For every 100 job openings in the U.S., there are roughly 60 unemployed workers. That says it all. Candidates are in short supply, so they can be choosy in accepting job offers. Many are also motivated by pandemic experiences to be highly selective about jobs that hold meaning for them.
Hiring teams take heart. The following are five strategies to help you cope with the current candidate-scarce situation. Each best practice can help you create exceptional hiring experiences that get candidates excited about your role and your company – so excited that they also lift your brand and refer their friends and family.
#1. Engage immediately. We all expect immediate action in today’s digital world, so capture their attention right away and make it fast and easy to engage in your hiring process with digital tools. Text interviews take candidates just a few minutes to complete on a mobile phone. They understand right away if they meet basic qualifications for the role, such as having a CDL license or being able to lift 50 pounds. Use an intelligent hiring platform to manage one-to-many text interviews and auto-advance those qualified candidates to the next step. Candidates who won’t be moving on know that sooner too, which helps preserve your talent brand.
#2. Give them flexibility. Give candidates the flexibility to complete recorded interviews (also called on-demand or asynchronous interviews) when it fits into their schedule. They won’t need to take time off work and can interview comfortably from home on their preferred device.
Penn Medicine uses on-demand interviews to hire for open positions across the healthcare organization. “I joke with my VP that we interview while we sleep,” says Colleen Diercksen, Penn Medicine’s Director of Talent Acquisition Operations. “After sending the invites, we come in the next morning and have 30-70 completed interviews to review…. It’s simple for our managers to quickly assess candidates between patient times or time on the floor. A lot of our managers are not in front of computers all day long – we need to make it available on the fly for them.” Using on-demand interviews reduces the time candidates spend waiting and looking for other opportunities. Read this short case study.
Interview self-scheduling is another way to put control in the candidate’s hands. With self-scheduling built into an intelligent hiring platform, candidates can quickly and easily select the slot that works best for them. By offering self-scheduling, one global delivery company was able to connect nearly 55,000 candidates quickly to an interview at the right location out of 600. Two-thirds (66%) of candidates used the self-scheduling tool within 24 hours to set up their interview. Read this short case study.
#3. Let them try the job. Candidates are prioritizing the employment experience these days. Enabling candidates to try out the role through job simulations can influence their thoughts about your role, whether they get even more excited about it or realize that it’s not for them. Science-based pre-hire assessments that use job simulation exercises and realistic job previews create opportunities to demonstrate job-related skills and motivate talented job seekers to wait for your offer and refer others.
96% of candidates applying to Walmart with Modern Hire’s hiring tools say they would encourage others to apply.
#4. Provide immediate feedback. Cement the connection you’ve carefully built with candidates by providing same-day feedback. According to the latest Talent Board CandE Benchmark Research, companies rated the best at hiring by candidates give feedback to external finalists 125% more often and internal finalists 63% more often than the average. These companies also have higher candidate Net Promoter Scores (cNPS), indicating candidates are likely to refer others to their open roles.
#5. Become Known for Fair Hiring. Fairness in hiring is important to candidates and can be a differentiator for your organization in the talent market. The integration of validated science and advanced AI tools in hiring reduces bias and makes hiring processes more consistent and fairer for candidates.
Modern Hire’s Find My Fit™ is an innovative new online tool designed to help candidates understand more about themselves and their fit with different types of jobs. It recommends jobs to candidates with a high degree of accuracy and equitable manner that can help equalize the workforce. One Modern Hire client invited applicants to complete Find My Fit for a field service technician role; the opportunity significantly increased the percentage of female candidates who applied for this traditionally male role.
In another example, Modern Hire’s Virtual Job Tryout® has been proven to reduce bias in hiring. The Virtual Job Tryout is a science-based pre-hire assessment shown through hundreds of validation studies to accurately predict candidates’ future job success. When one of the nation’s largest pharmacy chains used a customized Tryout for its pharmacy technician role, it was able to identify and hire top-scoring candidates who went on to have above-average performance ratings on the job. Use of the Tryout also measurably increased new hire diversity in this role in terms of race and gender.
These strategies can help you attract and hire selective candidates despite the challenges of the modern talent market. To find out more about a holistic approach that enables you to create exceptional hiring experiences for selective candidates without sacrificing hiring efficiency or effectiveness, read our latest white paper, How to Hire Right When You are Starved for Candidates.