Top hiring tips: from HR professionals, for HR professionals

By Miranda Nicholson, Director of HR, Formstack

Picture this: you’re looking for a new job. You hear about a new opening at a fantastic company and submit your application. You have a great interview, receive an offer, and accept it in a heartbeat.

This is an ideal scenario for a perfectly qualified candidate, but every HR professional knows there’s a lot more that goes into recruiting behind the scenes. Where do you find the perfect candidate for a role? What criteria does each individual need to meet before they receive the opportunity to interview? What interview questions will show you how they might perform as an employee? And, if they’re hired, how do you know if they’ll get along well with other employees in your organization?

With all these factors—and more—in play, it’s no wonder that hiring is one of the top HR challenges faced by human resources professionals across the globe.

To better understand how organizations overcome the hiring challenge, Formstack asked HR professionals from different backgrounds for some of their best tips on hiring the right employee for a role. They gave us some outstanding insights and advice on different pieces of the recruitment puzzle, which we narrowed down into three main takeaways:

1. Define What “Fit” Means to Your Organization

Hiring for fit is an obvious part of the recruiting process, but few organizations actually take the time to identify what “fit” means for them. To get started, Mike Bensi, advisor at FirstPerson, suggests considering these key questions:

1. What are the core values that make up your company’s culture?
2. What kind of behaviors do employees need to be successful in your organization?
3. What kind of behaviors might signify a red flag?

Don’t hesitate to brainstorm with other employees on your team or in your organization to get a strong sense of culture, success, and overall fit. Answering questions like these will help you build a unique value proposition for your company’s recruiting experience and can become a solid framework for your interview process.

2. Create an Experience that Defines Your Recruiting Brand

As a representative of your organization, Michelle Rodriguez, HR Manager for the Indianapolis Colts, says you should strive to provide the best possible experience for all job candidates in your talent pool—not just for the candidates who receive an offer. Communication and trust both play a vital role throughout the recruiting process, so it’s important to establish trust with candidates early on. If you tell a candidate you’ll follow up with them on Friday, you need to get back to them on Friday, even if you still haven’t made a decision.

Trisha Borme, talent acquisition manager at Interactive Intelligence, has found recruiting success by building a team of passionate talent professionals who designed the right process for her organization. Two major components of their process were assessing candidates’ soft skills and conducting a cultural assessment. Trisha notes that the candidate experience is very important and can make a major impact on your talent brand. Stringing candidates along without consistent communication is frustrating and unfair to them. Your recruiting brand will suffer if they share their negative impressions of your company with others. On the other hand, candidates who receive a great experience with timely and intentional communication can become advocates for your organization even if they aren’t hired.

3. Build Relationships to Expand Your Talent Pool

Even if your company has low employee turnover, it’s important to maintain a deep talent pool so that you’re prepared whenever the need for talent arises. Karin Gorman, president of the consulting division at Staff America Inc., encourages companies that struggle to find high quality candidates to reconsider their candidate sources. Building relationships with candidate sourcing organizations will help you fill your hiring funnel with candidates that have the skills and experience necessary for the job. For example, if you’re looking for a skilled graphic designer, connect with a local art college or institute. Once you establish a connection with those organizations, continue to foster the relationship through consistent communication, even when you don’t have job openings. This takes time but is absolutely worthwhile in the long run. If all else fails, consider partnering with a staffing agency that can help you fill those skilled roles.

If you continue to struggle with recruiting, take the time to identify your own personal hiring roadblocks and implement some of the above HR tips. While there’s no simple solution, putting more effort into these parts of your recruiting process is a great way to get started.


Miranda Nicholson is the Director of HR at Formstack, overseeing the acquisition, onboarding, and retention of current and to-be Formstackers.

The Straight Scoop: Why Employee-Authored Content is a Branding Powerhouse

By Phil Strazzulla Pat is looking for a new job. She sees an opening that looks promising and realizes it’s at the company where her friend Terry works.

You might think that the first thing she’ll ask Terry is, “Can you put in a good word for me with the hiring manager?”

But you might be surprised. Because the first thing that Pat would ask—or that when you really think about it, any of us would ask—is, “What’s it like to work there?”

Sure, Pat could read the company description from the ad or online, or look at some of the company’s communications materials, but she doesn’t want the glossy key messages. She wants to hear from someone who’s in the trenches, so to speak. It’s pretty simple. So simple as to be obvious. And yet, it’s a truth that is completely forgotten about by most companies: when it comes to your reputation as a workplace, talent trusts your people more than your PR.

Employer Branding and Your Staff

Your reputation as a workplace is the underlying principle behind employer branding. You can have an amazing brand as a company, and your product can be the hot name on everybody’s lips. But if your reputation as an employer is a giant question mark (or worse, a hazard sign), you won’t be the top choice of the talented and energetic people you want on your team.

“But Phil, we’ve got a great corporate culture!” you say. “Everybody enjoys their work, challenges themselves and their teammates, respects each other, and really believes in why we’re doing what we do!”

That’s great, but nobody’s going to find out about it if you don’t pass the mic to your employees and let them tell the world. But, by curating employee-generated content, you can harness a cost-effective and powerful way to cement your employer branding and improve your transparency.

Your People: A Trusted Resource

Employee-generated content can be as simple as some quick blurbs from staff in different departments that describe their roles and what they enjoy about working for you or regular blog posts from a rotating roster of staff members. When made prominent and easily accessible on your company’s website, this employee-generated content acts as an army of “Terry”s, giving curious talent an authentic sense of your company’s culture.

Making it work will take some effort. You want to make it as painless and quick as possible for your staff members, so that you’re not taking away from their other duties more than necessary. This may require some extra prep work from management to organize and plan this content, configure templates, and devise other ways to make it as rewarding as possible for staff to participate in this. But it’ll all be worth it when the people who would fit best into your company can see that fit from the outside, spurring them to consider you before any other employer.

Nobody knows more on the topic of what talent cares about than the talent that’s already within your doors. So why not encourage your staffers to give an authentic picture of your company...one story at a time?

Phil Strazzulla is the CEO of NextWave Hire, an employer branding software company that allows companies to collect hundreds of authentic employee stories, and then distribute them through career pages, social media, and various other channels.  NextWave works with companies like Dropbox, Monster.com, CEB and more to help them build their brands and attract the best talent.

Don’t Get Left Behind: Why Digital Video Technology is Taking Over Recruitment

By Lindsay Stanton, Chief Client Officer, Digi-Me

When searching for top talent in today’s candidate-driven market, you want your clients to stand out from your competitors, and you want to impress job seekers. To achieve this, you have to keep up-to-date on trends. The latest technology can help maximize your sourcing efficiency and effectiveness.

How do you stay relevant in today’s digital world and reduce cost per hire? By incorporating digital video technology as part of your recruitment strategy.

Today’s talent acquisition professionals are becoming a lot more like marketers. Human resources and marketing departments are working closely together, more than ever before, to streamline brand messaging.

Marketers are using video as part of their marketing strategy. Why? Because they are getting a better ROI.

Click-through rates increase 200-300 percent when incorporated in an email. Conversion can increase by 80 percent when including video on a landing page. And, 64 percent of users are more likely to buy a product online after watching a product video.

If marketers are seeing such success with video, what could happen if you incorporated a digital job description in your recruitment efforts?

Today’s job seekers are social, and they are going to look for new opportunities on social media. In fact, 73 percent of Millennials reported landing their most recent job by finding it on social media according to the Aberdeen Group. LinkedIn is reporting a continued increase in earnings from Talent Solutions with a revenue increase of 41 percent year-over-year to $558 million.

Videos attract job seekers on social media. Did you know that 100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook per day? Why not carve out time to watch a video to learn more about a potential job opportunity?

Digital videos should be easy to share on social media with a social share function, giving recruiters the power to make their videos go viral.  Candidates will act as a third party validator of your content by sharing your job videos through out their network of contacts. We actually see throughout Digi-Me’s client base that 70 percent of views and applications arrive through social sharing!

Who do you want to share your opportunities? How about your greatest brand advocates--your employees?

According to a recent blog article by Clear Company, “statistics show that one out of every five referrals gets hired.” The blog article also stated referrals have longer tenure and are happier at the companies they are recruited to, being that “46 percent stay over one year, 45 percent over two years and 47 percent over three years.” Sixty-seven percent of recruiters and employers reported the overall recruiting process took less time. Fifty-one percent of recruiters and employers reported that it is was more cost-effective and less expensive to recruit a referral.

Needless to say, referrals have a great value as an added source for your recruitment efforts and they can be easily attracted by digital video.

Video conveys a message about your client’s job positions and their company culture that text alone cannot. It shows and tells a story about the people behind the job, processes, philosophies, awards, etc. in under one minute. In this digital age, attention spans seem to be shortening as we are all bombarded with media and ads. Video is short, simple, and effective.

On average,  candidates spend five times longer on websites with videos instead of just text, and 80 percent of candidate traffic comes from Google searches. Why is that second statistic relevant?  Because Google ranks video job content 53 times higher than text-based job content!

Regardless of where you choose to post a digital job video, the best thing about today’s digital technology is that you have the ability to track your efforts. Including who is applying, where, and at what time. You have the necessary, detailed information to know where you are getting the best traction. When you know how to hone your efforts, you are not only more effective with your time, but you can also formulate a strategy that will reduce your cost per hire.

Don’t fall behind when recruiting top talent. Digital video technology is key to today’s successful recruitment strategy.

Lindsay Stanton is chief client officer for Digi-Me, a video technology company for talent acquisition that helps organizations add new dimension to their job and employment brand messaging.  In her time at Digi-Me, Lindsay has facilitated relationships with 19 partners, including the largest recruitment advertising agencies, global recruitment process outsourcers, and staffing firms. These partnerships magnify the organization’s reach into the Global Fortune 1000, providing an effective and innovative solution to the largest global employers, including USG Corporation and Kiewit.

A subject matter expert on the use of video technology as a recruitment tool, Lindsay works closely with industry leaders, creating new and better ways to connect jobs and job-seekers.  She has been a featured speaker at SHRM as well as a featured leader in the recruitment space through ERE, HRO Today, and major media outlets, including Forbes.com, ABCNews.com, and CCTV.