Job Portals: Perfect for Making Your Hiring Process Duller and Less Effective

Some companies have begun using job portals to search for new employees. In essence, such a digital recruiting program scans resumes, its algorithms seeking certain qualifications. Eventually, it will select a small group of potential hires for a particular opening. As you can imagine, the main attraction of these portals is that they save employers time.

However, by relying on these tools, organizations could easily deprive themselves of superstar staff members in a misguided attempt at efficiency.

Variety Is the Spice of Business

What makes a company truly dynamic and powerful is diversity in its ranks ― a mix of educational backgrounds, talents and life and work experiences. With such variance comes a wide range of ideas and different ways of looking at challenges. Under those circumstances, you never know which employee could devise a solution to a problem that’s been holding your business back.

However, job portals aren’t interested in diversity. They’re designed to look for the same things all the time. They create uniformity. Moreover, if your team members have been chosen by software, those people might seem so similar that a rejected applicant could file a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

The Human Touch

When you meet someone during a job interview, you might instantly have a hunch that he or she would be ideal for your organization. Maybe it’s that applicant’s energy, enthusiasm, optimism or creative phrasing that strikes you. Perhaps you think something along these lines: “Well, I bet this person would make a great partner for Mary. I should team them up and let them create great things together!”

In some cases, though, the interviewees who impress you won’t quite meet all of the job requirements that you’ve set forth. They might lack certain technical or business skills. But you could always train them in those areas. After all, if someone is missing a qualification but overflows with intelligence, ambition and warmth, why would you want to lose that candidate to a competitor? Of course, an algorithm would instantly eliminate that person from contention.

In short, when you rely on job portals, you’re dismissing the role that intuition plays. And in the long, proud history of global commerce, intuition has been responsible for countless breakthroughs.

Contact Madison Approach Staffing today for help with recruiting candidates and making your next great hire!

Principled Positions: What Start-Ups Reveal About Values-Based Jobs

There was a time when you could offer promising job candidates high salaries, corner offices and other materialistic perks and be guaranteed that they’d join your company. These days, many young professionals look for a corporate culture that rewards personal and workplace values over monetary gains.

Millennials generally want to make positive contributions to society and feel like their work is important to the world, not just to a corporation’s bottom line. Moreover, many yearn to be creative, avoiding rigid hierarchies in favor of environments where everyone can offer ideas.

The Influence of Start-Ups

Start-up companies frequently embrace such beliefs. It’s little wonder, then, that so many recent graduates flock to these establishments. Start-ups commonly give new employees major responsibilities and the authority to control funds.

Many of these businesses are starting to offer incentives that will attract talent in their job descriptions. For example, employers will offer paid time off for their employees to volunteer for their favorite charity. Or employers will give an in-kind contribution when employees donate to a cause.

The Strength of WBEs

Every day, women launch more than 1,000 businesses in the United States. Between 1997 and 2015, the total number of such companies went up 74 percent. As a result, about 46 percent of private American companies are now either half, mostly or completely owned by women.

What accounts for the staggering success of women’s business enterprises (WBEs)? Female executives tend to be excellent managers: confident, savvy and extremely knowledgeable about their industries. At the same time, they frequently assist one another, and sometimes they even help out their competitors.

In addition, women are often supremely efficient, knowing just how much time to give to various tasks. Perhaps they possess a special intuition because they’re used to juggling a great many responsibilities in their professional and personal lives.

Since many female business owners pursue bold goals while maintaining their integrity, they especially appeal to millennials.

Values in Your Office

No matter what business you’re in, your company can attract those who crave workplace values. Consider your job opening advertisements: In those ads, stress your overall mission and the specific ways your firm improves people’s lives.

To the greatest extent possible, give your employees decision-making power. Also, encourage staff members of all ages and experience levels to collaborate with one another, and always be transparent in terms of the corporate strategies you pursue. By making these moves, you might do more than entice millennials. You might find yourself falling in love with your work all over again.

Contact Madison Approach Staffing today for help with attracting talent and making your next great hire!

Hiring for Talent, Not Just for Bullet Points

The Business Case for Abandoning the Hiring “Process” and Going with Your Gut

I find it intriguing that while the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that over 60% of jobs in the next 10 years will only require the SKILLS of a High School degree, 27% of Employers have actually INCREASED education requirements for jobs over the last five years (CareerBuilder survey).

We all know that schools have been doing a poor job in preparing young people for the work world which is probably why businesses have responded by increasing education requirements for even the most basic of positions, what I term education inflation. Currently, there are robust debates about education reform, but this piece does not intend to take a position on the pros or cons of any particular curriculum or reform.

Rather, I would like to speak to the business person who has the opportunity to make a change now, a paradigm shift, an embrace of “old school” mentality of nurturing and “bringing up” a workforce. What if we started hiring for potential talent, not just matching skills listed on a resume to requirements on a job posting? In the end, there is both a strong business case and civic responsibility for rethinking your hiring strategy.

CASE STUDY:

IBM, the old school pinnacle of corporate ingenuity and still the backbone of countless new technologies, is going back to traditional values by going back to school. They are the major collaborators in a new school initiative in Brooklyn which is driving a new campaign throughout New York: P-Tech.

IBM realized there was a major gap in what they termed “middle-skills” areas of their prospective employees and their employee pipeline. So what did the innovation pioneer do? They went back to an old school idea: mentoring and training young people and putting them on a career track to fill their employee pipeline for the long term health of their company.

With NO cash on the line, IBM provided assistance with business-relevant curriculum development to a school in Brooklyn and provided mentors to help guide and direct these young people into future jobs in technology. They decided to invest their TIME into their future workforce. In short, IBM created a modern apprenticeship program.

Today there are thousands of “overqualified” college graduates floundering in the basements of their parent’s homes working at Starbucks or waiting tables, digging their way out of college debt while struggling to find that one job that will give them a break into ANY career path.

Behind these college grads are thousands of “underqualified” high school graduates wandering, seeking some direction toward a future, a goal, a purpose, but lack a skillset, knowledgebase, or even a toolkit to get started.

Businesses need to take a chance on these young people. Hire the “overqualified” college grad and give her that well-earned break, hire that “underqualified” high-school grad and give them a direction. It can pay dividends to both them and your business.

What are the upsides to hiring “off process”? Here are a few key points:

◾Lower initial costs: less educated, less “qualified” or “inexperienced” employees cost less in wages.
◾Employee loyalty: don’t underestimate the dedication and loyalty giving a person their first opportunity can engender – and a dedicated, loyal employee is priceless.
◾Company knowledge: starting a person at ground zero and guiding them along a career path through your organization provides them, and your company, a depth and breadth of knowledge and understanding of the organization that can be invaluable over the course of the person’s career.
◾ Succession planning: having a broad base of knowledgeable employees provides your company a wealth of resources for succession planning as your company grows and ages.

There was a time in this Country when a company took in young people and gave them a toolbox, gave them a direction and set them on a career path. It is not just the education system that has lost its purpose, and it is not just the youth that lack direction, but business lost its sense of obligation. We have failed to engage in the nurturing and training of the workforce. We need to return to the old school values, take a chance on that kid out of school and help them to find their way in the world.

Are there risks to hiring a young person? Of course, but every hire has risks regardless of the demographics of the person you are hiring. But what is the worst that can happen? You fire them. (ok, so here’s the shameless pandering…hire them as a temp and there’s even less risk!!) But you might also breathe new life into your company, your community, and a person.