When Theresa Mazzaro started at Fairfax Radiology Centers, she found that 95 percent of the budget was going to one big job board. And it wasn’t producing sufficient results.

In this video, Mazzaro describes multiple initiatives she has undertaken to diversify her spending, engage candidates better, improve student recruiting, use video, streamline the candidate experience, improve her tech stack, and get better results.

“Our results have been phenomenal,” Mazzaro says. She talks about them, below. 

People with disabilities face an unemployment rate about double the average.  

So often, the reasons for this involve unconscious bias. In other words, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Whether you’re hiring for higher education, government, non-profits, or the private sector, there are steps you can take to change the status quo.

Raghav Singh, who has worked as in-house talent-acquisition leader as well as for multiple technology vendors, is now an advocate for the disabled. 

In this video, he talks about:

• Barriers people with disabilities face when applying for jobs
• What human resources and recruiting can do to address the problem
• Any barriers to success once hired

It’s about 18 minutes, below.

The State of Pennsylvania is trying to reduce the time it takes to hire an employee down to 50 days. It’s part way there, having cut from 90 days down to 58.

The Keystone State is not alone. Numerous state governments, local governments, colleges and universities, as well as private-sector companies are all finding that new technologies are helping slash time to hire. 

One reason this is so important: faster hiring processes correlate to better quality of hire.

Here’s some of what these employers are experimenting with to reduce time to hire.

Building and nurturing better pipelines. Colleges that used to send one-size-fits all careers newsletters by email to all prospects are now getting more astute. They’re segmenting their talent communities by job — whether admissions, faculty, foodservices, and so on — and sending tailored communications that are much more targeted. This makes job prospects less likely to unsubscribe and more likely to respond when there’s an open job.

Using Generative AI. Long Beach is trying out the use of Generative AI to help build job descriptions. This makes sense to save time when there are certain jobs that open up over and over. If done well, the AI can also help write compelling job descriptions, and keep those descriptions focused on specific skills — without a lot of vague fluff about “looking for passion” and “hiring rockstars.”

Advanced use of data. The most modern and sophisticated talent technologies are using predictive analytics to help companies decide the best place to post jobs, and then tracking how many hires each source provides, so companies can modify accordingly.

Taking a hard look at requirements. Is that required “five or more years of experience” really necessary? How about that requirement that the person have a college degree? In some cases, an organization has a validated reason for needing requirements like these. If not, they’re removing these requirements and getting a better pool of applicants.

Looking beyond the resume so no talent is missed. Organizations like AMN Healthcare are training managers to stop looking for people who fit in, and start looking for people who can bring their unique talents to a healthcare role. This improves hiring time by “screening in” and not out potentially great employees.

Augmenting applicant tracking systems. A huge number of great candidates don’t finish their job applications. The employer doing the hiring doesn’t know the person was interested in the job, and thinks “we can’t find anyone.” It doesn’t have to be that way; new technologies integrate with the ATS and stop these candidates from getting lost.

We’re working with dozens of employers to reduce hiring time. Let us know if you want to talk about what we’re finding that works and what does not

Long-time talent-acquisition leader John Beard has recruited for Microsoft and Amazon, but the non-profit Neighborcare Health is quite different.

Neighborcare serves about 60,000 patients annually at nearly 30 clinics.  Its workforce speaks over 55 languages and dialects. No patient is turned away because they can’t afford it.

Beard’s team has the challenge of recruiting employees who could make more money somewhere else.

He talks about what the organization is doing to attract and keep people, in this eight-minute video, embedded below.

A job candidate goes to their favorite job board. They see a job they like. They click to apply.

Despite uploading their resume, they’re given a multi-page application by the applicant tracking system. 

Parts of that application keep giving them an error — like, it says the “college” field is required but the candidate has already filled it in. So they bail out.

Or the job seeker gets toward the end, and are a bit put off by the personal questions they’re supposed to answer. So they bail out.

Amazingly, this almost-applicant is not passed on by the applicant tracking system to the organization that’s doing the hiring. That organization with the open job never finds out about the talent they missed out on.

If They Don’t Complete It, They Don’t Exist

To reiterate, with some applicant tracking systems, if a job seeker doesn’t finish their job application, they just disappear. Nothing is passed on to the recruiter or hiring manager.

The company doing the hiring never knows that this person tried to apply and gave up. They can’t market to them. They can’t nurture them, or put them in a talent community. They can’t send them a weekly or monthly email about their new headquarters, the fairs they’re attending, or the new patents they received. They have no contact information about the job seeker.

This is ludicrous. 

The good news is that we’re working to solve this problem with the customers of ours that are in this frustrating situation. We’re able to help get around it. We can help configure your career site and applicant tracking system to:

• Pass on the information on a candidate that is complete, such as their name, email address, and perhaps a resume or link to their LinkedIn profile.
• Identify where the bottleneck or problem is. Where did people stop completing their application? How much time was spent on each part of the application, or did they continue returning over and over to one spot? (We’ve seen instances where no matter how many times a person puts their zip code in the ATS, they’re still told the field is empty and “zip code is required.”)
• Improve the candidate experience. We’ve seen instances where candidates make it to the near end of an application and then are offended by what they’re asked. We’ve seen candidates stuck realizing their school isn’t listed as an option and the “other” option isn’t working.

These are all preventable issues with certain applicant tracking systems. Let us know if you want to talk about how we’re helping many organizations never lose an applicant.

A resume is insufficient in evaluating an executive and a leader. 

So is a job interview that’s spent asking someone to “tell me more about yourself.”
Russell Podgorski has an alternative.

Podgorski is former Executive Director, Talent Acquisition, for Providence, one of America’s largest health systems. Now with AMN Healthcare, Podgorski talks about executive assessment and selection in the video below, which is just as applicable to any industry as it is to healthcare.

We cover:
• Four things to look for as you go beyond the resume to learn more about job candidates
• Measuring the impact of the person you are interviewing, as well as how they did it
• The perilous practice of hiring people who “fit the culture”

It’s about 25 minutes, embedded below.

Ready to find the right candidates for your institution? Schedule a free consultation today.

We look at a lot of college and university career websites. We see patterns as to what higher education is doing well to promote its careers, and what just looks like every other website.
Here are some tips for improving your college or university’s career site.

Tell Us Your Purpose

“Work with purpose” is a phrase on many college websites. Others say you can “work with a purpose,” “lead with purpose,” or “work for a purpose.” As we said in this recent video with SIL Global, this is a good thing, as a purpose is what many young people are looking for. However, the phrase is so common on college websites that it’s losing its impact when it doesn’t have some specifics behind it.

Some schools, fortunately, are describing a bit about their purposes or missions. California State University-Fullerton, for example, says that “every employee is driven by a shared purpose: to transform lives through the power of education.” The University of California-San Diego says that employees can be “part of something greater, of serving a larger mission of innovation and care.” Contra Costa Community College asks prospects to “Join Our Mission to Transform Lives.”

Make sure you tell the prospective employee what your purpose is, not just that you have one.

Tell More Stories With Video

Penn State University, instead of just telling us about its students, its philanthropy, its alumni network, and its research, lets a video do the talking. The minute-and-a-half video featured prominently at the top of its home page celebrates “the thinkers, the artists, the athletes, the dreamers, the makers.” Georgetown University does a great job of this as well with its “Spirit of Georgetown” video.

Don’t Waste Labels on Empty Words

At many college and university career sites, the first words you see are “explore jobs,” or “job opportunities.” That describes what you see, but it doesn’t make you feel anything; it doesn’t inspire; and isn’t any different than anyone else. Webster University, on the other hand, says “We Want You to Join Webster and Enjoy Working With Us.” Wanting the job candidate to enjoy their job is better than just listing a job. Use the valuable real estate on your website, especially your careers home page, to make your job prospects get the sense that you are talking directly to them and offering them something positive.

Show Real People
Strangely, many colleges and universities don’t use actual people to tell the stories of their jobs and their careers. One that does is the University of Rochester. It features its medical center CEO saying that his “move to Rochester was the best professional decision I ever made.” Its provost says that the university is a “rare place that combines world-class research with a close knit community.”

Sell the Location

Many colleges are in small- to medium-size towns that we don’t know a lot about. Utah State, on the other hand, has a large, snowy photo of its mountainous location, with the caption “This Is Our Great Outdoors” next to it. In large fonts, it lists the average summer and winter temperatures. It features a Time magazine quote saying that it’s the “most beautiful college in Utah” and says that there are eight national parks within five hours.

What Do Your Potential Hires Value? The Answer Is the Key to Non-profit Recruiting 

How might a non-profit operating in more than 100 countries figure out what’s important to its prospective employees?

Bethany Wallace, Director of Strategic Workforce Planning at 4,300+ employee SIL Global, is learning as much as she can about the values and interests of her mostly Generation-Z target market. And she’s modifying her recruitment messaging to match those Gen Z desires.

In this video interview, Wallace talks about:

• What distinguishes this generation of employees
• How that impacts SIL Global’s talent-acquisition efforts
• How every non-profit could learn from Wallace’s mindset
• Recruiting tactics and initiatives that are working for this non-profit

It’s about 18 minutes, embedded below.

Ready to find the right candidates for your institution? Schedule a free consultation today.