely digital or that require the use technology older individuals may not be familiar with would naturally penalise older applicants.
    Evaluating the efficacy of their recruitment practices should be the first step for hiring managers and talent acquisition teams, particularly establishing whether these include any elements or processes that would ostracise certain individuals.
    What’s the answer?
    If an organisation has built teams predominantly comprising younger individuals, they should consider asking themselves whether they have – consciously or subconsciously – avoided hiring those within older age groups, and why.
    While having three or four different generations within the workplace may potentially lead to some minor generational clashes, it also has the potential to be beneficial for all age groups, which is why businesses should empower individuals of different ages to work together.
    This should involve utilising behavioural science to identify key traits in individuals to establish whether they will be able to work well together, regardless of age. Knowing exactly how workers collaborate with other individuals, manage stress or react to change are all factors that can help hiring managers make the right decisions and avoid age bias.
    Hiring managers should first and foremost establish what individuals’ abilities are, how they behave in different situations and what sets them in motion. While there is no one answer for every business, our focus should be on making hiring practices as inclusive as possible, which starts with making decisions based on data and focusing on skills and qualities that truly matter.
    Ultimately, biased hiring practices are exacerbating the labour shortage and causing businesses to miss out on a huge portion of talented workers capable of really making a difference.
    By David Bernard, founder and CEO of behavioural assessment firm AssessFirst.
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    The Future Workforce: How to Attract Gen Z Talent

    By the year 2030, the number of Gen Z employees globally is expected to triple, meaning that those born between 1995 and 2015 will soon make up as much as 30 percent of the workforce worldwide.
    With increasing numbers of Gen Z joining the workforce, it is inevitable that they will play a vital role in shaping the world of work for decades to come. But the question remains around how this generation will change the fabric of workplaces – as this cohort will bring their own vision of what the new world of work should look like.
    LinkedIn data shows that those early in their careers are changing jobs nearly 40 percent more than last year, at more than double the rate of millennials. Just under three-quarters of these career starters attribute this to a career awakening, primarily brought about by the pandemic – with many reporting feeling bored, wanting a job that better aligns with their values, and craving a better work-life balance.
    This leaves employers and recruiters with a new challenge: how can they attract and retain this younger generation of workers in an increasingly competitive labor market?
    Gen Z wants flexibility, not necessarily remote
    It’s clear that to attract Gen Z talent, recruiters will need to understand what matters to them. The pandemic has clearly taught us that flexibility at work is not just a daydream – it’s an expectation. According to our data, Gen Z is the generation most likely to have left – or considered leaving – a job because their employer didn’t offer a feasible flexible work policy (72%), compared to 69% of millennials, 53% of Gen X, and 59% of boomers.
    But this doesn’t necessarily mean that career starters wish to be remote all of the time. Our research of 4,000 Gen Z (18–25-year-old) career starters in the UK, US, France, and Germany suggests that the vast majority (70%) want access to an office, preferring either a mix of office and remote working, or being in the office full-time, compared to just being fully remote.
    For recruiters, the key takeaway here is the importance of flexible working arrangements. That means recognizing the realities of people’s personal situations, including that they may not have an ideal set-up to work from home full-time. Offering flexibility isn’t just essential in attracting and retaining Gen Z talent, but it also represents a huge opportunity to make workplaces fairer, more inclusive, and more equitable. For example, our recent report found greater workplace flexibility could help open up new employment opportunities for 1.3 million people in the UK with disabilities, caring responsibilities, and those based in rural locations.
    Create a culture of continuous learning
    People aren’t just rethinking when, or where they work. But also why. Our recent Workplace Learning Report found that 76% of Gen Z employees cite learning as the key to a successful career. Our data also suggests that two-fifths would be willing to accept a pay cut of up to 5% of their salary for a role that offers better career growth.
    To attract Gen Z talent, companies can promote a culture of continuous learning and highlight the opportunities they’ll provide for career growth. Whether you’re facilitating mentorship opportunities or providing access to learning courses, all of these steps will go a long way to attracting and retaining those at the earliest stages of their careers.
    Remove the barriers of experience inflation
    Recruiters have a crucial role to play in helping their clients to advertise entry-level job roles appropriately. If you’re hiring at the entry-level, you need to ensure that your job postings are reflective of the level of experience career starters will have under their belt.
    Our data found that nearly a third of Gen Z job seekers say that the biggest hindrance they face is not knowing where to start. This is because more often than not, organizations label positions requiring three-plus years of experience as entry-level. This experience inflation is locking top talent out of applying for roles that they perceive themselves to be underqualified for. For example, based on our analysis of LinkedIn data from nearly 4 million jobs posted between December 2017 and August 2021, we found that employers required a minimum of three years of relevant work experience on 35% of their entry-level postings.
    It may seem advantageous to have experienced employees coming in at the entry-level, but companies could end up losing out on top talent in the long term. With Gen Z candidates becoming increasingly selective about the roles they apply for, it’s more important than ever for recruiters to be well-versed in an organization’s purpose, culture, and what makes it stand out. Job postings will not only need to reflect entry-level skills and organizational values, but they will also need to take a skills-based approach to ensure potential candidates aren’t being locked out of these opportunities.
    By Adam Hawkins, Head of Search and Staffing EMEA & LATAM, LinkedIn.
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    How to Ask Better Interview Questions

    If you want to hire the best people, you need to ask the best interview questions. Online CV builder resume.io gathered the most effective interview questions from successful business leaders and entrepreneurs. And it added some helpful tips and advice on how to incorporate them during your next big recruitment drive.
    Good interviews start with good questions. Those questions need to be open-ended and probing. Open-ended questions can’t be answered with a “yes” or “no” or a static response. They’re often phrased as a statement and are designed to get your candidates talking as much as possible.
    Common open-ended interview questions:

    Tell me about yourself.
    How would you describe yourself?
    How would your boss or co-workers describe you?
    What motivates you?
    What do you see as your strengths?
    What accomplishments are you proud of?

    The best open-ended questions
    Not all open-ended questions are created equal. “How would you describe yourself?” is vague and could lead the interview down an unfruitful path.
    Instead, the trick is to ask open-ended questions that reveal the candidates’ suitability for the role you’re trying to fill.
    Porter Braswell, CEO of diversity hiring startup Jopwell, asks his applicants, “What does success mean to you?”
    Shippo CEO Laura Behrens Wu asks something similar. She inquires, “What are some things outside of work that you’re irrationally passionate about?”
    Both questions appear unrelated to a specific role. However, they’re excellent tools for hiring managers who want to understand what drives and motivates their candidates.
    For example, if your candidate plays a competitive sport and is motivated by a high salary, bonuses, and awards, then there’s a good chance they’ll thrive in a fast-paced, high-pressure sales environment.
    Asking uncomfortable questions
    According to billionaire entrepreneur Tim Ferriss, your success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations you’re willing to have.
    This is certainly the case for recruiters, who should never be afraid of asking really tough questions. After all, every candidate can look like a star if you keep pitching slow balls. Only an elite few can handle the fastballs and curveballs.
    But finding the right balance is crucial. You want the candidate to open up, not clam up.
    Former Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson uses this question to challenge anyone he interviews:
    “Tell me about a time you really screwed something up. How did you handle it, and how did you address the mistake?”
    It’s an excellent interview question. It assesses the candidates’ honesty and humility – would you really want to hire someone who claims they never make mistakes – and it’s an opportunity to tick off other essential competencies, including problem-solving and the ability to respond positively to feedback.
    Here are some more ‘uncomfortable’ questions from successful business leaders:

    “What would someone who doesn’t like you tell us about you?” – Luis Von Ahn, Duolingo CEO.
    “What’s one piece of critical feedback you received that was difficult to hear?” – Pema Lin-Moore, VP of People Operations.
    “Describe yourself in three words,” – Sara Blakely, Spanx CEO.
    “If you were in my shoes, what attributes would you look for in hiring for this role?” – Tim Chen, Co-found and CEO of NerdWallet.

    Get your candidates thinking
    Elon Musk drops this brain-teaser in during his interviews:
    “You’re standing on the surface of the earth. You walk one mile south, one mile east, and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?”
    It’s not a trick question; the answer is The North Pole.
    For Musk, the question tests a candidate’s cognitive ability – and that needs to be high if you’re designing rockets to Mars.
    But the question is helpful in other ways, too – even if the candidate doesn’t know the answer. In fact, how they respond to not knowing can be extremely revealing.
    Are they humble enough to say they don’t know? Curious enough to ask you to explain the answer? And if they try to wing or blag it, what else are they not being 100% honest about?
    Start trying these questions out in your next interviews. You’ll be surprised by how much they’ll help you find the right person for the job.

    Ashley Murphy graduated with a BA (Hons) in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Manchester. He works as a content writer for Resume.io, specializing in technology, higher education, and entrepreneurship.
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    What Does Your Recruitment Process Say About You?

    With the easing of lockdown kickstarting the economy and more employers seeking new staff, candidates have become far more selective about the jobs they decide to take. And where does a candidate gain their first impression of your business? During the recruitment process.
    If you still think your ideal recruit will jump through hoops for the chance of an interview, think again. Candidates have far greater expectations when it comes to recruitment in 2022, and there are around 36% fewer applicants across industries in the first place. So, you cannot afford to let the ideal candidate slip through your fingers.
    Where businesses go wrong with recruitment
    Two key reasons why candidates decline a position include:

    However, 52% of job seekers place lack of response from employers (or recruiters!) as the number one frustration during the job search — which explains why 89% of potential candidates drop out of the hiring process due to a drawn-out timeline.
    During this new age of remote and hybrid working, company culture is also more important than ever. Failure to display a progressive attitude to work-life balance could be the ultimate turn-off for a potential candidate. According to Glassdoor, 77% of people consider company culture before applying for a job — and even believe it is more important than salary when it comes to job satisfaction.
    What’s more, since the pandemic necessitated the widespread adoption of remote working, many people are reluctant to accept roles involving a long commute. Only one in seven workers expect to commute into their place of work five days a week — so, if your business cannot offer a flexible approach to work, your top candidates will likely seek it elsewhere.
    How to improve the recruitment process
    A candidate will gain their first impression of your business by checking it out online before even thinking about applying. So, if your online presence is inconsistent, incomplete, or out of date, people are unlikely to view your organization as a suitable match.
    Ensuring everything — from your website and social channels to the job ad itself — is well written, accurate, and demonstrates a positive company culture will go a long way to reassuring a potential employee that your business is a legitimate and appealing prospect.
    A business’ reputation also speaks volumes about its culture and values. Quality online reviews and feedback from current or past employees are crucial, so it is essential to build a positive working environment and reputation to prove how great your business is to work for.
    Clear communication and timeliness from the start are also critical elements of the recruitment process. It takes a lot of time and resources for HR departments to keep up with multiple ongoing applications; by embracing technology and integrating digital processes, you can automate responses and streamline applications.
    Once you have refined your software and remote onboarding processes, your pool of available candidates will expand significantly — especially since 43% of graduates have had to turn down interviews due to the cost of getting there. Plus, as the average cost of replacing an employee is 150% of their salary, it is well worth investing in the correct processes to get recruitment right the first time.
    By Julie Mott, Managing Director, Howett Thorpe.
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    A Step-By-Step Checklist To Inclusive Hiring in 2022

    Many HR departments are attempting to create a diverse workplace in today’s world, but you can’t have diversity without inclusion.
    To construct a diverse team and a modern and attractive workplace culture, HR staff must create an environment that welcomes all individuals and fosters equal engagement and representation.
    In recent years, there has been a significant effort in the UK to fight for equality, to the point that employers are instituting quotas based on gender, BAME, disability, and even sexual orientation.
    There are two significant types of diversity in today’s workplace:
    First, inherent diversity is concerned with qualities such as race, gender, and age. Education, experience, beliefs, skills, and knowledge are all aspects of acquired variety.
    Natural HR has set out to explore our top ideas for making a diverse and inclusive recruitment process a standard element of your people talent strategy in this article.
    What is the definition of workplace diversity?
    It is critical to remember that workplace diversity is defined as when a company understands, accepts, and values differences between people of different races, ethnicities, genders, ages, religions, disabilities, and sexual orientations, as well as differences in personalities, skill sets, experiences, and knowledge.
    What are the benefits of diversity and inclusivity recruitment?
    Having a functional diversity and inclusion strategy that is incorporated into your recruitment workflow will provide your company with various benefits, including:

    Hiring better talent.
    Being able to make more informed business decisions.
    Increasing the performance of your teams.
    Accelerating innovation by allowing different mindsets to collaborate.
    Gaining more decadent customer satisfaction due to high-quality staff.
    Improving company culture with improved employee satisfaction.

    The inclusive hiring in the workplace checklist
    The tutorial below will walk you through the whole recruitment process, from bringing on a new team member to crafting a job advertisement and interviewing qualified candidates. It will include critical considerations to ensure that diversity and inclusion are prioritized at each stage.
    1. Audit your job adverts to remove bias:
    When it comes to inclusive and diverse recruitment, you can’t look forward without looking back. As a result, the first step you must take is to assess your whole recruitment pipeline to identify faults and begin implementing improvements that will address diversity and inclusivity concerns.
    When reviewing historical job advertisements, you may find a propensity to employ more masculine or feminine language in job advertisements, which may discourage particular groups from applying for specific roles. Based on the findings of this analysis, you may then retroactively apply new conditions to the recruiting procedure to reduce biases in future recruitment drives.
    2. Target sources where diverse candidates are focused:
    It is now easier than ever to recruit applicants from a large skill pool with the Internet’s strength. To that end, sourcing individuals from several sources is a terrific method to diversify your recruitment pool.
    Rather than relying solely on traditional job boards or recruitment agencies, look for chances to diversify candidates through alternative sources such as educational institutions, government agencies, and even rehabilitation centers.
    You might also communicate directly with organizations that focus on specific areas; for example, for a technology post, you could interact directly with women in technology groups to connect with suitable female applicants.
    3. Encourage your employees to utilize their network:
    If you want to hire more of a specific group of under-represented people, reach out to some of your current team members who fall into that category.
    Creating an internal applicant recommendation program is one approach to accomplish this. You will be able to connect with similar candidates from varied backgrounds by utilizing your existing internal pool of diverse workers.
    4. Offer internships targeted at underrepresented groups:
    Offering internships to folks with specialized credentials is a terrific approach to foster up-and-coming talent in your sector. To accomplish this, you may form collaborations with education and community organizations in your area to provide an opportunity to groups that may struggle to take the first steps into the roles you’re recruiting for.
    5. Develop an employer brand that showcases your diversity:
    When developing a brand identity, don’t overlook the significance of diversity and inclusivity. You should encourage employees from various backgrounds to share their experiences with your organization, which you should then incorporate into your employer and recruiting branding.
    Having these stories in place and actively pushing them in your applicant sourcing is a terrific approach to ensure your diversity recruiting strategy is working properly.
    6. Utilize blind recruitment:
    Blind recruitment is one of the most popular trends in the industry. To reduce bias during the first recruitment stage, it takes steps to blackout essential information such as name, age, education, and candidate photos. The idea here is to avoid further discrimination in who you choose to interview.
    7. Rethink what factors you screen for when hiring:
    When determining what your ideal recruit looks like, it is vital to ensure that your possible candidates exhibit the characteristics that your firm values. Throughout the recruitment process, examine how you’re screening candidates and yourself to see whether you’re directing the outcomes towards specific types of people owing to potential bias.
    Chris Bourne is Head of Marketing at Natural HR. Natural HR is a cloud-based HR software for small businesses and organizations looking to improve staff management and pay. 
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    Why AI Recruiting is Key to Growth in 2022

    Business priorities in 2022 have all shifted to center around talent. Primarily, finding it. The Great Resignation, or the Great Reshuffle, or the Big Quit — whatever you want to call it — continues to dominate headlines and highlight the ongoing shortage of labor. But companies need to understand that the skewed supply and demand ratio for talent is here to stay. One study even predicts a global human talent shortage of 85 million workers by 2030.
    Despite this trend seeming to look like old news at this point, many organizations’ hiring programs were still completely caught off guard over the last year. In a report by Hiretual, 61% of recruiters said sourcing talent was their biggest challenge in 2021. At the end of 2020, when asked about their biggest anticipated concern, sourcing talent didn’t even make it to the top three.
    That same report found the second and third biggest challenges for recruiters surveyed went to candidate engagement and employer competition, respectively. Again, when recruiters were asked the same question the year before, neither of these obstacles was high on the list.
    What these responses signal is a shift in priority from inbound to outbound recruiting. That is, rather than relying on workers to go out and find jobs, companies are now having to sell available jobs to workers — and doing so at scale is proving difficult. While companies and recruiters may be beginning to understand this, the amount of LinkedIn posts we’re still seeing from leaders exclaiming, “We’re Hiring!” — expecting qualified prospects to go out of their way and click through to a boring careers page — shows not many have adapted to compete.
    As organizations around the world refine strategies for the future, now is the time to commit to growth, and adapt to achieve it. Companies that do will stand to benefit from a final post-pandemic jolt to productivity, setting themselves up for a more sustainable future. But with more jobs available than there are workers to do them, those that fail to change their recruiting strategy will see their workforce — and success — atrophy.
    Getting More Human With AI
    The pressure is on for talent acquisition, but changing priorities brought on by the pandemic will require recruiters to do more than fill jobs. Going forward, recruiters must offer opportunities that meet heightened needs from talent (such as more inclusive cultures and more flexible work schedules) and align with refined company objectives (like scaling skill sets and leading product innovation).
    To do that effectively, recruiters need to be able to spend more time doing the more human aspects of the job, to provide a better experience to candidates, and better qualify talent for the needs of the business — now and for the future.
    If 2021 investment data is any indication, talent acquisition tech stacks are getting reevaluated. In fact, 62% of companies increased their investment in talent acquisition technology last year, according to Aptitude Research. Because something has to give, more companies than ever before will look to AI recruitment technologies to give themselves a competitive advantage. Here are a few ways AI will help companies address key recruiting challenges in 2022.
    Revealing Blind Spots
    Not all talent is accessible in the same places, and many recruiters are looking for candidates with too narrow of a view into the available talent pool. Usually limited by a handful of disparate job boards, with limited search functionality or candidate profile visibility, talent acquisition pros end up missing access to a large share of qualified talent.
    AI recruiting tools will broaden the scope of available talent. By pulling candidate profile data from multiple talent pools, hiring teams can access significantly more of the total talent population and search from a single source. Some platforms are approaching access to almost a billion candidates. Companies that need to scale growth will have more options, and more opportunities to hire.
    In addition, AI will help recruiting teams remove limitations to how they find talent by mitigating unconscious bias from the process to make more equitable hiring decisions. This works by automatically matching candidates based on the skills relevancy of what a recruiter is looking for, rather than focusing on any other candidate’s features. For example, blind searches can be conducted to remove attributes like gender or race, or even education, to help remove bias and lack of diversity in the hiring process.
    By managing diversity in the outbound phase of the recruiting process — as opposed to scrubbing data in ATSs or CRMs — organizations can take a more proactive approach to make equitable hiring decisions.
    Meeting the Need for Speed
    To reach goals for scale, hiring teams need to shorten the time it takes to bring the right jobs to the right people. With AI, organizations will begin to automate more of the transactional and respective aspects of the hiring process. This will give recruiters more time to focus on building relationships by engaging prospective talent in meaningful ways.
    Without the right technology, recruiters will spend less time adding value to the process. Automation will free up the time it takes for recruiters to facilitate communication by removing manual tasks like bulk outreach, scheduling, and managing candidate pipeline data, so they can spend more time consulting with talent to place them in roles that best fit their interests, ambitions, and experience.
    Teams leveraging AI will encounter fewer obstacles with potential candidates in misaligned job expectations and broken feedback loops, resulting in faster time to hire and smoother onboarding experiences.
    Establishing a Foundation for Growth
    For many candidates, contact with a recruiter is the first moment of exposure they have with an organization. That first impression has the potential to create interest by offering the candidate valuable and relevant experience. It also has the potential to diminish the brand in the eye of prospects and their peers.
    With the help of AI, organizations will set up hiring teams to showcase their brand to candidates in the best light and build a workforce that better supports company objectives for the long run. By engaging talent with a more inclusive approach, increasing the speed and ease of the hiring process, and broadening the scope of talent they see and consider, only organizations leaning on AI will overcome today’s hiring challenges to build workforces that grow.
    Shannon Pritchett is Head of Community at both Hiretual and Evry1 (which she co-founded in 2021). 
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