18 Lean Recruiting Tips & Tricks

Recruiting in a World with Limited Resources “Your mission this year, should you choose to accept it, is to hire 800 people with 2 recruiters, a recruiting platform, and a modest budget. This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds. Good luck.”

This is a true story. Well, minus the movie Jeremy is not alone. Most recruiting teams Combine that with an increasingly tight drama. are small, nimble, and always strapped talent pool in an economy with nearly full for resources and budget. LinkedIn clearly employment, the market for top candidates That’s what Jeremy Ryder, the Head of quantifies the dynamics around the recruiting is only getting tougher. In fact, according to Recruiting at Trek Bikes, was asked to crunch in their 2017 Global Recruiting Trends the 2017 Recruiter Nation Report, 89% of do by his management team, and he Report from LinkedIn where recruiters said: recruiters think it will get more competitive implemented a highly tuned, simplified over the next year. recruiting process, automated everything • Hire More People: 56% needed to hire that he could, and created a talent machine more people this year than last Oh, and you’re also going to have to that brought in top talent for his both his backfill the people that leave, given the • Without More Recruiters: 61% didn’t corporate and retail positions. pervasive acceptance of job hopping among anticipate any additional recruiting Millennials and others. Instead of being daunted by this goal, he headcount embraced it, and all of the lean recruiting best Bottom line: You need to get smarter about • Without More Budget: 52% reported practices that helped him accomplish what using what you have in this increasingly that their budgets would remain stagnant had seemed impossible. competitive, dynamic, and noisy hunt for qualified talent. That’s what being lean is all about.

800 Hires | 2 Recruiters | 1 Year | Time-to-Hire Let’s get started. Dropped by 20 Days | Agency Fees Dropped $165k

1 Nail the “Free” Lean Recruiting in a world with limited resources means that you need to make sure to cover the bare Recruiting Basics minimum, and these seven things don’t cost a thing—even better, right?

Here’s where to focus:

2 1. Create a Recruiting Culture: Since you’re on your own, or have a small Nail the “Free” Lean recruiting team, you need to transform everyone at your company into recruiters. That means getting everyone involved from the moment a Recruiting Basics candidate is welcomed at reception to creating a balanced interview team that covers each aspect of what they are looking for in a teammate.

Although most employees are onboard, there are always a few “problem children” that don’t do a good job of selling the company or don’t conduct a positive interview. Identify those folks early in the process (even if they are hiring managers) and coach them with mock interviews.

2. Get Consensus on the Ideal Candidate: This may not sound like a wise use of time when you’re being pressured to get hires in the door quickly, but it’s actually the best use of your time, if you want to successfully hire the right people. Meet with your key stakeholders and/or executives and get into agreement on who your ideal candidate is—both from culture fit and a “skills that you need today and 3 years from now,” perspective. This will help you, and your hiring team, zero in on the right candidates faster.

Remember your ideal profile should be a starting point in candidate assessment, not a rigid formula.

3 3. Referrals Are Your Friend: Referral candidates are well known to be higher Nail the “Free” Lean quality, but also stay longer with an average retention rate of 46% versus the 33% retention rate of candidates that come in through your career site, Recruiting Basics according to Undercover Recruiter. Referrals are especially important if you have a small recruiting team because these candidates also have a much lower cost-per-hire. So, make your co-workers your biggest asset and get a program set up, publicize it well, and advertise the financial rewards and time- frames to your employees so they are incented to spread the word about your open positions.

Tips to Build a Better Referral Program

• Create a public leaderboard to give the program, and your star referrers, company-wide visibility.

• Host a sourcing party! Have your employees look through their LinkedIn connections to identify “the best product manager in New York” or “their favorite sales rep in the Minneapolis area”.

• Publicize your SLA (service-level agreement) on referrals, so employees know what to expect when they refer a connection.

• Announce your hired referrals at department or company-wide meetings. Make it a big deal!

4 4. Clean Up Your Employer Brand: This is one that can be as tiny or huge as you Nail the “Free” Lean make it. As a lean recruiter, it make sense to smart small and take advantage of the free things like LinkedIn and Glassdoor profiles. And, don’t forget about Recruiting Basics writing compelling job descriptions that inspire candidates to apply and a career website that works well on mobile.

5. Make What You Have Work Harder For You: Think about what you’ve done before that’s worked well. If you’ve run Boolean searches that delivered impressive results, bookmark them for reuse. If you’ve got footage of happy employees talking about their work for a corporate video, put it out there on your career page. If you’ve stockpiled past applicants for a rainy day, pull out their resumes, tag them correctly in your CRM, and see where they might fit now. Sometimes reusing and recycling your core assets is the fastest, simplest way to make a big impact.

92% would consider leaving their current jobs in offered another roll with a company that had an excellent corporate reputation.*

5 *CR Survey Report: Corporate Reputation Affects Talent Acquisition 6. Stay Current on What’s Out There: If you know your competitors are using Nail the “Free” Lean certain strategies and having success, give them a try, too! Read up on current trends in sourcing, and see if they make sense for your company. Find out Recruiting Basics the top technologies used by other companies like yours, and consider if they’re right for your needs. You don’t have to come up with brand-new ways to engage with talent. You just need to find quality candidates fast and hire them first.

7. Ask Your Friends in Marketing For Help: Your marketing team comes up with catchy taglines and compelling advertising all day long, so why not enlist their help with your employer brand? They can help you spice up your job descriptions, provide great shots to add to your Glassdoor profile, or give you advice on how to raise awareness about your hardest-to-fill positions.

6 Make Technology The right technology can help lean recruiting teams boost efficiency by delivering more targeted Work Harder for You sourcing, more personalized engagement techniques, and more automated workflows (and that’s just the tip of the iceberg).

It seems like there’s always a new, cool technology that promises to automate the entire recruiting process and magically surface the perfect candidate among hundreds who have applied. Although artificial intelligence and machine learning is all the rage, the technologies are still in their infancy when it comes to recruiting.

So, here are two important pieces of advice:

7 8. Try Before You Buy! Put the technology through the paces to make sure that Make Technology the application lives up to the hype. Push back and lean on vendors to help you show success with quotes and examples from existing customers or an Work Harder for You ROI calculator.

9. Start With What Works: As a busy lean recruiter, you don’t have enough time to let technologies fail you. The good news is that many successful experts have paved the way for you with creative ideas for everything from strategic sourcing to streamlining processes. Your task is to figure out which of those ideas you can put to use quickly and efficiently. We recommend starting with a proven ATS and then slowly add in test programs or other applications.

Key Questions to Ask When Evaluating Recruiting Technology

1. What are your core needs in terms of features/functionality?

2. Is the software easy to use?

3. Have customers—that are similar to you—seen success with this tool?

4. What is the ROI of the tool? What KPIs will this tool help you improve?

5. How will this tool improve the candidate experience?

8 Kick Roadblocks Lean recruiting teams must be agile enough to respond to new or changing demands, so you’ll and Time Sucks need to eliminate the obstacles that typically delay to the Curb recruiting processes. The simpler, the better.

“Looking back to life before Jobvite, we would spend 70-80 percent of our day screening applicants. Today that has dropped by at least 30 percent. Now I can focus on critical work that can move the needle for Noble, allowing my time to be more strategic and impactful.”

Michelle Ybarra, Manager of Selection & Hiring, Noble Network of Charter Schools

9 10. Say Bye-Bye to Your Biggest Bottlenecks: Hiring quickly is imperative in Kick Roadblocks this economy, so you’ve got to address the hold-ups ASAP. Are there hiring managers who won’t respond to your requests? Are you having difficulty and Time Sucks keeping up with communication to candidates? Maybe your bottleneck is simply an over-complicated apply process. Whatever is blocking you, think to the Curb about the easiest solution to clear your path.

11. Replace Time Sucks with Time Savers: Lean recruiters don’t fall prey to the office’s most notorious time-wasting practices, right? If you’re using social media to track down candidates, don’t fall into the “I’ll just check my newsfeed” abyss. Stay on task! If you’re meeting with hiring managers to discuss a job description or a candidate, have an agenda mapped out in advance to avoid getting sidetracked. And don’t be afraid to delegate tasks to other people or departments if they’re not critical to the job at hand.

10 Plan Ahead to Even though your day job keeps you very busy, it’s important to plan for the future if you want to Stay Ahead stay nimble as market conditions and business requirements change.

Make sure that you’re looking ahead at your roadmap so that you already have a pipeline of candidates for future roles. Here are a few other things to keep in mind:

11 12. Be Very Clear on Your Hiring Plans: This is as boring as it sounds, but it’s Plan Ahead to vitally important. You need to understand exactly how many people you need to hire, by when, and that hiring budgets are approved. Pro tip: Make sure Stay Ahead that you have market data for each position you’re hiring for; match the title with market data and your budget. That way, you can rest assured that your offering competitive salaries while still staying within fair ranges for the role and your geography and within your budget targets.

13. Don’t Forget Attrition: Everyone always forgets about attrition in their hiring planning. Based on your current attrition rate, and industry norms, plan for hiring accordingly. The last thing that you want is to get caught flat-footed and miss your hiring targets because you were too busy backfilling roles.

Calculate your attrition rate using this formula. Depending on your growth rate, you may need to review this once a year or as much as once a month.

12 14. Document Changes: At the beginning of every year, most recruiters have Plan Ahead to their annual hiring goals locked. But, as is always the case, things change. Either you need to ramp up or down, based on the needs of the business. Stay Ahead Make sure to document all changes to the hiring plan, and set expectations accordingly, so that there are no surprises when measuring results.

15. Constantly Evaluate the ROI of Your Spend: Make sure that you’re the getting most out of your lean recruiting budget. If something is working, double down on it. If it’s not, drop it like a hot potato, and reallocate those dollars accordingly.

Jobvite’s reporting capabilities definitely help justify certain expenses. We can look at how much we’re spending on LinkedIn—which is probably our biggest line- item expenditure—and then easily see how many people we have hired from those campaigns [and see if] our investment is paying for itself.

Alyssa Planeta, Asst. Director of Talent Acquisition, EverQuote

13 Establish a Metrics Metrics will help demonstrate the effectiveness of your most basic strategies, so you know whether Minimum they’re working or you need to recalibrate as you go forward.

As a lean recruiter, your day can’t be consumed by measuring every metric like email open rates or the minute details on ad copy performance. You need to decide which metrics matter most to you and your organization.

14 16. Here are a few recommended metrics to always keep your eyes on: Establish a Metrics • Time-to-Hire Minimum • Cost-per-Hire • Visitor-to-Applicant Ratio on your career website • Source of Hire

You may also want to consider doing a series of surveys that measure the candidate and hiring manager experience. (SurveyMonkey is a great one, and it’s free!) This will give you great qualitative insights, in addition to quantitative satisfaction numbers.

At an early-stage startup, everyone wears multiple hats. Even our software developers need to act as hiring managers. Jobvite’s social media features provided an easy, intuitive way for employees to share open positions within their networks, allowing them to find their inner recruiter.

Jeff Lipton, Vice President of Marketing, Watersmart Software,

15 How Do You If you’re doing your job right, you’re helping your company grow—and that means there will likely Know When it’s come a time when you, too, must expand your Time to Grow? team’s function. You need a plan in place for tackling that situation as efficiently as you would for any other department.

16 17. When Do you Grow? When deciding whether to add a new member to your How Do You recruiting team, do your homework first. Understand your hiring roadmap, your current hiring team’s capacity, how long it’s taken to hire people in Know When it’s the past, and your budget. Apply those factors to your plan, and see if your Time to Grow? current resources will get you there (or not).

18. How Do You Grow? If candidates for a particular type of position are running short, for example, you might need a new sourcer. If your application yield is through the roof, you’ll need help with screening. If your recruiters are spending too much time scheduling, then you may need a team coordinator. And, if you have a big push for a particular skill set or location, then you may consider bringing in outside help for the short-term.

17 Go Be Lean! No question: Hiring is on the rise, competition is fierce, and time is of the essence. That’s why today’s recruiters must be able to meet their goals quickly and effectively, despite limited resources. A lean recruiting approach can help you achieve that essential efficiency—whether by leveraging available assets, capitalizing on new (or existing) technology, or eliminating bottlenecks—so you can ultimately deliver better results under pressure, now and into the future

Want more information on how Jobvite can assist you in building your lean recruiting team? Our complete technology platform covers every aspect of the recruiting funnel, providing the necessary process automation, streamlined workflows, and advanced features that simplify your job, from source to hire and beyond.

18 Go Be Lean! Take it from a lean recruiting pro….

The key unexpected benefit we’ve gotten from Jobvite is the flexibility and customization of the tool itself. If we see an opportunity to quickly make a change that will add value for our candidates or hiring managers, we can put it into play right away. We’re able to continually improve what we do every day.

Jeremy Ryder, Talent Acquisition Manager, Trek Bicycles

19 About Jobvite

Jobvite is the leading recruiting software company that helps emerging, CONNECT WITH US mid-market, and enterprise companies hire top talent easily, efficiently, and effectively. Our comprehensive and analytics-drivenrecruiting platform www.jobvite.com accelerates recruiting with a Candidate Recruitment Marketing (CRM) tool, an easy-to-use Applicant Tracking System (ATS), social recruiting www.facebook.com/jobvite capabilities, mobile-optimized branded career sites, a recruiting branding www.twitter.com/jobvite solution, on-demand video screening, advanced analytics, onboarding, and seamless integration with other HR systems. Focused exclusively on www.linkedin.com/company/jobvite recruiting software since 2006 and headquartered in San Mateo, Jobvite 650-376-7200 has thousands of customers including LinkedIn, Schneider Electric, Premise Health, Zappos.com, and Blizzard Entertainment. To learn more, visit www.jobvite.com or follow us @Jobvite.

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