Tag Archive: Front-Line Hiring

  1. 7 Career Competencies to Look for in New Graduates

    Graduation season is a chance to bring diversity, fresh perspectives, and new skills into your organization. Whether you hire a handful of summer interns or hundreds of young professionals each year, Talent Acquisition teams face a major challenge:

    With little or no professional experience, most new grads don’t know if they’ll enjoy the work, or even what they’re looking for in an employer. In 3-6 months, will they love us or leave us?

    Sure, you could budget for higher-than-average turnover and prepare to re-fill these roles again next quarter. Or, you could save your company a huge expense by cracking the code on new grads.

    First, be sure to keep up with trends on each new generation. Then, since you can’t evaluate this talent pool’s past experience, you’ll have to look for other success indicators, like career competencies.

    Career competencies will differ depending on the job, but if you want to know what most new grads will need to succeed, you’re in luck. Our research team analyzed competencies across 300 entry-level jobs and identified the 7 most important competencies for young professionals.

    1. Relationship Management

    Many new grads will have spent their last four years networking with others on campus, but how this this translate to the professional world? If your candidates have a natural knack for building relationships, they’ll have no trouble connecting with people who will help them succeed in their new role.

    2. Making Sound Decisions

    Being able to to make sound and confident decisions is an important skill in any job. A good hire is someone who will weigh options, consider others’ feedback, and come to a conclusion relatively quickly. What you don’t want is someone who jumps into action without thinking, or someone who overthinks to the point of paralysis.

    3. Communicating Effectively

    After countless presentations and group projects, you hope that new grads leave school as A+ communicators. But that’s not always the case. Your ideal candidate can express thoughts and ideas clearly, without dominating conversations, and is insightful enough to adjust the content and delivery so that messages are well-received.

    4. Work Organization

    Carrying a class load does require good organization skills. In fact, many new grads are expert time-managers. But, is this the same style of organization you expect at your company? It’s possible that new grads are so detail focused and task oriented, they’re unable to see the big picture or how they contribute to your company’s mission.

    5. Influencing

    Great employees can’t accomplish great things alone. They have to be able to mobilize others. So, in addition to expressing their ideas, your ideal candidate is someone who inspires action. Look for new grads who are assertive, sociable, and comfortable following up with others. Too much ‘go with the flow’ could cap a new hire’s potential.

    6. Resilience

    Some new grads are naturally equipped to respond to challenges with composure, optimism, and hardiness. Others are not. Starting a career is a test of reliance, and you want to hire people who can move through setbacks. Resilient employees will also model healthy stress management strategies for others in your organization.

    7. Delivering Results

    Delivering results is the hallmark of a good contributor. This is someone who has high work intensity and high follow through, someone who understands objectives and will execute projects in an orderly fashion, and someone who has both practical and innovative sides to their rationale.

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    If these are competencies you want to hire for in your organization, talent assessments and video interviews are two great ways to learn about your candidates. Then, when you’re ready to bring finalists in, here tips for great culture fit interviews.

    Remember, fresh-out-of-school grads may be going through a formal hiring process for the first time, and they don’t know what to expect. It’s your job to help them get to know your people, your culture, and the expectations of the job.

    Want to do more college hiring?

    Learn about building strategic internship programs and college recruitment pipelines.

  2. Is Resume Screening Software Biased?

    Resume screening software is a quick and easy way to scan lots of resume data without actually reading resumes.

    The option to automate resume screening – which most talent acquisition leaders say is the most challenging part of recruitment – is enough to perk the ears of any high-volume hiring team. That’s why resume screening software and AI screening software are growing in popularity. But are these tools effective? And do they solve, or perpetuate, bias?

    As companies increase their hiring volume, recruiting teams have to find ways to do more with less. Resume screening is incredibly time-consuming, taking up to 23 hours per hire. And we all know, the longer it takes to screen and hire, the less likely you are to snag a top candidate.

    With so many advancements in AI, why would humans still need to read resumes?

    A better question might be: With so many advancements in AI, why are we still so reliant on resumes? Resumes are problematic for many reasons:

    • They’re self-reported descriptions of work experience and education
    • They include half-truths, exaggerations, and lies of omission
    • They say nothing of knowledge, skills, or character
    • They put too much emphasis years of experience and gaps between jobs
    • Information is hard to verify, because a resume is not an official document
    • Job seekers can easily optimize a resume using keywords, or hire a professional resume writer

    What we’re doing when we use resume screening software is making an ineffective process faster. After news broke of Amazon’s resume screening tool that showed bias against women, this type of AI is under increased scrutiny. But, in Amazon’s story and others like it, it’s not the technology that’s to blame. It’s the underlying data – in this case, the resume.

    A 500-700 word document, even when it contains action verbs and job-related keywords, isn’t a good predictor of success. AI doesn’t change that.

    Luckily, there are other ways to screen candidates at scale:

    • Pre-screening questions are a simpler, lower-tech option. Instead of training AI to scan for keywords on a resume, you could simply ask candidates what is it you want know. Do you have four years or more experience in customer service? You can do this through your ATS, or in your video interviewing platform.
    • A pre-hire assessment integrated into the application process is another good option. This is how American Airlines fuels all their front-line hiring. According to Rob Daugherty, Director of Global Talent Acquisition:

    With a  name like American Airlines, we get a lot of applicants. It’s almost impossible to understand who’s a fit and who isn’t. The assessment helps us focus on candidates with the right personalities and skill sets.”

    • Video interviewing software has also proven its value in time and cost savings. By replacing the phone screen with pre-recorded videos, most companies see at least a 60% reduction in candidate screening time. At Virgin Atlantic, video interviewing enables recruiters to screen 3X more candidates per day.

    AI-driven technologies have unlocked exciting gains in efficiency. What’s important is that we’re driving efficiency in the right areas – not just hiring people faster, but hiring the right people faster. It’s also important that technology is used to inform our decisions, not make our decisions for us. Learn more about AI and the future of hiring in our on-demand webinar: How to Keep Your Hiring Process Human in the Age of Automation.