April is often the time for spring cleaning, but sometimes, giving your recruitment strategy isn't always about "cleaning it up" and removing things. When cleaning, there are times where you may have to add things, which add value, so that you are more organized, or so each part of the recruiting strategy is a little more meaningful and impactful. This week's hiring and recruiting news roundup offers ways that you can add value to your recruitment strategy, and "clean up" this spring with a more efficiency and effective recruiting process.
March Madness and Goal Setting: Walking the Walk and Accountability - Seamless Workforce - Okay, it's already April and March Madness is halfway over as the Final Four play this weekend. But that doesn't mean you can't learn a thing or two about recruiting from these great basketball teams. After all, they do spend a lot of time recruiting the best talent from across the country. The main message here is to take a proactive approach to accountability, which is what will make the difference between having an average team and having a great team.
How to Add a Human Touch to Your Applicant Tracking Systems - The RPO Hub - An ATS can add a lot of value to your recruiting process, but to ensure that it adds the most value, you need to use a human's eyes and thought processes as well. This means taking a look at candidates the system has rejected, in case there's one that may be a fit for a future position, or if the person was only rejected because of formatting issues the ATS couldn't sort through (many systems can't read a PDF, graphics, or a table). Adding a human touch means linking your ATS with social media recruiting, since many systems have social functionality where it can work with an employee referral program or identify a candidate's social media profiles.
Hiring Best Practices: Intelligent Sourcing - Accolo - Intelligent sourcing is not just knowing where your candidates are coming from, but which sources tend to provide the best candidates for the open positions. The best sources may differ from position to position, where the best tech candidates come from a very different place from your sales candidates. How do you know if you're sourcing intelligently? Well, you need to measure it, and this article shows you how to measure the effectiveness of each source of hire. It's not hard once you do it a few times, as the most difficult part is getting started and tracking the number of applicants you're getting from each source.
Finding Your Own Motivation - Mark Lukens - According to Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, acceptance and creativity are the two highest needs. It's only by meeting these needs that people find satisfaction. Sure, people want to live comfortably and don't want to worry about finding food or paying the medical bills, but having food and paid medical bills doesn't achieve satisfaction. The tough part is that acceptance and creativity differ with each person, and is not simply achieved by having a well-paid job. It's up to both employees and employers to determine the right motivations so that they (or employees) are creative and feel accepted for who they are and the work they are doing.
Outside-the-Box Resumes: Creative or Gimmicky - The Hiring Site - This idea made headlines recently when Northwestern University student Leah made her resume out of Legos. Sure, the resume caught the attention of the media, but would such a resume catch the attention of an employer? Do such resumes even work outside of a creative position, such as an accounting position or a customer service position? Essentially, the overall important point is that the resume needs to be tailored to the position. Hopefully, that's the case since putting together a Lego resume takes a long time and can only be done once. The headlines aren't going to be as positive if another company finds out you tried your stunt elsewhere.
