The New hiring ecosystem: part 3 – hiring

3 mins, 26 secs read time

In my last two posts, I detailed two major areas of product innovation, talent marketing and sourcing, looked at how each is changing, and outlined ways to evaluate products within each of those categories. In this post, I’ll do the same for this series’ final area of product innovation, the hiring process.

Hiring

1. Screen fairly
2. Digitize your process
3. Give your recruiters superpowers

1. Screen fairly

One way that our partners are improving the hiring process experience for both recruiters and candidates is by creating products that screen candidates fairly. These products help create a better dialogue between you and your candidates.

When you issued a background screening in the past, your candidates only knew if they passed or not. Now, products like GoodHire offer candidates the ability to provide context, which is layered on top of any red flags that may have come up in their background screening. Another way that companies are screening more fairly is by discussing the types of testing that they want to do with the candidate while the candidate is progressing through the recruiting funnel. This allows there to be dialogue about the test itself and not just the answers provided.

Be mindful of bias throughout this process. With any screening or assessment, it’s not going to be perfect. It is evaluating something very specific, and you may be creating false positives or false negatives along the way. In the case of testing providers, make sure you are asking them about how they actually assess the candidates, how they identify outliers, and what expectation should be set with the candidates using the provider’s product.

2. Digitize your process

We’re also beginning to see more products that help you digitize your hiring process. For those of you who use Greenhouse, you can take a huge step by creating an interview plan and, if you haven't done that already, I encourage you to meet with your Customer Success Manager and kick one off.

Beyond the plan itself, you can focus on moving each element of the plan online. A good example of this is implementing products that facilitate video interviewing, such as Spark Hire. It might not make sense to bring each candidate into the office for an in-person interview. As many recruiters know, in-person interviews require a lot of coordination and time investment. By creating a set of standard questions, candidates can provide answers on their own time and then submit them for review. This also allows you to assess quickly and uniformly.

3. Give your recruiters superpowers

The third way we are seeing products improve the hiring process is by giving your recruiters efficiency-creating superpowers. These superpowers hone in on the repetitive, manual tasks that your recruiting coordinators, recruiters and hiring managers are doing.

A big boost to productivity is happening within scheduling. GoodTime and Interview Schedule automate the scheduling process for the employer and give candidates an interface that makes it easy to book, update and cancel any interview they have scheduled.

You can also create efficiency through your communication channels with candidates. Email nurturing platform MixMax creates a one-to-many interface for your recruiters to manage conversations with candidates. This enables your recruiters to speak with a multitude of candidates at the same time and set up stage-specific messaging for your pipeline.

Final thoughts

I started this series by addressing how and why recruiters are feeling overwhelmed with all of the technology options available – Greenhouse alone has over 250 integration partners in over 20 product categories.

As we examined three of those categories, it became clear that the number one action you can take is to simply address your needs and not be lured in with technology for technology's sake. Each product you add to your technology stack should serve a specific purpose, and you as the customer should create measurable expectations with each vendor.

Check out our Partners page to learn more about the solutions we have available today and request demos of any product.

Thanks to Dinah Alobeid, Emily Brooks, Garret Starr and Jillian Trubee for reading drafts of this post.