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Written by Laura Belfield

Scalable career discovery for younger workers

Sapia’s CEO Barb Hyman comments on Australia’s Federal Budget as it relates to the youth.

As Australia rebuilds its economy, investing in the youth is a step in the right direction. However, business and community leaders must guide them towards the right career path, one HR leader said.

“It is comforting and critical that the government has recognised the important need to invest in this younger generation. They are both the worst-affected as a group by COVID in the short term. They are also likely to beat a larger cost of the impact of COVID on the economy and employment opportunities for the next five to 10 years,” said Barbara Hyman, CEO of Sapia.“Despite this, the investment in training only pays off if the individual has a good idea of what jobs they are best suited to. And, we all know, career counselling from school and beyond is pretty much non-existent,” Hyman told HRD.

“The more understanding for the kind of role and environment that brings out the best in an 18- or 25-year-old. The deeper self-awareness they have about their strengths, the more ROI both the government and the individual will get from this massive investment,” she said.

“Scalable career discovery should really be a part of this. R&D backing in this year’s budget should be used. That way, the hundreds of thousands of young people who are making life career choices can do so with confidence. Also, this technology is here now through AI-led personalised scalable career coaching,” Hyman said.

See the full article below.


‘We owe it to the next generation to ensure a strong economy,’ Frydenberg said

The Morrison government is ensuring the next generation won’t be left behind in an economy reeling from the pandemic, Treasurer Frydenberg said.

The Federal Budget 2020 unveiled this week includes incentives to businesses that will hire young Australians, and opens new pathways for upskilling them.

Frydenberg announced a new JobMaker hiring credit, payable for up to 12 months, for companies that will employ workers aged 16 to 35. “It will be paid at the rate of $200 per week for those aged under 30, and $100 per week for those aged between 30 and 35,” he said.

The incentive aims to open 450,000 job vacancies for young workers across Australia. New employees are required to render 20 hours of work per week. Additionally, they must have been receiving support such as JobSeeker, Youth Allowance or Parenting Payment. That is for at least 1 month in 3 months prior to hiring. Read more: JobSeekers are facing rate cuts – and fewer vacancies

Also, the government is also expanding its upskilling programs by allocating $1.2bn to 100,000 new apprentices and trainees. Overall, providing a 50% wage subsidy to businesses that enlist them. Before this, the government had already invested $1bn in creating 340,000 training places for school leavers and jobseekers.

It is also funding the following:

  • 50,000 new higher education short courses in agriculture, health, IT, science and teaching
  • 12,000 new commonwealth-supported places for higher education in 2021
  • 2,000 Indigenous students through the Clontarf Foundation to complete year 12 and pursue further education or find employment

“We owe it to the next generation to ensure a strong economy so their lives are filled with the same opportunities and possibilities we enjoyed,” Frydenberg said.

Read more: JobSeeker plan could cost 145,000 jobs: report

JobMaker credit open to employers hiring younger workers

As Australia rebuilds its economy, investing in the youth is a step in the right direction. However, business and community leaders must guide them towards the right career path, one HR leader said.

Government initiatives for youth!

“It is comforting and critical that the government has recognised the important need to invest in this younger generation. They are both the worst-affected as a group by COVID in the short term. They are also likely to beat a larger cost of the impact of COVID on the economy and employment opportunities for the next 5-10 years” said Barbara Hyman. “Despite this, the investment in training only pays off if the individual has a good idea of what jobs they are best suited to. Furthermore, we all know, career counselling from school and beyond is pretty much non-existent,” Hyman told HRD.

“The more understanding for the kind of role and environment that brings out the best in an 18- or 25-year-old. The deeper self-awareness they have about their strengths, the more ROI both the government and the individual will get from this massive investment,” she said.

“Scalable career discovery should really be a part of this and the R&D backing in this year’s budget should be used. That way, the hundreds of thousands of young people who are making these life career choices can do so with confidence. This technology is here now through AI-led personalised scalable career coaching,” Hyman said.

 


Blog

Graduate recruitment during COVID-19 – what’s different?

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Recruitment is still fundamentally human activity

The job seeker is a human being who at some point in the process wants to talk to another human being.

B.C (before COVID-19), organisations would create those moments of connection with prospective hires through campus events, case study workshops, group assessment days and invitations to office events.

COVID-19 and forced incubation make some of this impossible and even illegal.

Organisations who have been forced to bench thousands of employees face the same challenge. Staying connected to, caring for and protecting this ‘people asset’ they have built and invested so much in.

The only experience organisations have with protecting an asset on extended leave is when new parents take parental leave and for most organisations that comes down to letting them keep their computer equipment and inviting them to the Xmas party.

Countries in the southern hemisphere are bang in the middle of graduate onboarding, and graduate recruitment and those in the northern hemisphere are about to kick off their programs.

Graduates are a critical part of your talent pipeline. 

They bring new ideas and new skills, and above all, ambition to make a difference. They are also often the most cost-effective cohort as far as output vs salary and related costs.

Some questions to consider right now

  1. If you are mid-way through your graduate recruitment campaign, how do you complete the process remotely, and still maintain a high integrity and fair process for the applicants?
  2. If you haven’t yet started, what has to change as a result of COVID-19?
  3. Your latest graduate intake just started, how do you efficiently steer them through this and stay close to those who need more support?

Have you been following the HR practices of tech companies over the last decade? If you have, you will notice that expectations of employees and candidates have shifted big time. The Netflix culture deck personifies much of it with concepts such as ‘Trust people, not policy’ or ‘Trust + transparency = accountability’.

Trust at work means your team will work all night to meet a deadline. They will be generous sponsors and ambassadors for your organisation and your products, they will refer their friends to work with you. Additionally, they will accept change in your business more readily. Your team will admit and bounce back from mistakes and failures more readily, and overall their discretionary effort will be substantial.

Trust in the workplace is a massive accelerator, and most organisations are trying to find ways to accelerate – to build product faster, ship faster, change business models faster.

Woebegone companies that believe they can keep attracting talent especially young talent with a purpose of ‘improving Shareholder returns’.   Today, we look for aspirational purposes that connect us to something bigger and with which we want to identify. Check out the motto mission statements of the tech giants here and to be the 11th million (or thereabouts)  person to download the Netflix deck click here!


Click here to get 5 Tips To Maximise Trust In Grad Recruiting During COVID-19

 

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Recruitment Software

Whether it’s a revolution or evolution, technology touches our lives in ways that few could even imagine just a few years ago. There are few, if any, industries that have not been transformed by the digital age.

With the rise of new technologies and automation, there were some that feared the robot apocalypse was upon us. Who needs actual people when machines, algorithms, software and programs can do the job faster, smarter and more cost-effectively?

In the recruitment and HR industries, as job boards, social networking and websites like LinkedIn began their relentless rise, many believed that the human touch was about to stripped from an industry that only exists for human capital.

Of course, the very opposite is true. While there’s no denying some roles and industries have changed forever, advancing technology means new industries are emerging, new roles are being created and new skills are being sought by candidates and employers alike.

In the hiring industry, recruitment software is here to stay. This article explains how it can be working hard for you and providing a seamless and rewarding experience for your team, your clients and for every candidate.

The technology landscape in recruitment and HR

In this article we’re specifically looking at recruitment software and exploring its role and impact in the hiring process. Before we do, it’s important to understand its context and connection to the technology that can support the complete employee lifecycle. This extends from talent acquisition right through to the ongoing management and development of people through HR teams. The recruitment strategy and candidate management technology pipeline covers:

  1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – tools use to manage and analyse interactions with past, current and potential candidates. It enables a proactive and ‘always on’ hiring strategy, by tagging, categorising and growing deep talent pools.
  2. Applicant Tracking System (ATS) – an online platform that simplifies and streamlines the entire recruitment process from sourcing to selection. We’ll explore ATS in this article.
  3. Vendor Management System (VMS) – tools used by specialist recruiters and companies to manage the end-end process of contingent labour – freelancers, contractors, sub-contractors, statements of work (SOW)
  4. Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) – the core people system underpinning an organisation’s HR department with capabilities that may cover: onboarding, human capital, leave management, learning, recruitment, performance management and feedback, payroll and benefits.
  5. Learning Management System (LMS) – Learning and development is critical for organisations to evolve workforce skills and knowledge to meet skills gaps and evolving technologies. These tools administer, track, report and deliver
    e-learning, training and development programs

 

So what is recruitment software?

Recruiting software is not one thing. It’s an umbrella term for different tools that address different stages of the recruitment process. From creating job requisitions and conducting candidate screening to scheduling interviews and even sending out job offers, recruitment software can automate every step of the hiring process.

Generally, most types of recruitment software can be categorised into four categories and will address some or all of these key functions of the recruitment process:

  • Sourcing – this is all about identifying, finding and attracting potential candidates.
  • Engagement – how recruiters, candidates and organsations stay connected throughout the hiring process. It’s about nurturing relationships.
  • Selection – a range of tools and technologies to help accelerate the process of identifying candidates with the best or appropriate qualifications from the pool of applicants
  • Hiring – software tools that can be used to manage and coordinate the practicalities and processes of hiring and even onboarding candidates

Just as there are many types of recruitment agencies, there are many types of recruiting software and every solution will look different. Some recruitment agencies may also manage work placements so their recruiting software technology stack may include a Vendor management System as described above.

An agency placing technology professionals into permanent positions will have very different sourcing, database and engagement needs than an agency working to high volume briefs for customer-facing service roles. An agency retained for search and recruitment at the highest executive levels will have different needs again.

 

Why do you need recruitment software?

It’s rare to find anyone in the recruitment business that hasn’t begun to automate at least some of the hiring process. Job seekers – and not just those tech-savvy millennials – have been quick to embrace and engage with mobile apps, social media, job boards and more to find their next job. However, there are still many organisations relying on outdated and labour-intensive recruitment methods.

Recruiting software has been developed and continues to evolve to address the universal challenges and experiences of recruiters the world over:

  1. Time – Filling any role could take weeks or months, much of it spent reviewing and screening CVs and candidates, communicating with candidates and hirers, scheduling and coordinating interviews, making job offers and more. Recruiting software can help automate these processes and give you back your time to concentrate on higher value tasks.
  2. Costs – As much an issue for recruiters as it is for the businesses engaging them, traditional manual and paper-based processes can be expensive. Recruiting software can dramatically lower costs to hire, repaying technology investment quickly.
  3. Hard work – Any recruiter will tell you there are simply not enough hours in the day (or dollars in the budget) to stick with traditional labour-intensive, manual processes, especially in high volume recruitment briefs. Is there really anyone who will manually read and screen the CVs of 5,000 applicants?
  4. Free the people – For most hiring and talent acquisition teams, human resources are stretched thin already. Recruiting software can give your people more time to deliver a positive experience for every candidate.
  5. Skills shortages – In the history of work, there has always been and always will be industries and times when it’s challenging to find appropriately skilled candidates. Recruiting software can help recruiters find more candidates, with the right skills to fill roles sooner.

 

 

What does recruitment software do?

The hiring process has many steps. From promoting job opportunities to screening CVs, tracking candidates to making job offers, there are many pressure points.  The process can be costly and time-consuming and if things go sideways, you’re not just burning hours and dollars, you could be burning candidates too by making poor hiring decisions.

Automated recruiting software can do all the heavy lifting for you. It organises all the tools and all the data in one place to provide end-to-end functionality through the complete recruitment process. Simplifying and enhancing that process ensures a better experience for everyone –  recruiters, hirers, HR departments… and job candidates alike.

By streamlining process, recruiting software can help you significantly reduce hiring costs and fill roles faster.

 

What are the benefits of recruitment software?

Here’s how your organisation can benefit from recruitment software:

  • Automation – It’s not about software doing your job, it’s about software helping you to do your job better. From managing client databases to scheduling interviews, automation of many daily tasks can give you back time to focus on higher value briefs and enhancing the candidate and client experience.
  • Hire better, faster ­ – Through the one platform,  recruiting software can help improve hiring metrics including time to hire, cost per hire, employee retention, turnover rate and quality of hire. An easy, pain-free application process means more candidates are likely to apply for your jobs.
  • Finding, attracting and cultivating candidates – Candidates are the fuel in the engine of the recruitment business. Most recruiting software solutions will include capabilities to implement a CRM system to build deep talent tools of ‘ready to go’ prospective candidates.

A CRM platform may stand alone or integrate with an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that can streamline the entire recruitment process. At its simplest, an ATS is a data-driven system that eliminates the paper chase of traditional recruiting. There are fewer opportunities for data-entry errors and as data is digitised and can even be stored in the cloud, say goodbye to physical files and unwieldy paper charts.

Every ATS is different, but most will include integration with online job boards, careers pages and resumé databases, automated hiring workflows, communication capabilities and reporting tools.

  • Evaluating candidates – As reading and screening CVs and job applications can be the most time-consuming part of any recruiter’s job, this is one of the areas that many recruiters prioritise for automation. Driven by artificial intelligence and powered by machine learning, Ai recruitment tools are used for 3 key functions in the hiring process: sourcing, screening and interviewing of candidates.

Ai tools can use text, voice and even video to automate part or all of the evaluation and interviewing process. Making the recruitment process up to 90% faster, it’s especially useful for high volume recruitment briefs such as frontline retail or customer service roles.

  • Support diversity goals – Ai-enabled interviewing and screening can help reduce the effects of unconscious bias – the inherently human prejudices, personal preferences, beliefs and world-views that shape our assessment of others. Our biases can easily have a negative impact on candidates and mean you’re potentially missing out on the best candidates for the job. It can also mean employers are missing the opportunity to cultivate workplace diversity and all the benefits it delivers.

PredictiveHire’s Ai recruiting tool is a text-based, mobile-first interview offering blind-screening at its best, with no gender, age or ethnicity revealed.  Candidates rate the experience highly and appreciate personal feedback and coaching tips.

  • Reporting and insight – Most recruitment software solutions will provide easy, extensive and accurate reporting so you can gain valuable insights into candidates, trends, costs of recruiting and more.

Good reporting and centralised information can also enhance communications and collaboration between all stakeholders in the hiring process – candidates, recruiters, hiring teams and employers.

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Ready to continue your exploration of recruitment software and the benefits it can bring to your business? Find out more about PredictiveHire’s Ai-powered recruitment tool and how we can support your recruitment needs today.

You can try out PredictiveHire’s FirstInterview right now, or leave us your details to get a personalised demo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Contact Centre recruitment & retention – this will blow your mind!

Imagine being able to dial-up (or down) any chosen metric such as NPS, retention, absenteeism, staff turnover or any performance data point simply through smarter, predictive, data-driven hiring.

Predictive Talent Analytics turns the imaginary into reality, presenting a variety of businesses, including contact centres, with the opportunity to improve hiring outcomes and raise the performance bar. With only a minor tweak to existing business processes, predictive talent analytics addresses challenge faced by many contact centres.

Recruitment typically involves face-to-face or telephone interviews and psychometric or situational awareness tests. However, there’s an opportunity to make better hires and to achieve better outcomes through the use of Predictive Talent Analytics.

Many organisations are already using analytics to help with their talent processes. Crucially, these are descriptive analytical tools. They’re reporting the past and present. They aren’t looking forward to tomorrow and that’s key. If the business is moving forward your talent tools should also be pointing in the same direction.

Consider a call-waiting display board showing missed and waiting calls. This is reporting.

Alternatively, consider a board that does the same but also accurately predicts significant increases in call volumes, providing you with enough time to increase staffing levels appropriately. That’s predictive.

Descriptive analytical tools showing the path to achievement taken by good performers within the business can add value. But does that mean that every candidate within a bracketed level of academic achievement, from a particular socio-economic background, from a certain area of town or from a particular job board is right for your business? It’s unlikely! Psychometric tests add value but does that mean that everyone within a pre-set number of personality types will be a good fit for your business? That’s also unlikely.

The simple truth is that, even with psychometric testing and rigorous interviews, people are still cycling out of contact centres and the same business challenges remain.

With only a minor tweak to talent processes, predictive talent analytics presents an opportunity to harness existing data and drive the business forward by making hiring recommendations based on somebody’s future capability.

Telling you who is more likely to stay and produce better results for your business.

But wait, it gets better!

Pick the right predictive talent analytics tool and this can be done in an interesting, innovative and intriguing way taking approximately five minutes.

Once the tool’s algorithm knows what good looks like, crucially within your business (because every company is different!), your talent acquisition team can approach the wider talent market armed with a new tool that will drive up efficiency and performance.

Picking the right hires, first time.

Predictive talent analytics boosts business performance

  • Volume & time – with the right choice of tool, your talent team can simultaneously engage hundreds or thousands of candidates and, within a few minutes, be shown which applicants should be at the top of the talent pile because the data is showing they’ll be a good hire.
  • Retention – Each hiring intake is full of talent with the capability to perform for the business. An algorithm has effectively asked thousands of questions and subsequently identified the people who will be capable performers, specifically for your business.
  • Goodbye generic – Your business is unique. If the algorithm provided by your predictive analytics provider is unique to your business, then every single candidate prediction is personalised. A contact centre has the potential to analyse thousands of candidates and pick the individuals who best fit the specific requirements of the business or team, driven by data.

Consider this. Candidate A has solid, recent, relevant experience and good academic grades, ticking all the right hiring boxes but post-hire subsequently cycles out of the business in a few months.

Candidate B is a recent school-leaver with poor grades, no work history but receives a high-performance prediction and, once trained, becomes an excellent employee for many years to come.

On paper candidate A is the better prospect but with the fullness of time, candidate B, identified using predictive talent analytics, is the better hire.

Instead of using generic personality bandings to make hiring decisions, use a different solution.

Use predictive talent analytics to rapidly identify people who will generate more sales or any other measured output. Find those who will be absent less or those who will help the business achieve a higher NPS. Bring applicants into the recruitment pipeline knowing the data is showing they will be a capable, or excellent, performer for your business.

Now that’s an opportunity worth grasping!

Steven John worked within contact centres whilst studying at university, was a recruiter for 13 years and is now Business Development Manager at Sapia, a leading workforce science business providing a data-driven prediction with every hire. This article was originally written for the UK Contact Centre Forum


You can try out Sapia’s FirstInterview right now, or leave us your details to book a demo


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