Author Archives: briana

  1. How to Give Candidates More Love in the Hiring Process

    In this webinar, we take on the topic of candidate experience – the good, the broken, and the opportunities we have to help candidates feel more love. Joined by two recruiting and talent experts, we talk about the rise of The Experience, ways to show candidates you care (even through small gestures), and how to put a stop to ghosting. We also reveal early insights from our candidate optimism research, which is a brand new way of looking at job seeker sentiment and job market health.

    Watch the 5-min recap: #1 Thing Employers & Candidates Should Do to Improve Candidate Experience

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    Webinar Transcription

    • Briana Harper – Webinar Host

    Moderators:

    • Robin Stenzel – Chief Solutions Officer at Outmatch
    • Jason Ferrara – Market Insight Expert at Outmatch

    Panel and Talent Experts:

    • Jan’ea Mayberry – Corporate Recruiter at Express Employment Professionals
    • Lynne Zappone – Executive Coach and Business Consultant at The Zappone Group

    BRIANA: Thank you for joining our webinar on, “How to Give Candidates More Love in the Hiring Process.” I’m really excited for this one because we have two very special guests joining the conversation today. One is a Corporate Recruiter from Express Employment Professionals and the other is an Executive Coach and Business Consultant who founded her own firm in 2017.

    Again, I’d like to say thank you for being here. I know you could be doing a hundred other things right now and you’re here with us. We really appreciate it. I hope we can provide you with a chance to think reflect, plan ahead, and hopefully make some improvements as the year goes on.

    My name is Briana Harper, and I’m your webinar host. I’m also your resource for any questions you have about today’s topic. I’ll be taking questions throughout the presentation, so feel free to chat in at any time during our discussion. You’ll also see a follow-up email from me after the presentation with today’s slide deck and a link to the recording. If you’d like to get in touch after the presentation, please reach out. You can email me at bharper@outmatch.com or find me on social @OutmatchHCM.

    Before we dive into our discussion today, I’d like to give you a quick sneak peek at other upcoming webinars in our future of work series. Next month, we’ll look at the post higher side of diversity hiring. That is, what it takes to make diversity hiring successful as well as create a sense of belonging for everyone in your organization. Then in April, we’ll explore culture bit versus culture ad, monocultures, and how to hire good fits but not clones. And finally, in May, we’ll look at how technology can help create healthy cultures and healthy subcultures and teams.

    If you’re interested in any of these topics, I’d love to have you back. You can register for upcoming webinars at outmatch.com/webinars. You can also catch any of our past webinars on our YouTube channel. Each presentation as well as today’s presentation is valid for one professional development credit for the SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP, and I’ll chat in that activity ID at the end of the webinar, so keep an eye out for that.

    Here’s a quick overview of the topics we’re going to cover in our discussion today. So first, we’re going to look at the experience, which we all talk a lot about, but I thought it’d be good to just start at the beginning and look at what do we mean when we talk about the experience and how do we measure it. Then we’re going to look at ghosting, so why it happens and what we can do to help stop it. We also have a sneak peek at some new research we’re doing here at Outmatch around candidate optimism, so I’ll share some of that closer to the end of the presentation. And then we’ll have about 10 minutes set aside for Q&A at the end. So, like I said, if you have any questions along the way, feel free to chat those in and we’ll get to those at the end of the webinar.

    So, Robin Stenzel will be moderating our discussion today. Robin is our Chief Solutions Officer at Outmatch. Prior to Outmatch, Robin worked in talent management with companies like West Rock, Delta Airlines, and Macy’s. Much of her career is focused on talent acquisition, and she’s done a lot of work building connections through the candidate and employee experience.

    Also, we’ll have a special appearance by Jason Ferrara. I mentioned some of that candidate optimism research that’s happening at Outmatch, so he’s going to come on towards the end of the presentation to share more about that. He does a lot of things at Outmatch and he’s also known as our Market Insight Expert, so I thought he’d be good to hop on to share a little bit more about our research.

    And as I mentioned, we have two special guests on the call with us today. Jan’ae Mayberry is a Corporate Recruiter from Express Employment Professionals, and Lynne Zappone is an Executive Coach and Business Consultant.

    Jan’ea, would you like to tell us a little bit more about yourself?

    JAN’EA:  Hello, everyone. My name is Jan’ea Mayberry, and like Brianna just mentioned, I am with Express Employment International Headquarters, and I’m the Corporate Recruiting Manager here. I started off in recruiting about eight years ago as a staffing consultant and just kind of worked my way up here at Express throughout the years. I’m excited to be here today, and I hope the information that we give you guys is helpful.

    BRIANA: Thank you, Jan’ea.

    Lynne, would you like to share a little bit more about yourself?

    LYNNE: Thanks, Briana. Good afternoon, everyone. This is Lynne Zappone. As Briana mentioned, I have my own firm, The Zappone Group, and we specialize in executive coaching and providing leadership, development and talent management consulting to organizations across industries. I’m excited to be part of this conversation today because I spent most of my professional career as a Chief People Officer and Head of Global Talent and Learning, really helping to create cultures and working with leaders to create cultures that attract, develop, and retain top talent. So it’s wonderful to be as part of this conversation today, so I can share from my experiences and learn from all of you. So, thank you for participating.

    BRIANA: Yes, and thank you for being on with us.

    So, at this point, I’m going to hand it over to Robin.

    Hello, Robin.

    ROBIN: Hi, thanks for letting me join today’s session, excited to be here, and really excited to get the perspectives from both Jan’ae and Lynne as we go through this conversation. I may jump in from now and — now and again and may ask Jason for his perspective, too, as we go through the conversation. But really, as we think about experience, it’s an interesting topic and as we looked at — as we kind of looked early on of talent trends for 2020, we’ve seen experience pop up yet again.

    So if you’ve been sort of watching this trend, it hit in sort of ’17, ’18 kind of really became more to the forefront. We saw it again showing up as a talent trend in ’19, and seeing it for ’20. We’ve coined it as starting with candidate experience. We’ve talked about the employee experience. I thought interestingly, last year, Deloitte use the phrase “human experience.” So really, it’s about that experience that we’re trying to create and it’s really about how do we start to think about our employees and our candidates much more like true customers.

    So exactly as we think about the marketing experience. What does that like for candidates and employees? What I found really interesting is the fact that we’ve seen this rise of the Chief Experience Officer, and that’s a role that sits in or near people organizations, and so really creating the experience for us. And when we think about it, and we think about the work, it’s really about how does work get done. So if we tie at the back to today’s topic, if we’re creating an experience of how we do our work and how our work gets done, if we’re in the talent acquisition space, how our work gets done directly impacts our candidate experience. And so it’s really interesting, I think, as we think about that for talent acquisition professionals and what they’re doing along the way.

    And so before we get started though, I thought it’d be interesting to find out from the audience, and everyone listening, where are they as they and their organizations think about experience? So I think we’ve got a poll question for you, which is, “How is your company focusing on experience today?”

    BRIANA: Yeah, so if you will think about your answer. I’m going to launch this poll and you’ll be able to put your answer in for us.

    [pause]

    All right, it looks like we’re getting some answers in. Let’s take a couple more seconds to give everyone a chance to answer.

    [pause]

    All right, we’re still getting a couple answers in, but I’m seeing over 50% saying they’re focused on both employee and candidate experience. So that’s really awesome to see.

    I’ll close this out and share the results with everyone.

    [pause]

    ROBIN: Yes, we see 54% of you focus on both employee and candidate experience, 18 with primary — it’s interesting, even mix between just focused on employee or just focused on candidate. Maybe that means you’ve already kind of gotten if you weren’t focused on the candidate side, maybe you really haven’t focused much on the employee or other side. We’ll focus on that. And then 11% who are not focused on experience, so love to hear more about that.  Maybe that means that you’re either well along in this journey or you’re still making it to your priority list. It’s hard at look we were talking yesterday. There’s so much going on in the HR space and talent, so many things to do and prioritize. So really an interesting piece of this.

    So I think as we think about both candidate and employee experience, and that’s kind of what we’re going to focus on, if we look at 54% of that today. I’d love to unpack this a little bit and hear from our panelists, how their experiences compared to their poll as they think about kind of either organizations they’re working with or their current organization.

    So Lynne, you know, as you introduce yourself, kind of in your both your past experiences, certainly your current experience, I know you’re working with lots of different companies, what are they sharing with you as it relates to experience and their journey and what they’re focused on?

    LYNNE: Thanks, Robin. First of all, I think it’s very interesting that we’ve got that new research and coining the terminology, the “human experience” because whether it’s employee, candidate, or even customer, we’re talking about human beings, right? And how they react to something, and I think I’m starting to see that service quite a bit with clients. And I want to take everybody in the group a step back for a minute because across industries we’ve known for the past, you know, working on two decades now, organizations are investing much more resources and attention on the customer experience. And I think we have something to learn from that work as it applies to the employee and the candidate experience.

    So because there are principles that apply to both, which is because we’re talking about human beings, as we sort of just mentioned, so, for example, we know from marketing research and customer experience work that customers respond to or impacted by something we call the peak-end rule, which basically says that the first and last interactions throughout an experience have the most impact and are the most memorable to a person. It impacts how they feel about the experience, it sort of connects with them in their mind about what the experience was to feel like. And it doesn’t mean that all the little touch points in between don’t matter. However, we know from research with customers that the first and last, right? The peak, which is the beginning and the end, really make the biggest impact.

    And so you have to really be cognizant about what that looks like. And that, you know, a great way to explain this if you think about if you’re out to dinner, and some parts of the meal maybe are going well, some are not so well, but at the end, if that server really does a nice job of closing the experience for you, you might be more likely to kind of forget about all the incidences in between because it ends, right? The end ends on a positive note and that might impact how much tip you provide, right? So that’s that end experience, just like we often we talk about the welcome matters as much, right? And so, how you feel about the moment you walk in.

    So, now let’s take that principle and apply to a candidate experience. In our current environment, the first experience and interaction many applicants are having with you that has eased up our side of the work is with the applicant tracking system, right? They’re not even interacting with a human being, they’re interacting with, you know, a system. So the point is, how can you build a unique experience from this launching point? Their first interaction is with your applicant tracking system. So, how do we make it unique from there? And that’s harder to do, but you’ve got to be looking for every interaction once you decide you want to connect with them. How can you do it through channels that they appreciate? How can you tell the story? And how do you keep connecting with them on the way even if you decide that you don’t want them to continue on the applicant journey?

    You know, a local company here in Atlanta that’s actually doing a really good job of this is Delta, right? Huge company. Now, lots of us promise on our applicant tracking system that if you give us permission, we’ll follow up with roles that match your capabilities and experience. And we say we’re going to do this, but Delta is very consistent about it with applicants, and it appears very personalized. Now, I’m not saying there’s not an algorithm behind that, but to the applicant and candidate, it appears that if it’s very customized to them, and so it’s it’s key that they’re continuing to connect. You might not have been the right match for the original role, but you’re certainly someone we want to connect with, and we do so over time.

    And the same applies for the end, right? If you just — the communication with candidate just trails off or there’s no followup, it is very frustrating to candidates. We hear that quite a bit. And as I’m doing career coaching with people or people who are in transition, they often say, you know, “I might even gone further along in the process, but then suddenly, it just goes completely cold. I’m getting no information.” And that gives — you know, really impacts the experience and tells them a little bit about the company, and what the culture might be like. And so you’re constantly telling your story, so it’s really important to close that loop. And candidates really appreciate even if you say you’re not the right person for this role. Provide them with some meaningful feedback. You want them to walk away thinking, “Wow, that’s a great organization, because they invested time in me even enough time to give me feedback that might help me land a role somewhere else.”

    ROBIN: Yeah, you made a lot of really good points in there. I love that peak experience — peak-end, right? Your first and last becoming very memorable. It’s interesting, too, kind of the interaction if you think about that first interaction being kind of more systematic. I think we’re seeing more, too, a little bit in this space with people using chat bots, and who seemed very real. I didn’t realize I was chatting with one the other day from a customer’s side. And so as we think about that, from the candidate experience, what does that start to do with to your point when it’s still systematic, but hopefully that’s like a way you’re starting to think about it. Can you integrate chat into — these give some sort of two-way interaction because, otherwise, you’re exactly right. You put something in and you feel like it just goes into this dark hole. I love that.

    I love the dining analogy because that’s what it does feels like on a date, maybe, even to that extent.

    ROBIN: Janae, your organization talks to a lot of candidates. What are they telling you about the experience and what are you hearing from them?

    [pause]

    ROBIN: Jan’ae, did we lose you?

    JAN’AE: Can you hear me? I’m sorry.

    ROBIN: Yes.

    JAN’AE: Okay.

    ROBIN: No problem.

    JAN’AE: So, a lot of the conversation has been based off of the experience, just the job-hunting experience as a whole. A lot of candidates, you know, dread having to start that process of putting themselves back out there applying for multiple opportunities. And it’s really frustrating when they hear nothing back, or they get that automated, you know, message, “We received your application, someone will contact you soon.” And no one ever contacts them. And I think it goes back to what Lynne mentioned, you know, even if the conversation is that you’re not the right fit, but giving them that feedback that’s going to help them eventually to position themselves for the next opportunity, I think it is very helpful and rewarding to those candidates. So I think that’s important. Some of them, you know, never hear anything back or they go through the entire interview process. They might speak to someone on the phone, and then the followup doesn’t happen. You know, no one reaches out to them to continue that conversation.

    So I think, you know, putting systematic processes in place to ensure that you are reaching out and connecting with these candidates are important. Because like we mentioned before, you know, they’re interacting with applicant tracking systems early on and someone, you know, just may need to hear that live voice to feel like they were truly touched and considered for the opportunity and given that feedback of why or why not. So I think that’s important to make sure that we are engaging the candidates throughout the process.

    ROBIN: It’s great. I love that you both kind of talked about this giving back piece of it. I’ve heard where some organizations are actually when you hit apply, you get something like maybe if it’s a B2C customer, you know, or organization, you get something back like a coupon for a product or a discount or something like that, which, if nothing else has got to at least like, “Ugh, ut went through,” right” Rather than just, “Thanks for applying,” you know, to get something back. And I think, you know, Lynne, you mentioned and talked about Delta. And I heard someone from Delta talk about the fact that they realized, you know, the number of applicants that they get, they’re saying no to more people than yes because they’ve got a very low turnover. And so really thinking about how are you telling your customers no every day and so I love that, again, the idea of, you know, giving back.

    BRIANA: Robin, I love what you said about offering something like a coupon or a discount. We got a question in from Tonya, that was, how do you have that follow up when you have a mass number of applicants, so like over 100 or over 200? And and I think that’s one way to do it. It’s something that’s automated, but it’s also going an extra step. And if you’re not a B2C customer, I think you could think about what is it, what are you assessing, and is there some sort of automated — there are ways that you can give automated feedback as well? So here’s some things that they can do. We can help you think about that. Not to put a plug in, but, you know, certainly I think there are ways that you can provide a little bit of feedback if you don’t have that opportunity to kind of give something back that sort of monetary. There’s some things there from the process as well. And you’re exactly right, when you get that many candidates, it’s really hard to be able to do that. I think Delta is actually giving candidates feedback who apply along the way. I think they should give free flights.

    LYNNE:  [Giggles] There you go.

    BRIAN: That’d be great.

    LYNNE: Robin, I was also thinking do that because you’re right. The point is, I mean, you can’t pay up possibly. I mean, we put an applicant tracking systems to help us sort through the thousands of applicants. You can’t talk to everybody. And I love the solutions we’re talking about. And I just also want to mention the trend that’s there. And this is important for sort of HR folks on the phone is that we have to really lean into the marketing side of our role, whatever that looks like. And I think we’re seeing that more and more because lately, I do a lot of coaching with new chief HR officers or new chief people officers, and many of them are coming from the business and marketing. Because we need to apply some of those principles to the work that we do, the traditional sort of HR or recruiting work that we’re doing. And so you have to be thinking about how do we market to our audience and do it in an efficient way because we can’t speak directly to everyone.

    ROBIN: I love that. Yeah, that is so true. And I — you’re exactly right, that sort of new look and kind of fresh eyes on the problem is great to have particularly about that marketing lens.

    So, you know, we’ve been talking a little bit about some ideas and what do we look like, but I think part of this then comes in and this sort of ties in nicely to what you were talking about when kind of these fresh eyes, and what marketing does. Marrketing is constantly looking in measuring that outcome. So, if I go and I reach and I touch out to you, what does that realize from a conversion standpoint, what am I selling to you in the end, and how are those touch points looking at that?

    And so we, as HR professionals, also need to think about those touch points and those outreaches and what’s happening. So curious to understand how you all are thinking about measuring your candidate experience within your organization. And so, Brianna is going to put up a new poll, and we’d love to see what you all are doing and then maybe chat about that on the other side.

    BRIANA: Yep, so that poll is up. It looks like we’re getting lots of responses in.

    [pause]

    Give it just a couple more seconds.

    [pause]

    All right, I’ll go ahead and close this out and share the responses with everyone.

    LYNNE: So, we’ve got — looks like the majority of people — it’s kind of a three-way tie here is — we survey new hires; periodically, we do a pulse check, but no regular measure, or we don’t measure at all; and a few of you are measuring those survey hires and non hires.

    So, I think we’re going to kind of turn in to our our experts here, but I’d love to come back to that because I think it’s very interesting again of who we choose to measure, how we do that, and then kind of how do we do that in an efficient way. So we think back on this, we know experience and measurement are kind of work in progress, what we’ve all are doing something around there, but probably still working on those things to get better.

    And then we’re thinking about how do we get candidates to continue to engage with us. So if you think about this, and I think, Lynne, both you and Jan’ae brought both this point up, is a candidate is going to apply for us, they’re not going to be right for it, they probably — maybe they applied in one of those jobs that was hundreds of applicants, we don’t really have a way to respond to them. And then we have another posting and maybe they’re actually better qualified for that opportunity and there’s a smaller pool, but if we lost them to Lynne’s point about the peak, you know, peak and end, if we’ve lost them in there, are they going to come back or just like in the restaurant example that Lynne gave, when you have a bad experience and if it’s not great or it’s okay, but at the end, if your server wasn’t great, the likelihood of you coming back becomes not very high. So same thing from the candidate perspective.

    And so, we had someone actually write us ahead of time that said that they are starting to see within their organization that they’re experiencing quite a bit of drop-off from candidates. So candidates are almost voting back, right? “You guys have been through all these years, you haven’t responded to me. So now, I’m a candidate. I’m in your process. I’m going to go ahead and just drop out, and I’m not going to tell you and maybe even engaged with me. You’ve invited me in for an interview or a phone screen, and I just — I go silent for a while. I’ve dropped out.”

    And so the question, I guess, becomes, I guess I’ll start with you, Jan’ae. Are you hearing from candidates as to why they’ve decided to not show or back out at the last minute? Are they sharing kind of, you know, I don’t know if you all are asking that question in your business, but what are you hearing from candidates as to this sort of no-show or Briana term, ghosting, that’s happening from our candidates?

    JAN’AE: It is really a wide variety of reasonings that I here, but some of the most popular answers that that I get from the candidates are that they might accept another job offer. You know, they didn’t hear anything for a week or two, and they were just kind of placing it in a holding sale, if you will. And during that time, they’re still interviewing with other companies, right? They’re still applying to other opportunities, so they might have just accepted another offer. And then also, you know, no one really interacted with them, like you set the appointment and then you forget to follow up. You forget to send that confirmation email, that calendar invite. You forget to send that text the morning up, like looking forward to seeing you. And so they have lives themselves, you know, things going on, children that they’re juggling, families that they’re juggling, and it was just no contact. It was no communication throughout that two or three-day waiting period into they came in to meet with the hiring managers, you know.

    So and then after they researched the company because some will do their due diligence after they speak with a recruiter, you know, HR team, and they’ll go and research the company. And so it’s, you know, has something to do with what’s out there on social media, Glassdoor, and things like that. Do you have a good reputation? What are people saying? Maybe a family member interview with them before and was like, “Oh, that’s not going to be the best culture fit.” Those various reasons, so I think it all has to do and surrounded around that experience though, and is why those candidates, you know, will decide not to move forward or just to ghost an employer.

    ROBIN: It’s interesting you mentioned this part of no one’s followed up with them, right? I mean, if you think about that in kind of our lives, if we’re expecting something right, you I get — I just got something today as a reminder on my phone from my dentist, “Hey, don’t forget about your appointment,” right? An automated response kind of thing. And we’re seeing more and more of that kind of how do we kind of have those touch points, and I love that you’re saying, “Hey, you know, if you’re not touching base with me, then maybe I don’t feel as important or I’ve just gotten — it’s gotten lost in the clutter because we all have a million things going on.” And so that that followup piece is not happening there. And then I love this, and we’re going to talk about a little bit more too, but just the whole, “I’ve done some research on you, and I don’t think you’re a fit.” So they’re both — those are kind of — and then then just, you know, other offers are interesting.

    Lynne, as you’re working with companies, are you used to hearing the same thing from them, and what are they doing maybe to combat the issue?

    LYNNE: Yeah, it’s a great conversation because I find it fascinating, but I want to really reinforce what Jan’ae said a bit there is that there’s a tough competition. They have multiple offers out there, and candidates are doing their homework because one thing we know especially about the emerging workforce is that culture, reputation, purpose of company matters to them, and so they’re looking at that and measuring it along the way. And, you know, if I think back to the title of this webinar, right? When someone else meeting another organization is showing them more love, they’re going to lean in that direction, frankly, right?

    So, you know, they’re looking for opportunities. They’re looking at the culture. And if they just don’t feel like they’re getting that level of engagement upfront, they’re going to move on. No, I’m not saying it’s respectful to say, I’m coming in for an interview, and I’m not, but I think this idea of connecting them with some way and it could be simple things, which can be automated around, maybe parking is difficult coming to your building. Even if you send an automated text that says, “Here are directions to us. Here’s where parking is. Oh, by the way, you’ll be meeting with multiple people.” Maybe giving them a little bit more heads up around the dress code, right? So if you are a casual environment, they probably shouldn’t show casual, but they should know that so they don’t come, you know, dressed in a three-piece suit.

    I had someone recently told me that they went and they were really overdressed when they got there, which is something that’s unusual if you think about the traditional overview, but you have to create a compelling reason for your company to be at the top of their list, you know. They have options out there. So, how do you make your process stand out? How do you tell your story? How can — I’ve seen some clients really go out of the way, especially on the retail side to try to create sort of fun, almost recruiting events, not your traditional job fair, but, you know, a national recruiting event, you know, really kind of fun things happening where people can even bring their family along to learn more about that.

    So I think that’s important to kind of give a glimpse into what your organization is about by providing those opportunities. Also, I’ve seen some clients have noticed they’ve been losing candidates because their their process on hiring whether it’s background checks, et cetera, is taking too long, and so they’ve gone to a contingent hiring process that says. “We are hiring you on a contingent basis. You can start tomorrow.” But if your background check or something comes back, or if they’re still doing drug testing, and that’s a problem, then you know, we have a right to turn around. But they realize that if they said, “I need five days to wait for your background check to come back,” they would lose a top candidate to a retailer down the street who could move it through more quickly. And so they’ve added these contingent processing. So you’ve got to create this experience, you have to connect with them, and you have to make sure your processes aren’t so cumbersome that they drag on so long that you lose the candidate to a competitor down the street.

    ROBIN: I like that. I really like too that, you know, kind of this idea of creating these events that include your family, right? Because then some accountability starts to happen, right Whether it’s you kids saying, “Gosh, mom (or dad), what happened to that company? It was so great.” And you having to explain kind of that if you dip into one who’s not shown up right kind of thing. That is — it really kind of gets everyone engaged in the process and really kind of that connectivity. That’s a really, I think, a really fun idea to kind of be able to do that and bring people there. And then just this idea of we’ve got to act with speed. You know, the old saying, I guess, of time kills all deals works in this process as well. So great stuff. You know, interestingly —

    LYNNE: May I just add one thing to that.

    ROBIN: Yeah, please.

    LYNNE: That this is not unusual or creative, but I’ve been seeing a lot as we see, again, especially on the retail side and even on the hospitality side, as you see different brands disappearing from the landscape. We saw it a lot last year with Payless. I just saw something posted with Macy’s. It says a lot about companies when you see other organizations reaching out, let’s say to the San Francisco-based Macy’s people reaching out to those current employees and saying, “Hey, we know everybody’s about to be impacted there. We are a similar business environment. We’re interested in you.” You know, if you’re in a team member who is being impacted, and you see another large organization reaching out saying, “Hey, come to our job fair, come to our site, we’ve got opportunities for you.” Again, that’s — you’re in a bad place. And that really can make you consider that other organization. And we’ve been seeing a lot of that. We saw a lot of it last year. A lot of people were reaching out to those Payless team members and I’ve seen it already with Macy’s recent announcements.

    ROBIN: It’s a great point. I did see — you know, now that you mentioned that, I saw something on LinkedIn I thought that was really interesting that they had talked about, who was the head of talent acquisition, talking about the fact that people were reaching out and really engaging those employees. And to your point, even if you’re not in the job search, if you see that and you see that from an organization. And by the way, Macy’s, you know, I think that’s a great example because we know that they’re going to open up this new concept store, and they’re need to have people for those stores, and what does that look like. Well, if you see that, it’s an organization that people (A) want to be if you’re there, people want your skill set, and (B) that they’ve cared enough to kind of share the story. I think that’s really great. I think that’s an excellent point.

    You know, I think — and so as we’re talking about this, it’s kind of we talked about a candidate driven market. We talked about the fact that it’s really hard to get people and here they’re ghosting us. Yet have we stepped and thought back of it kind of back to the beginning of this when someone comes into our applicant tracking system? If we do nothing, then we’re ghosting them. And I know some organizations sort of got away from the rejection email kind of thing because — or it became very long time before you get it because I’m going to put all these people in and if something doesn’t work out, I want to make sure I’ve got a back-up plan. But it’s kind of like waiting for the date to the prom, right? No one’s asked you just yet. Imagine somebody came to you and said, “I don’t know you might be my date, but I got a couple other people ahead of you. Let me get back to you.” And then you don’t hear from them, right? You assume the answer is no. But you start to feel like not great about that experience, right? It’s not a very in the interest of Valentine’s Day, right? Not very interesting. And so we’re hearing that as an experience that people are really talking about.

    I heard from one woman as this topic came up who had — was in the workforce, had gone back, done some upskilling to really become more relevant with her skills, talked to a career coach and said, “Hey, given where I am in my career opportunity, if I decide to go to this path, do you think the fact that I’m a little more senior is going to be an issue and what does that look like?” And the career coach — and look, maybe she got bad advice — but the current coach said, “Nope, I think given your experience in sales and marketing…” And she was moving into more of a user experience role. ” Given that experience, you’ll really be able to be very valuable in the market.”

    And she said, you know, what she’s finding is she’s going out applying for jobs and not hearing anything or she’s going out, applying for jobs, someone will say, “I’m interested in you. May see a sample of your work or what have you done in the past?” One organization even said, “Come in and do some work for us for a couple of days, sort of on a trial basis and see what that looks like.” Trial period ends, she goes home, and then here’s nothing.

    Right? So there’s no feedback and no loop coming back. That actually was, interestingly enough, I won’t name the brand, but it was a brand that she has in her house, and a very expensive brand. So now she is saying, “Hmm, I’m not sure this is going to be at the brand of our choice as it comes.” So as a customer, you’re giving me — and that brand is excellent at giving customer feedback and recognition and support yet when it came on the employee side, it seemed very lacking from her experience.

    So I think interestingly, I actually learned about it — because I called her afterwards — I learned about it from a social media post. So back to we had talked a bit about what happens on kind of candidates who you want are going out and looking at social media. Those candidates that maybe you’re not interested in are also using social media. And so if we make it come full circle, those ones that you want are reading their posts, too. So Jan’ea, can you tell us the impact of social media as you’ve seen it in your role, not just to candidates you’re interested in, but also others that maybe you want to come to work for you?

    JAN’AE: It’s actually very crucial. Candidates, like we stated before, they’re actually doing their homework. They’re going out, they’re researching the company, they’re seeing what the world has to say. They’re not just hopping on your website to see what you’ve posted all the wonderful things and accolades about your company, they want to know what the world has to say about your company. So they’re doing their research. They’re talking to family, friends, and things and just really gaining as much information as possible. So those candidate experiences will affect what they see on social media and what they hear out, you know, just networking, if you will. So I really think it’s important that, you know, we’ve mentioned it before, I always say, you know, a declination email is better than no response at all, at least telling them that, you know, “This is not the right fit for you, always decided to move forward with other candidates.” It’s better than just ghosting them. The example that you gave about the young lady coming in and doing a working interview and not even receiving feedback after she left the working interview, that’s something that we all have to avoid because quite frankly, they have other options. And they will, you know, go and just do a bad review. Just like if we go to a restaurant, we have a horrible experience, we’re going to go to Yelp and do a review, right? Because we want people to know, “Do not eat at this restaurant.”

    So I think it’s important to follow up and just putting, you know, tools in forms in place, a debriefing form that the recruiter or HR manager might complete with a candidate before she leaves or even doing a 10 -minute, you know, call and debriefing on, “How was your experience today?” “Do you have any concerns on a scale of 1 to 5?” “Would you accept the opportunity if we were to offer you this job?” So I think it’s important that we know that especially even if it’s a candidate that we’re not looking to work for, they have access to the internet and social media. They can post just like a candidate that we do want to work with can go and actually read and review that other’s posts.

    ROBIN: It’s great, thank you. And Lynne, what — you know, as you’re working with companies, and you’re hearing this and you’ve got some experience with some innovative ideas that companies are doing to attract people, what are some things that you’re working with on companies or what have you seen to sort of help from this combat ghosting from the employer’s side, right? We don’t want the employees the candidates to ghost us, but how are you kind of encouraging them to make sure that they’re not ghosting their candidates?

    LYNNE: Yeah, I think one of the big conversations we’ve been having quite a bit and again, it goes back to what I said earlier about having a marketing perspective, I think Jan’ae is right. I mean, there are channels everywhere for consumers to give feedback about how they feel about products, and potential employees, candidates have those same channels available to them. So one of the biggest things that I spent a lot of time talking to clients about — especially when we’re talking about culture is making sure you’re clear about the kind of organization you are, what are your values and principles, and how is that communicated through your job postings, your website, et cetera. And then most importantly, is are you hiring recruiters or do you see that role very much as a, you know — we have a director of guest experience. Well, it’s a director of a candidate experience, right? And what is the view they take to that role?

    Now, again, thousands of applicants, it’s hard to have touch points with everyone. So you almost have to decide along our processes. The masses get this side type of automated response to us. And maybe it’s not all formal. Maybe the system, you know, spits out a very formalized, “thank you for applying.” But is there an automated kind of friendly text that goes out that represents the tone of voice and the personality of your company in your culture? And then as you get further along with the process and people, you know, let’s determine what are our standards of response that we’re going to keep that we think we can actually maintain? Let’s not overdo it because that’s just impossible to keep up. But what are the minimums that we’re going to provide? And, again, what are the types of people you have interacting with candidates?

    Well, I’ve been fortunate in my past life when I was inside organizations, running an HR team where I would get feedback all the time from candidates about really appreciating my director of talent acquisition or a talent acquisition manager and really felt they connected with them and saw them as a resource because they’re representing the brand. They’re being honest about who we are and what we’re looking for. And oh, by the way, even when people come on site, what does that experience look like? My last organization, I often would be a last stop with some of our more senior candidates and they would often say to me, “Everybody looks so nice around here and so friendly, do you just tell them candidates are inside?” But it was part about how — you know, that was just the experience of working for us and candidates can see it and feel that, and that comes across on your communication or lack of communication. How do you make people feel seen and heard? Right, that’s what it’s about it. That’s why I love that it’s a human experience because that’s what human beings are looking for. Have I been seen, have been heard? Right? And so how do we create that without it becoming too cumbersome? And that’s the challenge for us, right? We have hundreds of applicants, but how do you create that unique experience?

    ROBIN: Right, I love that. And, you know, so a question for both of you just on this. We talked a quite a bit about feedback. So do you think organizations feel comfortable providing candidates feedback that’s less than stellar? And if the answer is no, what would you suggest?

    LYNNE: This is an interesting question because I’ve always been pretty an advocate of providing people with feedback. I — as a matter of fact, you know, you asked for one piece of advice. The piece of advice I always give to candidates is, you know, make sure if you don’t get a role, ask for feedback because it’s an opportunity to learn. You might not have, you know, earned that spot today, but it certainly helps you prepare and you know what your strengths and opportunities are and how you can prepare for the next one. I think that organizations have to be good at. I think you want to be really specific about providing them some positive that they brought to the process, and what maybe what the other candidate had that made them a better fit. And I know it’s difficult because people don’t want to say anything that could possibly go the wrong way. But you really want to position it around how much you value them, how much you value their participation in the process. And that here were the experiences they brought to the table that were really helpful, but you just found a candidate who was just a bit stronger as opposed to comparing them to them. But I didn’t need to be very helpful for a candidate.

    ROBIN: Yeah. And I love when the candidates call back and say, “Hey, can I get some feedback about what I could do better next time, what I was missing?” I love that.

    JAN’AE: I definitely agree with Lynne. I think the feedback is so important to candidates. A lot of candidates will reach out to me and say, “Jan’ae, is there anything you could tell me that would better prepare me for my next interview?” They want that. So I think being able to be candid, respectful, but giving them that true feedback on things that they can improve upon, but also tell them what they did good, you know, as well giving them that positive feedback. I think they would be more receptive to receiving it, but a lot of them want it even if it’s, you know, bad news, “Let me know, so that way I can check you off my list and focus on the other two companies that I’m speaking with.” So, I think that’s, you know, very fair for candidates to have that expectation. So, I think, you know, it’s important. It goes along with the experience, right? What are they going to remember about you and your company. So, you know, in the future, you know, you might need to reach out to the candidate at another time for a different opportunity. Maybe they weren’t the right fit for that role before they apply for but maybe, you know, something comes along when you think of them like, “Okay, I need to reach out to this candidate again because they have the experience I need.” What was that lasting impression that you have with that candidate? They will remember, “That person took time out to talk to me to give me advice and give me feedback on things that I can improve upon.” So I think that’s important.

    ROBIN: Great, thank you. Lastly, if you all could leave all of us with two things. One, what is one thing employers should be doing as they think about candidate experience? We’ve talked a lot about a lot of them, but if you could highlight one of them. And then what is one thing you would kind of give advice to candidates that they should be doing as they think about the experience? Jan’ae, let’s start with you.

    JAN’AE: One thing that I think employers should do and one thing that I do with candidates especially if they move through that interview process is debrief with them just as I would debrief with the hiring manager, right? Debrief with a candidate as well. You, at times will find out that they’re not even interested anymore after meeting with the hiring manager. So that way, you don’t have to worry about getting ghosted later, right. But asking those questions, seeing how their experience was, you know, thus far, and maybe, you know, answering any other questions that they might have that might have came up and they didn’t quite ask in the first interview, but they need a little bit more clarity on. But I think putting those processes in place to ensure that you’re touching those candidates throughout that recruiting process is important, as well as, you know, I know it can be tedious and time consuming, believe me, I do it on a daily basis, going through those resumes, those applications, but especially when you see candidates that yet they’re not quite there. But, you know, if it’s possibility, reach out to them. Have a conversation because some candidates just are not skilled when it comes to writing a resume and selling themselves. So reaching out to them and talking to them, starting the conversation, it may just be a five -minute conversation, because you might realize that this is not a good match. It’s not the right opportunity for that candidate. But it could turn into a 30-minute conversation or you might end up getting a referral from someone that they may know, you know, that can feel an open opportunity that you might have.

    So I think really putting those processes in place so that way you can try to touch as many as possible. You won’t be able to touch all I’m sure, you know, with the hundreds of applications you’re seeing, but try to touch as many as possible. And then for the candidates themselves, selling yourself. A lot of candidates that I see come through, they look good on paper. They have the experience. They have the educational background that I’m looking forward to fill opportunity, but when they get into a room of panel interview, they struggle with selling themselves. But I think, you know, coaching them and giving them information, “Here’s the job description, so that which you can review,” I think is helpful. So that way, they could try to better prepare for that first meeting. But those are the two things that I would like individuals to think about following up and creating those debriefing.

    ROBIN: Fantastic, thanks. I really like that candidate debrief. That’s great. And, Lynne, how about you?

    LYNNE: Yeah, just two points really. First, from the company standpoint, again, really think about your peak and end, and, you know, there’s lots of little steps in between, but if you can add something unique to the beginning and the end that certainly can help. And I also want, you know, again, as part of this marketing as it’s difficult sometimes to find qualified candidates, sometimes we put parameters or restrictions around even how we post a job like, you must have five years experience or 10 years experience. And granted, you know, if you take out years of experience, you might get lots of people who are underqualified, but at the same time, could it be better to really word it around, “Here are the skills and experiences. Have you done this? Have you done something like that?” Versus saying five years because it may have some people shy away saying, “Well, I really only have three years,” because again, to Jan’ae’s point, they don’t have that confidence. They don’t know how to sell it, and they see a barrier right there in the job posting. So it seems pretty obvious, but I think that’s one thing we need to consider about. Again, how do we tell the story and what are you really looking for in a candidate? What what are the must-haves in terms of skills and experience and does the time in job matter as much? In some cases it does. But you know, make sure you’re not creating a barrier with any of the words or the criteria that you’re putting in your job posting. And again, creating that experience on the front and the back end, essentially.

    And for candidates, and I really want to say this mostly about those who are considering ghosting the potential employer. One, it’s about being respectful. But also, every interview you go on is an opportunity to practice interviewing, and to expand your network. And if you don’t show up, you might have missed an opportunity to meet someone who can introduce you to a role in a different organization through their network. And so never pass up the opportunity to practice interviewing, and to expand your network. And then finally, to ask for that feedback, take every opportunity. Be curious to learn and grow about how you can be a better team member anywhere in the future.

    ROBIN: Great. You guys gave some great examples. I love that, too, you know, the practice piece, but you never — I mean, I think it’s such a small world. We bump into each other all over the place. And so that really makes it. And also too, as you mentioned, sort of are ou kind of overstating something. We do some work with an organization called Merit America. And they really challenged us to say, “Do you really need to have a college degree on some of our jobs?” And it’s amazing what happens when you get to open that up. So, thank you both for that. And thank you for all of your insight and wisdom. It’s been really informative.

    So now, I’m going to transition it to Jason Ferrara who, as Brianna mentioned, is our Market Insight Expert. He’s going to talk a little bit about what we’re hearing from candidates and the candidate optimism report.

    JASON: Thanks, Robin. Everyone, thanks for joining today. So with this topic of candidate experience, we thought it was interesting to give you a sneak peek at some research that we’re working on here at Outmatch. And it really goes to this notion that the voice of the candidate is so important in the process. That’s why we’re doing this piece of research that we call The Outmatch Candidate Optimism Report because we want a real-time indicator of candidates in the market and what they think about the job market in general.

    So that’s why we’re doing this research. Like I said, it’s a sneak peek. We’ve been doing it for — we’ve been surveying candidates for a few months now, and have some interesting, interesting results to share with you, so I just want to go through those. The first thing I like to talk about is what we’re asking candidates, so you understand the results that we’re getting back. So the first thing we’re asking is really about perceptions in the job market, that you — that a candidate experiences. How positive are they about their ability to get a job? How positive are they with regard to the job market? Second question would be, how long have you been looking for work, right? Somebody who’s positive about the job market maybe new in their job search, want to understand that life cycle for somebody.

    And, you know, and the third question is, you feel that the current job market provides you with the right type of salary, adequate or inadequate just to get an understanding there, and what it’s like in the past month, what their experience has been in the past month in their outreach from employers. So this goes back to what we were just talking about, the candidates optimism, their experience and what employers are saying with regard — or what candidates are saying and how employers are reaching out to them.

    So some of this research that we found, I have three pieces of the results that I’d like to share with you. The first is job candidates are overwhelmingly optimistic about their ability to get a job and the job market in general. Not sure this is all that surprising, especially when you think of the number of people who are new searching for a job. Most of the people who are responding to the survey have been looking for a job less than a month. But I do think what’s interesting, and as you look at this over months, is to see a trend that aligns with the general economy. How does optimism and the general US economy relate to each other? And that’s something we’ll be looking, a relationship we’ll be looking to see month to month. And then — but the other big thing, I think, for this particular conversation that’s so interesting is candidates are receiving mixed interest from employers. So you have some candidates saying that “I’m receiving more interest from employers,” and you have around the same amount saying “I’m receiving less interest from employers.” And as it relates to this peak-end concept that we talked about, as it relates to how we as as companies and hiring managers are responding to candidates, it’s interesting to see the candidates’ perspective here.

    If you think about it, it can be the shorthand here is, “I’m excited about my prospects about getting a job. I don’t feel like employers are all that excited about contacting me.” And that may be a generalization, but I definitely think it hits home with this conversation here. And hopefully, what we take away from it as employers is, let’s look at our experience. What is that experience that we’re giving candidates? Have we gone through that experience as if we were candidates? How do we understand what those candidates are going through? And how can we be more human about that process? So this is what we’re hearing from from the voice of the candidates out there. And as as we learn more, we’ll be rolling this research out more broadly, but just wanted to sneak peek that because I think it really relates to this, how they give candidates the right amount of love and what can you do to think through how you approach a candidate what their experience might be?

    BRIANA: Thank you, Jason, for sharing that research with everyone on the call. There’s definitely more to come on that. So we’re happy to share, you know, as we learn more about this and put more of our research report together, and we’d love to be able to share that with everyone. And we’ve got just a couple minutes left. So if you do have a question, please get it in. And if we don’t have time to answer, we can follow up with you after the call.

    We did have Jacqueline right in asking for some fresh ideas on how to drive applicant flow. So I hope we were able to cover some of that in our discussion today. And I can write up a recap of top takeaways from the webinar and share that out with everyone.

    It looks like we’ve got another question and a couple questions here. So we’ll see what we can get to. How do we manage candidates when there’s a gap and expectation of their current skills? Looks like especially in the IT world.

    ROBIN: So kind of, I think, the way I heard that question is, “I’d like to do X in IT, but my skills really don’t allow for me to do that.” And I think kind of to Lynne’s point, maybe some time on the job is important there, I think, as I’m hearing that question. Is that right?

    BRIANA: Yeah. And let’s do one more quick one before we break.

    Laurie wrote in about, you know, we’re talking about social media and doing your homework on a company before you maybe go in for your interview. There’s definitely a challenge when your brand isn’t as well known. How do you overcome some of that?

    ROBIN: If the message hasn’t been as great?

    BRIANA: Yeah. So we’re worried about negative feedback on social media. But what if there’s nothing out there for people to learn about you?

    ROBIN: I think I’ll just jump in here quickly, but I think, you know, one of the things that you can do as an organization is as you bring an onboard employees, one of those social media channels that you would like them to be sharing your brand with. So, for example, not requiring it but reminding people, “Hey, if you’ve had a great experience, during the candidate experience, we’d love to hear about it.” We use channels like Glass Door or we’re big in LinkedIn or Instagram or whatever your social media channels are. But if you share that with new — particularly new hires because they’re so anxious, and they want to get started, and they’re looking for things to do immediately, you start to bring that into that. I think the other thing is thinking about in your your target area, what is that thought leadership that you really want people to start to think about your brand about? What does that look like for you? And how do you start to do that and what are those posts that you might create?

    It’s interesting, I was looking at a couple of organizations recently, and I noticed, you know, nothing had happened on their social media accounts since the end of last year. So again, I think being really active is important. You know, Jason, you’re kind of the market insight expert. What do you — do you have any thoughts for people?

    [giggles]

    Sorry, we’re in a bit of a room that Jason’s got to run now.

    JASON: So I don’t want to be off of the background. No, I think the, you know — if everybody needs to be active on social media, especially, as Lynne said, the emerging workforce is expectation that you are there, you are interacting, and that part of that candidate experience. It is really as simple as if you don’t have someone on it, find someone in your organization to get on it. Starting is better than waiting until you have a strategy, honestly. But then certainly develop that strategy as you move forward, and and then ask candidates who have good experiences, even ones that you may not be hiring, you know, to to to post and to work with you on social media.

    BRIANA: Great. Thanks. Thank you, Jason. And you’re right. I don’t think we answered the question about the skills gap. But we do have an upcoming webinar. We’ll have one this summer on upskilling and what to do about bridging that skills gap, so keep an eye out for that. And we’ll be able to dive much more deeply into that.

    ROBIN: But we’ve got some other things that we can share in the followup, too —

    BRIANA: Yes.

    ROBIN: — I think in between other questions. Sorry, we did —

    BRIANA: Sorry. That was a good question. I didn’t mean to just gloss over it. So, thank you so much for everyone who attended. Thank you to Lynne and Jan’ae for being our special guests on the panel today.

    I chatted in that SHRM activity ID if you want to grab that before you go, and I hope to see everyone back next month. Thank you.

  2. 3 Reasons Why Employers Should Care about Accessibility

    When your online experiences aren’t accessible, you shrink your recruiting reach – and the diversity inside your company – by 15%.

    Over 1 billion people around the world have some form of disability, according to The World Bank. That’s 15% of the global population. If you don’t happen to be part of that 15%, you probably haven’t thought much about accessibility. Until now.

    As we enter a new decade, we’re seeing accessibility move closer and closer to a tipping point. Digital natives are gaining influence, and voices on social media are louder than ever. On top of that, diversity has evolved from a conversation to a full blown revolution.

    These things have converged and are all directing out attention to the issue of accessibility. Frankly, it doesn’t make business sense to ignore it any longer.

    According to a recent poll, 30% of HR leaders said they’re making accessibility improvements. Forty-one percent said “I know it’s important and want to learn more,” and 28% said  “Eager to make improvements, just need budget and a plan.”

    Poll results - we asked HR leaders "Where are you in your accessibility journey?"

     

     

     

     

     

    If you haven’t started on your accessibility journey, you’re not alone. But, that’s no excuse to throw it on the back burner. Here are 3 reasons why you should make accessibility a priority in 2020:

    1. Legislation is coming.

    Remember GDPR? When GDPR became law in the EU, companies all over the world went frantic. One day the switch was flipped, and if you hadn’t been proactive about it, you were suddenly out of compliance with data privacy laws effecting a major chunk of the globe. It can happen that fast, or at least it seems fast when you don’t see it coming.

    So here it is. We’re telling you now. Accessibility is following the same trajectory as GDPR, and it won’t be long until we see suggestions and guidelines turn into laws.

    2. Accessibility shows you care.

    At this point, you have to ask yourself, What kind of business do I want to be? What kind of culture do I want to create? Choosing not to be accessible sends a message that diversity isn’t important enough to take action on.

    Picture your logo, stamped with a big red disclaimer that says:

    • People with disabilities may not make it through our application process.
    • People with disabilities don’t have equal access to tools and resources in our company.
    • People with disabilities will encounter barriers that keep them from thriving here.

    The last thing you want is to be ‘found out’ for allowing this to happen. Luckily, no one expects you to achieve a 100% accessibility overnight. As long as you’re taking steps, even baby steps, you’re moving in the right direction.

    A good mantra to follow is:

    “Be better today than we were yesterday.”

    3. Accessibility has a cost. Not being accessible has an even greater cost.

    Beyond the hit to your brand reputation, think about what your losing when you don’t provide accessible experiences. While the war for talent rages on, can you really afford to exclude 15% of the population from applying to your jobs? Can you risk losing 15% of your talent to companies that are more inclusive?

    In a world where innovation is king and curiosity is an employer’s #1 competency, even a small improvement can make a world of difference. Imagine increasing diversity of thought in your company by 15%. Based on research, you can bet you’d see more than a 15% return.

    I’m sold. Now what?

    Since accessibility matters for web apps, mobile apps, digital media, and basically everything your candidates and employees touch, it can feel like an impossible project. Here are some tips to help you get started:

    • Find help. You don’t have to do it alone. There are companies out there that specialize in accessibility. They can provides audits, training, whatever you need. You’ll also want to find an internal champion (or group of champions!) to keep the wheels moving.

     

    • Look for like-minded partners. Because technology operates in an ecosystem, you’ll need to make sure your vendor partners are on the accessibility journey, too. They don’t be completely mature, or even in the same place as you. But they need to be on the journey.

     

    • Follow the guidelines. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is considered the gold standard in accessibility and is used all over the world. This framework provides specific and clear-cut guidance for designers, developers, and anyone interested in creating accessible experiences.

     

    • Start a focus group. Accessibility often involves making changes that are invisible to people without disabilities. How will you know it’s working? There are tools and widgets you can use, but also, get feedback from people with disabilities and people who use assisstive technologies.

     

    • Take a step. Don’t stall the project because you don’t know where to start. Like any big undertaking, you’ll need to prioritize and take a phased approach. Find a place in the business where you think you’ll see the biggest impact from accessibility improvements. Or, find a low-risk place to experiment. What matters most is that you start.

    To learn more about accessibility and how to get started, watch our webinar: How to Get a Win for Diversity & Accessibility in 2020.

    Title slide to webinar - How to Get a Win for Diversity & Accessibility in 2020

  3. How to Get a Win for Diversity & Accessibility in 2020

    Study after study has found that diversity improves business performance by 25, 35, and even 45 percent. But the path to achieving your diversity goals is less clear. Fortunately, becoming more accessible to people with disabilities is something you can start working on today. Doing so will widen your talent pool and help you support a more diverse workforce. Listen in to learn what accessibility means, the cost of not being accessible, and how to get started.

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    Webinar Transcription

    • Briana Harper – Webinar Host
    • Robin Stenzel – Chief Solutions Officer
    • Kim Carlton – Director of Quality Assurance

    BRIANA: It looks like everyone has joined now, so let’s go ahead and get started with the presentation. Thank you for joining us today for our webinar on, “How to Get Win for Diversity and Accessibility in 2020.” I’m really excited about today’s presentation. Study after study has found that diversity improves business performance by 25%, 35%, even 45%. Also, it’s a topic that’s personally important to a lot of people in HR leadership today. I talked to a woman just the other day from Circle K who created the first Women’s Leadership Council at Circle K’s parent company, and I could just hear the passion in her voice as she was talking about this project. She even had a mission statement for the project, which is to create winning conditions for women.

    So, our conversation today isn’t focused on women specifically, but we are going to talk about how to achieve greater diversity in your organization. One of the biggest challenges with diversity is that why we all agree it’s the right thing to do, the path to actually achieving your diversity goals is less clear. Fortunately, becoming accessible is a surefire way to widen your talent pool and support a more diverse workforce.

    [pause]

    So, again I’d like to say thank you for being here. I know you could be doing a hundred other things right now and you’re here with us, so I really appreciate it. I hope we can provide you with a chance to think, reflect, and plan ahead in the midst of all the New Year busyness. My name is Brian Harper, and I’m your webinar host. I’m also your resource for any questions you have about today’s topic. I’ll be taking questions throughout the presentation, so feel free to chat in any time during our discussion. You’ll also see a follow-up email from me after the presentation with today’s slide deck and a link to the recording. If you’d like to get in touch after the presentation, please reach out. You can email me at bharper@outmatch or find me on social at @OutmatchHCM.

    Our two experts on the call today are Robin Stenzel and Kim Carlton. Robin is our Chief Solutions Officer at Outmatch. Prior to Outmatch, Robin spent nearly 30 years in HR leadership where she led talent management at companies like West Rock, Delta Airlines, and Macy’s. All that to say, Robin has been in your shoes and has a lot of experience getting diversity initiatives off the ground and leading them to success. And speaking of shoes, Robin has an impeccable taste in shoes and is known for her very fabulous shoe collection.

    Hi, Robin.

    ROBIN: Hello.

    BRIANA: Kim is our Director of Quality Assurance and is currently leading our accessibility initiative at Outmatch. She spent the last year training, studying, and working with partners to learn accessibility inside and out. As our accessibility expert, Kim is a driving force in making our software and our company as accessible as possible. And fun fact about Kim, she makes her own sushi. I watched her do this the other day, and I was very impressed.

    Hi, Kim.

    KIM: Hi, everybody.

    BRIANA: Before we dive into our discussion today, I’d like to give you a sneak peek at other upcoming webinars in our future work series. Next month, we have a special Valentine’s Day edition on candidate experience and how to give candidates more love in the hiring process. Then in March, we’ll show you how analytics can help you understand team dynamics and strengthen your internal mobility initiatives. And finally, in April, we’ll dive into culture bit versus culture ad monocultures and how to hire good fits, but not clones. If you’re interested in any of these topics, I’d love to have you back. You can register for upcoming webinars at outmatch.com/webinars. You can also watch any of our past webinars on our YouTube channel. Each presentation as well as today’s presentation is valid for one professional development credit for the SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP, and I’ll chat in that activity code at the end of the webinar today, so keep an eye out for that.

    Now, back to the reason you’re all here, diversity and accessibility, I just wanted to quickly go through some of the questions we’re gonna cover in today’s discussion:

    1. Why does accessibility matter more now than ever before?
    2. What does accessibility mean and what does it mean for HR?
    3. What’s the cost of not being accessible and what are the must-do’s for HR leaders in 2020?

    Because everyone’s accessibility journey is different, I’d like to do a quick poll to find out where you are in yours. This will help Robin and Kim understand and talk to the part of the journey that’s most relevant to you. So take a moment to think about your accessibility journey, and I’m going to launch this poll for everyone.

    [pause]

    So, it looks like we’ve got answers coming in. I’m very excited to see where everybody is. I’ll give everyone just a couple more seconds to put their answer in, and then I’ll share the results with everyone.

    [pause]

    All right. Thank you so much for participating in the poll. It looks like most of you answered (A) I know it’s important and I want to learn more. Let me share these results with everyone. Okay, so 42% said, “I know it’s important and I want to learn more,” 28% said, “I’m eager to make improvements, just need budget and a plan, ” and 30% of you said, “Making improvements and pursuing a fully accessible experience.”

    So, thanks again everyone for letting us know where you are in your journey.

    [pause]

    All right. So to kick us off, I’d like to circle back to that first question in our agenda. It makes sense that being accessible widened your talent pool and helps you retain the talent you’ve got, which is incredibly important in a tight talent market, but we’ve been in a tight talent market for years, so why is accessibility on everyone’s mind now? Robin, what would you say about that?

    ROBIN: So, I think as we — and that we saw this with people who said I’m on the road, right? We’re progressing with our diversity and inclusion journey, and this just becomes one more consideration for us as we work to build and buy environments that are inclusive and allow people, our employees, candidates, and customers to belong. And quite frankly, it’s something that our candidates and employees are demanding of us and our customers. And so if we don’t think of this, we’re not gonna be able to win both in the talent marketplace, but as well as in the consumer marketplace and really thinking about this. And I think this voice — and as we talk more about inclusion and longing — becomes even more important.

    Additionally, I think it’s also becoming more and more integrated into our everyday lives if we think about technology, so as we kind of think about accessibility, and Kim’s going to give us some great information on this today. It’s really more of what we do, and examples are, you know, we’ve bought online for years now, but how we buy online is even different. I was watching a news show as I was getting ready this morning and they talked about buying a mattress online, something a few years ago you wouldn’t have thought of because how am I going to return this, right? What does that look like? So, again, even what we’re buying and how we buy it has changed.

    On the employees’ side, I think what’s happening is how we do our work is changing consistently? So, while we’ve been using technology for many years, how we use it and how it’s integrated into our jobs has really started to change. And as we think about it, you know, whether it’s the tools that we need to do our work, we need to make sure that they’re supporting our employees and allowing them to be the most productive that they can, so this accessibility again becomes more important. I think a great example kind of from the employees’ standpoint is thinking about onboarding. And so, if you go back many years ago, right? It was sort of this in-person session that you had and then all of us said, “Okay, that doesn’t really work.” We’re becoming broader. Our employees are more just dispersed, and so we really wanna be able to do this from a digital perspective.” And we started all these tools that you could do things online. We’re making even more interactive now, maybe that’s with gamification, maybe it’s with augmented reality or virtual reality. And as you start to add those components in it, this accessibility becomes even more important as we start to change those. So those are just a couple of thoughts I had.

    KIM: Yeah and, you know, kind of a follow-up with what Robin said, I mean — and I had to look this up — is that the web is like more than 25 years old now, right? So it’s not a novelty anymore, right? [chuckles] I mean, these apps and these things, they run our lives now. I mean, they keep us on track, they run our lives, and I think a lot of the generation that’s moving into the workforce has had this their entire life, which means their expectations are — everyone’s expectations at this point are really high on what features it has, how it delivers it, you know, things like that. I mean, it’s instrumental.

    ROBIN: There was a session first in CHRS that I attended, and one of the things that they talked about was digitally native, right? So as we think about this, this becomes even more and more important clearly with the years of years of experience although you can’t see me 100 years old. You know, that’s not sort of the generation I’m from, but I even find myself I had left my phone, which I know is crazy to think of, some at home one day. I wasn’t sure how to order a cup of coffee because I only order coffee off of the Starbucks app. [chuckles] I didn’t know how to check in for my flight because I only do that from an app. So as you start at Kim’s point to do this, it really starts to change how you think about things.

    BRIANA: Yeah, I love those points, and I’m gonna recap some of that for everybody, so that you have this in your takeaway materials, but like Robin and Kim were both talking about, there’s a huge population of digital natives and they and all of us together have higher expectations of what technology is supposed to do. It’s supposed to be there. It’s supposed to work all the time. No downtime. Kim, to your point, when this was new, we were kind of excited to have something new and it was very groundbreaking, and now it’s the norm and it’s just supposed to work and it’s supposed to be there.

    There’s also this influence of social media and you have to have a concern about your brand reputation. So what does it say about you, you know, if you’re not accessible, if you don’t have a way for all different types of people to be able to apply for your job or be successful when they get inside your company? And, you know, people are gonna to talk about that. If they have a bad experience, it’s gonna be very loud on the web. And younger generations, too, there’s this idea of generational differences where younger generations, they’ll speak up about things like that where maybe older generations were more go with the flow and do your job and keep your head down. I mean, that’s all changing as well. And then diversity now is not just about demographics and the numbers, it’s about how do you become as innovative as possible and how you create this culture of diverse thinking, so all of these things are shifting kind of as we speak.

    ROBIN: I think, too, just if I — if you kind of go back to one of the points that you made, just talk about, you know, a new generation and the expectations and the voice that they have. I think what’s interesting is it’s not necessary that the voice is coming to you and saying, “Hey, your site is not accessible to me. Here’s what it is.” They’re voting and they’re telling their friends through social media. So back to your point on social media, you combine those things that becomes very powerful for you as an organization either as a pro or a con as you look to go back to how are you recruiting, what are your customers saying about your business, you know, all those channels now that that starts to come from.

    BRIANA: Yeah, absolutely and just like you said about buying mattresses, I mean, this just wasn’t the way things were done a couple years ago and now it’s almost the only way that it is done is for people to share their experiences online.

    KIM: So, let’s talk about web accessibility, kind of what does it mean. So before we go with that, let’s take a step back and like why is the web important, why is all this technology important to us, and, you know, we have an unbelievable amount of information at our fingertips, right? You can — if I want to know about that, let me go search it — let me go Google it, right? And see what’s going on. You have the ability to stay connected. So, if you don’t live near your family, you don’t live near your friends, you now have the ability to almost feel like you’re in the same room having a conversation with them, right? So those — a lot of those barriers are gone and I think that’s one thing if we think about technology and we think about the web is it really removes barriers whether it be location barriers, physical barriers, and language barriers, right? It removes all of those, so we can start to have relationships and gain knowledge really across the world.

    So, if we think about what accessibility is? So, you got web accessibility on top of that and again it’s making sure those digital products are easily accessible to everyone. This is across the board whether it’s someone with a disability or possibly a person without a disability. Everyone needs the same experience. Everybody needs to be provided the same information. So, I think that’s one of the big, big things when you think about what accessibility, that you’re really striving for is I like to say it should be the same experience kind of period, right? A lot of times, accessibility can get confused with usability. So that’s one thing where accessibility is everyone should have access and have the same information and process available to them.

    Usability, it’s a little bit rougher. It’s more the — how do I explain this — it’s more of your satisfaction, right? So, let’s take word processing apps, right? As an example. There’s a million of them, right? You can go and you can pick the one. They all have basically the same goals, right? But you’re going to find one that works better for you that you like better, you know, maybe one crushes a lot looks not really going to work for us, right, or, you know, it could be anything. Usability is a little bit different because your preference really kind of drives that one a little bit more.

    So, how do we define accessibility? And this is really kind of the first line of really thinking about it is whether you are designing, developing, procuring, you know, whatever, you know, you’re doing here is you want to make sure that any mobile application, any digital media, any product can be used with assistive technology. So, this doesn’t mean you’re coding assistive technology, it just means that the application you’re procuring or you’re developing can be used by things like save screen readers or Braille encoders. So there’s a way that those are developed, so they can be easily used through those different technologies.

    ROBIN: Yeah. So as we think a little bit about this it starts to come in what are the laws that are in place and as a business, we think about, you know, first kind of what our customers, employees need and want, that’s sort of sits sort of in front of mine hopefully for you, but we can’t forget the law because it’s there and it’s part of what we do every day. For many of us in HR, as we think about accessibility and those things, I’m sure popping into your mind becomes ADA, Americans with Disability Act, and if we think about that, that act prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability and employment. So, as we think about this and as we think about people applying, what does that mean? And so this area becomes very gray and Kim’s gonna give us some more great information as we think about this and the guidelines today because, again, I think the legality of this is not as clear-cut as the ADA itself, but one thing here to highlight is the fact that it is — while it’s a guideline, we believe it’s becoming much along the way that people are thinking about GDPR, right?

    GDPR is not required in certain countries as it is in others, what does that look like, but we’re seeing it become more standard, more focused, and we start typically — we believe — that there will be more legislation around this and that there will be more constraint. So, how do we get in front of this? How do we get ahead of this without suddenly something saying, “Oh my gosh, I have 18 months to be in compliance with the law,” which for those of you who work in global companies and GDPR hit, right? We were all scrambling to figure out what does it mean, what do I need to do, what am I actually need to do in the letter of the law. And so as we think about this, how do you start to integrate that in and how do you start to think about that a little bit more from again sort of the guideline, not legal side? And so Kim is gonna give us some great history and I think some context as we think about those.

     KIM: Definitely, yeah. You know, if you think about the Workforce Rehabilitation Act of 1973, it wasn’t really until I think 1998 that they added the Section 508, which dealt with technology, right? And products and apps that are out there. It wasn’t, you know, I think it was way after 1973. I mean, and then if you think about 1998, that was a while ago, too. So, if we talk next about what are the guidelines, right? So, there’s laws and there’s guidelines. And the WCAG, which is a Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, it was first published 20 years ago and in the industry, it was kind of a global game changer because it took — it boiled it down a little bit to something that was really attainable and understandable. And the WCAG right now is on its third version and, as you said, it’s kind of the gold standard kind of internationally out there and it was a brain power of two organizations, the World Wide Web Consortium and the Web Accessibility Initiative, came together. And really these guidelines took — you know, we need to be accessible and it really boiled it down for really content developers — content creators, sorry — developers and testers to really understand what that means.

    So, they created four guidelines, the first one that we’ll talk about is perceivable. I’ll give some examples to speak out, so we can we have something to hold on to. So, the first one is perceivable, and this is really your most basic level. And we’ll talk about it in the form of a website because I think it’s gonna be easier because, you know, it could be across the board, we could be talking about anything. So, I’ll talk about the form of a website, and the users need to be able to identify what’s there and grasp the information that’s being presented to them. So that means, you know, if you’re a sighted user, you can read it and you can understand what’s being presented to you. If you’re a non-sighted user, then your website can be consumed completely by a screen reader, so it can be read out loud. And say you’re a person maybe with some color sensitivities, you want to make sure that the color contrast on your site, you know, matches some guidelines that the WCAG lays out for you. And if you’re like myself who has glasses, you can zoom in, right? On the text and read the text that’s in there without losing again context of, you know, what’s being implied, you know, what’s being delivered on this webpage.

    The second one is operable, which means you need to be able to use it, right? So if it really needs to be navigable by a mouse, you can use a mouse, right? Or your keyboard to be able to tab through it either way. If we think about loading a website, one of the things you want to make sure is that if you’ve got animations or media on there that those can be paused, stopped, restarted, any of those things, and then really another big one for operable is it needs to be forgiving of mistakes, so cancel buttons. If you click on a hyperlink, and you go, “Oh, I don’t really wanna go there,” you can drag off and you’re not actually going to navigate anywhere. So just kind of being a little bit more forgiving as people are operating the website.

    Understandable is the third and just because a website is perceivable and operable doesn’t mean as understandable, and that just means that on your site you want clear concise language directions, so people understand especially if the website has got form on it or an application you’re filling out, right? You really wanna make sure that you’ve got directions like how to fill it out, the logical flows make sense, right? First name, last name, e-mail, and you’re not kind of bouncing around all over the place and you really want good labels. And that kind of comes into play like as you’ve got screen readers and things like that that may be consuming your website, you really want to have that additional content for everyone.

    Robust is the last one and that one is more in the digital age, so we have a lot of choices, right? So, we just got a website, what browser are you going to use, right? We’ve got Chrome, we’ve got Safari, we’ve got Edge. As a user of your website, I should really be able to choose which one I wanna use and same goes with assistive technologies. There’s lots of options out there for different assistive technologies, and you really want your website to be consumable by most of them, so that people do have that choice as they’re going through it.

    BRIANA: Kim, as you went through those things, I mean, I started thinking about how many of those things are important. You know, you mentioned glasses, I probably should be wearing glasses most of the time, so the zoom feature, the ability of like, “Oh my gosh, I totally didn’t mean to hit that,” and kind of thing all becomes important as you kind of start to think about some of these things and as you start to look at those. How did you think about sort of the different situations in which sort of people would start to apply that?

    KIM: Yeah, so I think the first thing is really kind of an understanding, right? As you have people with different disabilities really starting to understand what those are and then what the products are that are out there that can assist them in their daily lives, right? And really kind of stepping into those shoes and kind of taking it from there.

    BRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s just it seems like it’s a lot and kind of overwhelming and I think this is a great way kind of breaking it down a bit as we look at some of these different types.

    KIM: Yeah, definitely. So, there are, you know, different types of disabilities that you really want to design for. So we’ll take — actually, before we take one as an example, one of the things I want to call out is that when you think about it, is there is — you can have a permanent disability, a temporary one or a situational one, so we’re gonna stick with our example of a website, right? Say you go the website, look one for a job, right? And it’s got an intro video in it, right? Background on the company, something like that. If we choose maybe auditory from this list, you know, a permanent disability could be someone who’s deaf, right? So in that case, they would need closed captions or transcript to be able to consume that video temporary, and I get this all the time, is an ear infection, right? Which is I can’t hear as well as I normally do, so I may want those captions or transcript, right? Situational could be, I’ve started this process maybe on the subway and it’s really loud and I can’t hear, so I’m again going to want that additional content with subtitles and things like that to get me through that video. So as always, you know, I think that’s kind of a big callout is that it’s not there’s multiple levels, right? And then as you can see here, we’ve got visual and physical speech that all, you know, kind of play a part and in different ways you need to design for.

    BRIANA: And I think that goes back to your point about designing for everyone. I mean, while this came about because we wanted to be accessible to people with disabilities, this is really about being accessible to everyone like you said. I love, too, that you just talked about the different ways that comes in, you know, whether that permanent, temporary, or situational because I think the impact of that is it’s different to each person, but really to the person who’s sitting there, it’s the most important thing now, right? So, if I’ve gone to your point, if I’m on the subway and I’ve got a long commute, right? And I’m using that to apply and look for jobs or do those other things, if my experience is inhibited by that, that time constraint that I have becomes really important to that. So it’s great to think about the fact that again we probably when, you know, this first came up, I was thinking more of the permanent things and I love how you kind of brought in the temporary and the situational as well to think about the fact of where we are at that point.

    KIM: Absolutely.

    ROBIN: So, if we look at this next slide, I mean this, was a staggering statistic as we thought about this. One in five people has a disability that affects their use of the web. And again, I think as we think about this, this is more permanent, so if you get it, if you add in this situational, this starts to blow up even more. And if you think about the power of that, that means 20% of the population on a regular basis may not be buying your products because there’s something that’s inhibiting them to do that. They may not be learning more about your company or applying for jobs, and I think, you know, as we think about this and as I think about organizations that I’ve worked with or, you know, different friends of mine as we’ve talked about this, you know, it’s just got to be interesting. I’ve got to put a video. I’ve got to do all these other things, but I don’t know that we’ve always thought about — because we think reading something can sometimes be cumbersome. We’re boring, but we don’t really think about, well, how do we make those accommodations?

    But when we put it in terms of now I’m losing 20% revenue, 20% of our buying, that’s a chunk of revenue that could be there maybe 20%, but it would be some portion of my revenue is going out the door, it is 20% of my customer base, that’s going to impact potentially my Net Promoter Score. And then if you think about your population side of that again, we’re all struggling to find people to fill the jobs that we have and imagine how I’ve just excluded a percentage of those people as well just — I don’t know, again, when we were going through this and saw that number, it was staggering to me that it was that large.

    So, as we think about web accessibility, I think the other thing that really should come in mind in particularly when we tie this back to diversity inclusion is, are we creating an inclusive mindset? So, as we as an organization go out and do things, how do we really think about inclusion? And again, this is one of those topics that we probably have a whole sidebar on of what is inclusion, but I think today, as we think about expanding that, I mean, it certainly stacks from our gender and ethnicity and age, right? Or some of the typical things, but thinking about inclusion from a disability standpoint. And again, as Kim pointed out, which I think is really powerful, disability not just in the permanent context, but how do we think about it in the temporary and the situational context as well I think add to that diversity of thought.

    So, again, as people become more inclusive in how they think, which should be different, this can also impact. So again perhaps — I was talking to a friend of mine and I’d had a bad customer experience and I’ve shared it with her and I didn’t really think anything about it at this place and we were — I mean, it was probably six months later and we were talking about something. My assumption was, she was still buying from this place and I said something like, “Oh, don’t you go here.” And she said, “No, your story made me so upset, I don’t buy there anymore.”

    So, think about the fact that now if I’ve got a friend, she can’t utilize something and they share that it’s not just that 20%. That inclusive environment has grown and now I’ve grown and decided, well, I’m not going to use that website either because it doesn’t suit my friend, so what’s the next thing? Who else is it not including? So, I think it’s really important as we think about that, as we think about our organizations. Additionally, you know, Briana, when she kicked us off, talked about the impact on there, and again study after study shows that being inclusive is better for our business, it’s better for our shareholders, it’s a better return for them, it’s better engagement for both our employees and better customer satisfaction, you know, as we go on. So, all of that becomes very important as we think about this and again this number of impact.

    KIM: So, some things to avoid I think when designing for accessibility, so it needs to be designing or even purchasing, you know, procurement. You guys out there really looking for vendors to help you with this is one of the — some of the big items and these are some of the things that the WCAG lines out for you, right? This is why I think a lot of developers and testers and people in the IT field really like the guidelines because they actually give you things to hold on to, right? So, one of the things is, you know, avoid flashing images or text. And if you need to put text on your website, well, just put text, don’t put an image of text because if you think about, again myself with my glasses, right? And me having to zoom in on that page if it’s an image of text, it can distort, right? The higher you get in magnification.

    Another one that was just kind of called out in those guidelines is, you know, background music or sounds may be try to avoid them if you have folks who are using a screen reader then they’ve got sounds that start with the website loads as well as a narration from the screen reader, which can be overwhelming or confusing. And then scrolling text unless there’s a way to stop it because, again, everyone kind of reads at different rates, could consume a webpage at different rates, so, you know, let them do the scrolling and get what they need to do. And then the big one is color, so color by itself is usually kind of never a good thing. So, if we take an example is filling out our application online is I forget to fill in my last name or my e-mail address, something that’s required. You know, today we always see it like highlight’s red, you know, you can fill it, but if you’ve got some color sensitivities, you may not see the outline in red so it’s always good to use maybe a symbol and a color, so that if say I had a color sensitivity, I may not see that it’s red, but I may see that exclamation point that’s there, I forgot my e-mail again, right? So, let me go put that in and then I’ll continue on my way.

    So, that’s one of the good things and you haven’t read the WCAG. It’s all posted online. It’s great resource to have real-world examples where you take these high levels of, “Okay, I need my product or my application to be accessible,” and, you know, now I’m starting to understand some of the different ways, but what does it actually do? [chuckles] If you’re working with a vendor like what questions really should I ask them as I go through this process or as, you know, maybe a product owner, what do I have to start talking to my development team about, like what are the things we have to start thinking about, and that gives you a really good framework to get started, and it gives you the answers as you go through it, so it’s even better.

    BRIANA: I loved that example that you used about filling out an application and the color but also the symbol because as, you know, as you start to think about this, you start to think about is the interest, right? It starts to say, “Is this making my website no longer interesting,” right? “Is it boring?” But I think like thinking about these things in combination really drives that interest. Is that something you’ve seen as you kind of gone and worked through this?

    KIM: Absolutely. I think accessibility and usability kind of walk really close together, right? Which is why the lines can get blurry a little bit, but with that same example you’re going through, you know we’ve all done this where you filling out this huge thing, right? And then it’s like you try and hit next and it’s like something’s wrong and you’re like, “I don’t know what it is. It’s not calling it out to me. ” So, you’re gonna scroll back to everything you’ve filled out and it’s like, “Okay, let me go to — maybe it was the line ‘title’ or maybe it was, who knows?” And that’s why it’s so important to make things, easy, right? Accessible for everyone and easy to get through because if not, then you’re gonna start to see people drop off and say, “Yeah, you know, okay, I’ll just try the next one,” And that’s where you can start to see kind of some drop down to your point where if it’s not easy and it’s not accessible, you’re not going to get kind of those large volume of candidates in your process.

    BRIANA: Right. I think outlining some of these guidelines is really helpful because while we may not have a lot of software designers or developers on the call, I mean, I imagine you guys are designing experiences for your candidates, for your employees, and that does fall in your realm. And so these are the types of things that you have to be aware of and thinking about, so that when things aren’t designed, you’re able to kind of check for XY and Z and just make sure that it’s accessible to the most amount of people possible.

    ROBIN: I think it just goes back, too, as we think about like organizations and changes we’re updating things. Certainly, I’ve seen in working in large organizations, the more collective brief that you start to bring together, right? So, if you think about this, if someone’s doing something from a website even if it’s a customer perspective, right? Great to have maybe somebody from the HR team who’d part of that just sort of have this lens to it, right? Your communications team is gonna have a different lens or marketing team, your IT team. So, imagine if you kind of holistically think about this, you’ve got not only the interest that you’re trying to create, but also how do you make it most accessible for everybody and sort of bringing those groups together? It’s a great learning experience I think as you go through these things and particularly when they’re new, right? Because appreciative of, you know, the WCGA and being able that, but like probably the density of some of that stuff, how do you get different people to be able to go through and really take components of that and bring through and kind of like learning along the way.

    KIM: Absolutely.

    BRIANA: So, thinking about what needs to be accessible, a good place to start is to think about what’s most critical to your business. So again, we’ve talked about a lot of things and we’ve got a huge list here. These are all pretty HR centric as we think about it, and that’s probably a lot of you who are on the phone, but really thinking about it and again thinking about being, for those of you who are HR business partners, how do you become a great business partner?

    Well, it’s to think about what are those things that are impacting the business. So, is it that really if we think about it, the place that we’ve got most people landing our customers employees and I’ll use Kim’s example of the website, that might be a place to start because you’ve got this coming together of two different groups. And so one of the things too is it helps lend a voice to HR when you go and partner whether that’s your marketing team or your sales team or whoever is really focused on your customer to say, “Hey, here’s some things we’re thinking about from an employee experience. How might these be impacting you as you think about driving customers to our website and so how do we bring that?” That may not be the right thing, but again I think about what’s the most — what is gonna have the most impact on your business because that’s gonna give you the most voice as you think about it. And again, I think it comes back to this great partnership between HR and other organizations. And so how do we kind of still play in our lanes if you will, but also bring through this community and thinking about the business and, you know, I think still so often I hear HR people say, “Hey, how do I have a voice in the business?” Well, here’s a way to think about it and think about what’s important to your organization.

    And you’re gonna go through — you’re gonna create a whole list, right? And so then how do you prioritize what those things are and again not doing that in a vacuum is probably a great exercise, I think [clears throat]. The other thing is you go through the priority piece of this is thinking about maybe considering designating someone as a champion. Who’s the champion, right? You certainly need an executive sponsor, but who’s the person from the day-to-day perspective that’s going to do that? And do you have someone in your organization who’s impacted by some of these things and do they help challenge or help champion through that in general, right? We talked about development all the time. This is one of the great projects that becomes a development assignment. I don’t know, Kim. You kind of got this assigned to you. Do you feel developed after having gone through it?

    KIM: I do. I feel like, you know, you learn a lot, but like the learning never stops, right? So, there was something new like what we’re talking about the other day like, you know, listening to another podcast again, right? Because, you know, the other one has been released like you’re always kind of growing. And I think that’s where a champion or multiple champions really within your organization can really play a huge part is because they can start kind of spreading that education, right? Because a lot of folks, you know, good or bad, they may not be thinking about it. We talked a lot about websites and apps and, you know, things you may be building or procuring, but there’s other things out there too like the PowerPoint I just created or the marketing materials I’m about to distribute, like accessibility drops even those that are so digital artifacts, but, you know, they dropped down lower in really all aspects of the business so having folks there to kind of guide that education through the rest of the organization and bring it to the forefront of everyone. So, as they’re starting to make decisions or start projects, accessibility is really one of the things that always gets talked about. It’s not an after, it doesn’t come at the end, you really wanna weave it into the beginning and throughout the whole process.

    ROBIN: Kim, you kind of talked about some of those things just thinking about when you said PowerPoint in thinking about where to start, right? What a great and sort of simple way to start the conversation. What does that look like, you know, and I think we’ve all been in those meetings where one of two things happen, right? It looks beautiful, but no one can read the font that’s on there from the back of the room, so everyone starts walking the front. Or the font size, right? Because we’ve decided to put every piece of content on there so how are we looking at that and start. It’s just a really simple way to start to think about that as an organization.

    KIM: Yeah, absolutely.

    BRIANA: Yeah. This is a question that came up as we were preparing for this webinar, which is well if everything needs to be accessible, everything your candidates and your employees will ever touch in your organization, it becomes really massive and really overwhelming. And I think the takeaway here is that baby steps are good. Baby steps are better than nothing, so as long as you’re going in the right direction, you’re on the right track.

    KIM: Yeah.

    ROBIN: So, the cost of not being accessible, I mean, we’ve got several things up here and as you can see from this slide and the conversation, this cost really impacts your organization financially. So again, if I think about this, if I’m not getting customers driving towards my products or things like that, then that’s a financial component. It’s also a financial component to not filling your jobs, right? If we think about this in the critical jobs, if you can’t, for example, in a manufacturing environment, if you’re not filling jobs, you may not be running a line, which means you may not be up to full production. If you’re not up to full production, then that’s kind of revenue impact, right? So that cost — and we talk, you know, constantly in HR — the cost of not filling a job and what does that look like. And so, I think that becomes important to you. So, how do you maximize your revenue from a brand perspective. Again, that’s to our customers, it’s to our employees, it’s to our candidates and really thinking about that accessibility although not overtly with a big flashing sign that says, “I care, it shows you care,” right? Because you’re thinking about how easy — really what you think about, “How easy was this to you?” “Gosh, that application process was really simple. I didn’t have to go back. I’m looking for a job. I’ve applied for 15 jobs today and really this one was very easy.” If I get 15 calls, how am I gonna prioritize that, right? What does that look like? What does that think about as you look at it?

    And I think, you know, still thinking about the whole, you know, kind of whole as you think about the brand, that leads into your culture though, right? And so, is that that divisive, that part about being an inclusive culture are you creating belonging and again, that culture is internally with your organization, but it’s also do you create a culture of belonging where your customers feel like they belong, right? This need to kind of create experiences both for our employees and our customers and we want belonging as we go through that experience and we come there and candidates. I mean, I think the greatest thing is to have candidates walk away and say, “I’m really disappointed. I didn’t get that job, but man, that’s a great company. I’m gonna go tell somebody else,” and have that good story. I talked about my story of saying too, and again, I didn’t post this on social media, I just said to a friend why I’m not doing business with this company anymore and that was a choice she made. Imagine if my anger had hit the point of, “I’m going to type this on social media, what does that do?” So again, how do you kind of create that piece of it.

    And again, then from a legal perspective and again today while there are some legal components to this as we think about ADA, I think we see more of this coming and so how do you kind of just sort of knock that out of the picture. I’m really focused again. If think about growing your organization and what’s important, you know, really we want to focus more on culture, brand, and financial. Those become sort of more interesting components than to have to kind of think about what is it that I have to do from a legal perspective.

    BRIANA: Yeah. And I really like that you brought culture into the conversation because it’s the showpiece. You know, you can talk all day about diversity being important to your company but this is really one way to show, to prove that you’re putting in some effort there.

    KIM: Absolutely. I think as people are looking for new opportunities and take us back to hiring, right? It’s the good stories that really kind of will engage other people to be like, “Hey, you know, I work for this company and this is what our culture is like,” and, “Hey, we have these open positions,” or even down to, “I like this job. I may not have gotten the job, but it was an amazing experience going through the application process, the interview process, and getting to know folks and kind of having nice cohesive process.” And then saying, “I didn’t get the job, but hey go check them out,” right? And even though you didn’t get it, you’re still kind of sending that good story along. We’ve all gotten bad stories, but to keep sending those good stories.

    ROBIN: And I think to that point, I mean, I think if we think about from a talent acquisition perspective, right? We still kind of think and, I mean, I use the example of going on and applying for jobs. I think really for a lot of us, we’re struggling to get people to apply for our jobs. So, what are those barriers when you finally go out and if you think about if you are in the recruiting field or even if you know someone is. I’ve gone out. I’ve worked really hard. I’ve spent my time cultivating a relationship with Kim to get her interested in my organization because that’s the person I really want and then I say to her, “Great, we’re so excited to have you, you know, that you are considering us. If you don’t mind just filling out this application or doing something, going to our website and checking this out.” If she goes to that after all of that effort and now, she’s not able to access it in a way that feels good, she’s looking for reasons to screen me out. I’m looking for reasons to screen her in, and so how do we really make sure again those passive candidates and become really interested in us and sort of see the value in that.

    BRIANA: So, I’d love for everyone on the call to take a moment to type in any questions that you have. And while you’re thinking about what you’d want to ask of Robin and Kim, this is a question, you know, that I had, which is how do you measure accessibility or how do you even find out how well you’re doing because this is a journey. How do you know where you are in the journey?

    KIM: I think the big callout again this is a journey. It doesn’t happen overnight and it doesn’t stop either. It’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m completely accessible, now,’ right? Because our process changes. Our applications that we’re using as part of the process change, things like that. So it’s super ongoing, so I think kind of measuring it in small pieces and really kind of looking for as, say you’re starting your project, right? And again, “Rebecca, oh my gosh, where do I start?” Right? Pick the ones that have the most impact, right? So if you think about your hiring process, then maybe it is the application portion of it that’s a place to start because then you get folks through the door, but then also measuring it to make sure how’s my whole journey, right? From I step through the application process to the end to the interviews, the acceptance letters hopefully, right? And then even into everyday life at work, it really started as, you know, putting a nice Candyland roadmap up there for yourself, you know, as a way to envision it and, you know, and step your way through and start kind of, you know, checking off areas that you’ve really had a chance to address.

    ROBIN: I think — I mean, think about it. You’ve got your employees, you’ve got your customers, why not start asking for some feedback, right? If you’re making these small changes, going back to those people that, you know, that are being impacted, what are they saying? What’s the feedback that’s coming back to you, if we think about, you know, again, I’ll kind of stick with since you started with the website journey, let’s just continue on, right? You’ve got measures on metrics that you’d look at for click-through and things like that, is that increasing? Is it staying the same? Is it decreasing, right? There may be other factors. It’s not a sole one, but it’s certainly an influencer as you think about some of those things and what’s looking particularly if you’ve gone through and tried to do all this work and suddenly if you’re not seeing the same traction, what’s happened along the way is probably a question to ask yourself. But again, really using those channels that you have as you go through and I think it’s great, you know, some organizations have employee resource groups and so you might have one of them in particular. Think about this might be something they’re passionate about. Again, thinking about ways how do you make this interesting? Well, how do you engage other people? How do you connect? How do you again look for different ways around development opportunities for people to think about that could be a great one?

    KIM: And then there’s also vendors out that that will go in and help you start this process, help you though this process right there. Their lives are their accessibility, right? You can go in and take a look at your application, take a look at the website that you have and they can start to say, “Hey, here are the places you’re doing great,” right? “And keep doing these things, but here are some things that you need to address.” And they really kind of guide you through that process and those companies are out there and they’re great because they really help you if you don’t know where to start and you need someone to help walk you through the process. They get you up, they get you educated, and they will get you moving on your journey.

    BRIANA: And I really like what you said about you’re never really done. I mean, just thinking about some of the disabilities we talked about and the temporary situations and the permanent situations, I mean, it starts with kind of widening your perspective because a lot of this is invisible to someone that doesn’t have that sort of challenge. You’re not seeing it. You’re gonna make some accessibility changes, enhancements, and your website’s probably not gonna look any different. And this is where you really engage people, groups, even get feedback on how well you’re doing because it may not be obvious and you’re not really gonna get to an end that says we’re 100%, we did a great job, now we can move on to something else, right?

    [pause]

    I wanted to quickly go through some of the questions that are asked of us because I think this is really helpful as you think about engaging with your own partner or your own vendor partners because there’s no clear-cut, you know, “I am X percent accessible. I’ve done a great job. I’m certified in something.” You have to find another way to give that information. So I just threw up a couple questions that we get asked: What have you done towards accessibility? Can you show me your progress? And what are you working on? So I just wanted to share that with everybody so that you have starting point for some of the questions that you can ask of your own vendors.

    ROBIN: I think that’s important, right? That you’re asking those questions and really understanding where this fits into the vendor perspective, right? As you’re going through it, just, I mean, for those of you who are in the land of RFPs and doing these. I know there’s probably already a lot of questions that you’re sorting through and kind of consolidate, but this becomes really important I think as we think about that.

    KIM: Yeah, it does, and it goes back to the journey because if you’ve got vendors, you’re doing a vendor selection, right? And you ask those questions on everyone. I think what’s most important is that you’re finding the vendors no matter where they are on their journey, they’re on that journey, right? And they’ve started it so — you know, and then they’ll, you know, they won’t stop there, right? So, they’ll talk where they are, what they’ve done so far, and maybe what’s coming next because again it doesn’t end, right? So, making sure your vendors are out there or people you are selecting to kind of help you work you through are kind of just as passionate about its accessibility as you are.

    BRIANA: Yeah. It looks like we’ve got a couple questions coming in, so get those questions in. I want to quickly share a client story of ours because accessibility is very focused on making sure that the technology you’re using doesn’t create barriers to candidates or employees in your company, I think it’s also important to talk about how technology can improve diversity beyond being accessible or WCAG compliant. So, you have this this goal that you want to be at it’s kind of threshold for making sure that people have access, but then is there a world beyond that where you can, not just people access, but actually really improve some of those numbers?

    So, here’s a great example from a client of ours. They’re a really large BPO that provides customer engagement services to some of the biggest retail, financial services, healthcare, and tech brands in the world. They started using our pre-hire assessment in their call centers to help identify and fast-track top talent in their applicant pool, and they saw improvements in quality of hire, which is what they expected, but the coolest part was that they also saw an increase in diversity. My favorite stat from their data before implementing our assessment, 20% of the company’s hires were African American and a year later, African American hires had increased to 35%. During that year, our assessment helped them hire teams or helped their hiring teams at more factors like race that aren’t related to job success and instead see an objective, apples to apples view of each candidate. What I really love about the story is that it didn’t take a big expensive multi-year initiative to achieve greater diversity. It was just an objective piece of software that they implemented in their hiring process.

    So, I just wanted to share that story so that everyone can think about, you know, the other ways to improve diversity after you start or continue to move through your accessibility journey.

    ROBIN: I think if we tie that kind of story back to accessibility and you think about this there’s sort of these, you know, probably perhaps, right? There’s some unconscious bias that sort of gets eliminated as you go through this process and I think that’s sort of the same thing as we think about accessibility. So, if I’m interested in your organization, if we’ve gone this way and I’ll go back to the part of where Kim and I’ve been having this conversation and I’m trying to get her to come to my organization and she’s kind of now starting to become a little bit in, if she’s now got to come to me and say, “Hey, this is great, but I can’t access your website or I can’t follow through application. I’ve got some of these things.” And again, those are things that maybe I would not have known about her. Do those things start to come in and become a bit of unconscious bias is what you start to worry about from that perspective. And so being able to have some data and tools that allow you to kind of eliminate that or to be able to have the right setup really helps as you kind of start to go through it sort of like kind of this story, well not kind of around accessibility can certainly go back to the topic of today, too.

    BRIANA: Yeah. Sol I’ve got a question here. When using apps like Facebook, Snapchat, and Tik-Tok to recruit Millennials, how can we make sure we’re being accessible friendly?

    KIM: So, I think most on Facebook, all those guys, they’re well on their way on their accessibility journey, I assumed, right? They’re large enough so really just kind of — there’s a couple things you can do. There are tools out there where you can say load up Facebook and take a look at it and it looks at it real quick and says, “Oh, you know, these things are done well. You know, these things may not be done well.” There’s things you can do yourself, you know, say “We’ll just keep talking about Facebook,” right? But on Facebook, you load it up on the mobile app on your mobile phones. All your mobile phones have those screen readers on them and you can actually just turn this screen reader on and let it read through the page and you just kind of step back and listen, right? A lot of times, I have to turn away. I have to turn away from what I’m looking at and just listen, It doesn’t make sense if someone navigate through it. Sol there’s something you can do it yourself to kind of take a look at it, but really reach out to these companies. A lot of them will blog their way through these journeys as well so other folks can learn from them, but reach out, talk about it, start those conversations because those are the conversations you really want to get started.

    ROBIN: So, is it fair then to say as you’re going through and buying these tools to utilize for, right? Because there’s all some costs to some of this usually, but that you could ask your sales rep or whoever, “Please talk to us about your accessibility journey.”

    KIM: Absolutely.

    BRIANA: I think that’s really helpful and that goes back to your Candyland journey a little bit, which some of this is just walking through it yourself, right? And I think we talked about that a lot in terms of candidate experience but really through the lens of accessibility kind of brings new life to it.

    We’re right at time and I wanted to let everybody know that I chatted in the SHRM activity ID so that you can use that code to go get your professional development credit. Any last thoughts from you Kim and Robin? Maybe like a 20-second takeaway for everyone on the call today.

    KIM: Okay, I’ll go first. I think it’s a lot of people were just at the beginning of their journey, right? Sol the first thing is don’t get overwhelmed. There’s a lot of resources out there. There’s a lot of folks who have already started their journeys and they love to talk about it like we do here. And sol don’t hesitate to reach out for help. Don’t be afraid to get started and just remember, small changes every day are going to lead up to these big changes and these big improvements to ensure that your process is more inclusive. So just it’s kind of one of those things that just start and just keep going on that journey.

    ROBIN: I was gonna say be patient, I think on that, and then use the community that you’ve got available to you. So again, I mean, thinking about your organization, your customers, those friends that you have, how do you help include them in the process to really provide you that feedback is as a way I’d say thinking about it.

    BRIANA: Yeah. Thank you so much, Robin. Thank you, Kim. This was really helpful. I hope everybody on the call got a lot of value out of our discussion today. I hope to see everyone back next month for the future work webinar series. Thank you.

  4. Seeing Clearly in 20/20: What’s Ahead for the Future of Work

    Our panel of HR Tech innovators – each a founder of a successful HR technology company – tackles 4 big disruptors shaking the workforce today. We talk about jobs going to automation, the skills gap, how to become more agile in HR, and what candidates & employees are saying about AI. Listen in for tips on how to navigate these disruptors in 2020!


    Webinar Transcription

    Webinar host: Briana Harper
    Panelists:

    • President and CEO – Greg Moran
    • Chief Strategy Officer – Imo Udom
    • Director of Product – Adam Thompson

    BRIANA: So, thank you for joining us today for a webinar, “Seeing Clearly in 20/20, What’s Ahead for the Future of Work.” I’m really excited about today’s presentation because I have three HR tech thought leaders on the call with me. Those are the voices you heard during our trivia game. We’re gonna to talk about four major disruptors that are shifting the workforce as we speak and provide some tips on how to navigate as we move into the new year.

    Again, I’d like to say thank you for being here. I know you could be doing a hundred other things right now and you’re here with us, so I really appreciate it. I hope we can provide you with a chance to think, reflect, and plan ahead in spite of it being a really hectic time of year.

    My name is Briana Harper, and I’m your webinar host. I’m also your resource for any questions you have about today’s topic. I’ll be taking questions throughout the presentation, so feel free to chat in any time during our panel discussion.

    So, here are the thought leaders on our panel today. In fact, I’m calling this our founders’ panel because each of these gentlemen has founded a successful company — or multiple companies — in the HR tech space. One of the great things about working at Outmatch is we tend to collect really innovative people like this who, on multiple occasions, have seen opportunities to market and then build creative and workable solutions from the ground up. These guys have blazed trails in HR tech and because they’re so deeply rooted in this space, they are perfectly positioned to talk about workforce disruptors and the future work with us today. Let me quickly introduce each one of them.

    Greg Moran is the President and CEO of Outmatch. Before Outmatch, Greg founded a company called Chequed.com where he built a software platform for automated reference checking and assessments. In 2015, Chequed merged with a company called Assess Systems, and that’s when Outmatch was officially born. Greg also founded two other companies, PeopleAnswers and Pinnacle Technology Solutions, and he’s a consultant, author, and speaker.

    BRIANA: Awesome. Okay. Next in our panel is Imo Udom. He’s our Chief Strategy Officer. Right about the time that Chequed and Assess Systems merged to create Outmatch, Imo was founding a company called Wepow where he continued work on the video interview platform he began back in 2008. Imo joined us a year ago when Outmatch acquired Wepow, and his team is hard at work building video interviewing onto Outmatch’s talent intelligence platform. Imo’s earlier companies include Ovia and Inovaz.

    Hi, Imo.

    IMO: Hello, everybody. Looking forward to sharing again.

    BRIANA: Awesome, thank you.

    And then we have Adam Thompson. He’s the Director of Product at Outmatch. Before Outmatch, and for most of his adult life, Adam lived in Thailand where he founded a company called Thompson Bridge. At Thompson Bridge, Adam created a technology called Eureka, which uses machine learning and natural language processing to match candidates with companies. Outmatch acquired the IP for this technology earlier in the year and brought Adam on board as well.

    Hi, Adam.

    ADAM: Hi, and if there’s anybody Thai, sawadee-khap.

    BRIANA: [Laughs] Thank you all three of you for being here today. I’m really excited about the conversation that we’re gonna have.

    So, before we dive into our panel discussion, I’d like to give you a sneak peek at some of the other topics we’re going to cover in our future work webinar series. Next month, we’ll look at how to create feedback loops from pre to post hire, so you can better understand if you’re hiring the best possible people for your business. Then in February, we have a special Valentine’s edition on how to give candidates more love in the hiring process, and finally in March, we’ll show you how analytics can help you understand team dynamics and strengthen your internal mobility initiatives.

    You can find all of our upcoming webinars at outmatch.com/webinars. You can also watch any of our past webinars on demand on our YouTube channel. Each presentation as well as today’s presentation is valid for one professional development credit for the SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP. I’ll chat in that activity ID at the end of the webinar, so just look for that note from me.

    Okay, and a quick overview of the topics we’re gonna cover in our discussion today, we’ll also save some time at the end for Q&A with our panelists, but feel free to chat in any time with your questions and we’ll just take those on as they come in.

    So, we’re gonna look at jobs likely going to automation, the skills gap and what to do about it, the difference between ‘doing agile’ and ‘being agile’, and then AI in HR tech — what candidates and employees are saying.

    So now you’ve seen the topics on our agenda, I’d like to know which of them is your highest priority or your top concern for 2020. So, let’s just do a quick poll and then I’ll hand it over to our panelists.

    I’m gonna open this poll up to the audience, and then you guys can go ahead and start answering.

    All right. I’m seeing lots of answers come in, and I will share this poll with everybody as soon as I close it out, but right now I’m seeing a lot of votes for the skills gap, that looks like the highest priority for most of you on the call today.

    All right. I’ll go ahead and close that out and share the answers with everyone.

    Okay, so as you can see it looks like 50% of you are most concerned about the skills gap, so that’s really helpful just to let us know, you know, how we wanna focus our conversation today.

    GREG: Yeah, I — I mean, I don’t know about Adam or Imo. I don’t — not too surprising, right? For the conversations that we have, you know, with organizations around skills gap, we’re really trying to get multiple ways to kinda look at skills gap, right? And, you know, we really think about skills in two different ways, one is really a concept of, you know, that we refer to as enduring skills and, you know, they’re really, you know, around traditional hard skills, right? Hard skills being — hard skills really being around, you know, technology and, you know, you need. I don’t have enough people that can actually code in Ruby on Rails or, you know, whatever that is, right? And enduring skills really being more, you know, things that we would have considered more competencies, right? How do I — how do I get people that are more creative? How do I get people that are more innovative? You know, just a huge topic as we, you know, in an area where we have a labor market with, you know, 3.5% unemployment or something like that, you know, these days.

    I mean, I remember earlier in my career when we used to think of full employment at around 4%. So, you know, today, we’re at 3.5%, it just keeps going lower and lower, right? You have to figure out a way to get more from the talent that we already have and that skills gap becomes a huge thing. So, I think, no surprise that that’s where, you know, most of our audience is. The one that — the one that actually is surprising to me and, I think, my guess is if we look at this maybe a year or two years from now, option A about jobs going to automation will actually become pretty large — will continue to become something that we’re thinking more and more and more about. We’re talking about it, we’re hearing about it today, but it hasn’t been in mass yet, it hasn’t affected those roles that maybe are around most of the people on this call today, right?

    When we start to see financial roles or we start to see sales roles or more we’ve really considered to be more professional roles really starting to get automated, I think this is gonna very quickly rise from, you know, what I think was the lowest rank in there to probably the highest rank pretty quickly, but I think we’re probably a year or two ahead of that. I don’t know what Imo or Adam think about that, but …

    IMO: Yeah, absolutely, Greg, and I think those things are tied as automation starts really pervading jobs and roles that traditionally have been done by humans. What tends to happen is that the skills and the knowledge and the information that we, as knowledge workers need to have, is gonna adapt and change as well. So, we’ll see those things going hand-in-hand the importance of enduring skills that help you work in a world where repetitive tasks are being done by automation, right?

    ADAM: I agree largely. I think jobs going to automation is definitely going to be a big topic in the years to come. It’s no longer a question of if that’s gonna happen, it’s just — it’s a win now, but I think we should also be thinking about what jobs are gonna be augmented or changed because of automation, not necessarily, you know, they’re not gonna go away like radiologists are not gonna go away, but that’s probably gonna be one of the positions that are highly augmented by AI. And then there’s gonna be a whole list of jobs that are created that we, you know, gonna find it difficult to predict what those might be today, and all of that ties back to skills gap.

    BRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. That’s really good insight. I think it’s a perfect segue into our first topic here, which is all about jobs likely going to automation, and it’s no secret that jobs have always evolved and changed with technological advancement, but I think what we’re seeing now is such a rapid rate of change that people are really starting to be concerned about job loss and future proofing their workforce.

    So, I’ve got a question here that I wanna throw out to the panel: “How do you view automations impact on the workforce?” And, Adam, I think I’ll throw this one to you. I know you were just talking about this, but is there anything that you wanna add here?

    ADAM: Well, I would just say let’s — I would not underestimate how big the impact is gonna be. I mean, we’re really at the start of a new industrial revolution. It’s already being coined to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and that’s really AI and Big Data. If you look back at what our last industrial revolution was, it’s really the start of computers in the information age. Think of how much that changed the way that people went from working on assembly lines to everybody now, you can’t live your life without a computer. It’s a monumental shift in the way that we live, the way that we work. A lot of jobs, of course, were destroyed that don’t, you know, no longer existed after the computer age kinda came in, but it also created hundreds and hundreds of new types of jobs.

    So, I would say, first of all, the impact is gonna be enormous and we’re at the very, very beginnings of it, and I would just again kind of overemphasize we should be thinking of some jobs are gonna be augmented, some are gonna be completely disrupted, and some are gonna be created by this. So, there’s my — that’s how I would start this conversation.

    GREG: Yeah. If you look at, you know, just depending on whose data you believe, right? Anywhere from work for — you know, from World Economic Forum to a lot of the Deloitte’s and McKinsey’s and PwC, I think, have all done some work around this topic. You know, you’ll see numbers that range from somewhere between 5 million on the low end to about 20 million to 30 million on the high end of jobs being automated over the next, you know, five years, seven years, 10 years.

    There are today, if you just look at the US alone, and I know we’ve got people on this call from all over the world, but if you just look at the US alone, right? There are about a hundred million-ish workers in the United States today, right? In the US labor market. If you start to think about that five, 10, 20 million, that level of disruption is like nothing we’ve ever seen before, right? So, what does that mean for an organization, right? And how do you start to — how do you start to — you know, I don’t know that I would say how do you prepare yourself because I don’t know how you — I have no idea how you do that, but how do you start to think about that, right? Well, it means that the people that we have in our organization today, if they’re in siloed fields that become — that are going to become targets for automation and, you know, I hate to say this, it’s probably, I mean, everybody on this call today including probably the four of us, right? I mean, are all — the way that we need to think about our careers going forward is really fundamentally different, and that’s why that concept of enduring skills, I think, becomes a really important thing, right?

    How do we start to prepare ourselves and, therefore, how do we start to prepare an organization? Well, you do that by trying to expand that skill set beyond somebody who can, you know, work with spreadsheets, beyond somebody who can — my son about a year ago broke his leg skiing and the x-ray was done — there was an x-ray and there was an MRI, both of them were analyzed by somebody, I have no idea where they were. They were not — they were not anywhere in the hospital that we were in or anything like that, right?

    So, you start to see, like, I mean, that was just that kind of that really early wake-up call. Well, when you start to look at siloed professions where really is about your ability to process work, that will be where the biggest impact is felt. So, how do you start to enhance those enduring skills? How do you start to enhance around innovation? How do you start to optimize around creativity? How do you start to optimize around those things that truly are enduring and they truly are gonna drive an organization forward? Because those are not areas that, you know, automation, that those type of skills are always going gonna be required. And I think for an HR professional standpoint, it’s really incumbent about educating our workforce is that these are the things you need to be thinking about, right? And how do you start to enhance your career both for ourselves individually and our organizations broadly.

    ADAM: Yeah, it’s interesting. I saw a theme in the skill sets of the jobs that are most likely more safe than others when it comes to automation, and it has to do with jobs that require a lot of empathy, so really relating well with people, jobs like, you know, therapists or graphic designers, even nurses rank really high in that — on that, also jobs that have a lot to do with creativity or critical thinking. So when you’re not — you’re not facing the same type of problem over and over again, but you’re facing different types of situations on a regular basis, and it requires high critical thinking skills, those were the three top skill sets that are really enduring skills that would lead you to become a little bit more safe in the future.

    IMO: And if we think about that, those two things that you’ve said, as we look at the future, some of how we look at people’s performance and rewards needs to shift, right? If we think about a lot of the old way of performance reviews or tracking success is really looking at things done of tasks accomplished. Well, in the world of automation, those tasks can be accomplished at a much larger scale much faster. So, when we think about having to make sure that we’re prepared, we need to now encourage people to be creative, to innovate, to be empathetic, create experiences because it’s those experiences that are going to really help companies be more successful, right?

    Look at the retail world. You have two dynamics happening. You have the rise of Amazon and everything is going digital and online sales are being huge, but then you have people still having store footprints, but they’ve reimagined what that in-store experience looks like, so it’s more about the experience than the getting the item you need, right? So, we’re seeing that shift.

    I think as HR, as we figure out how to encourage the workforce, reward the workforce, we’re gonna have to think a little bit differently.

    GREG: Yeah, it’s definitely — I mean, this is not a political statement in any way at all, but it’s definitely not a coincidence that this — I don’t know if everybody’s been watching what the Democratic debates for US presidential race, but this has been a topic and I think every single one of the debates, a couple of candidates are a little bit, you know, more vocal about this than others. But, you know, regardless of where you are on a political spectrum, just the fact that it is actually risen to that level of attention today, I mean, it really tells you about, you know, I think where not only the US is going, but where the global economy is really going.

    It’s huge, and just going back to that poll. That’s why, you know, I think if we went back and we took a snapshot in 6 months, 12 months, you’re just gonna see that trend line just going up and up and up because we’re not — we’re not feeling it yet in the way that I believe we really will be, right? We hear it when we’re dealing with trucking or certainly self-driving cars and impact on Uber and, you know, things like that, but we are not — we’re not hearing it yet in the world that most of us working on a daily basis, but we’re going to.

    ADAM: Yeah, I’d be — I’d be really curious to know, Imo and Greg, what jobs do you think are gonna be kind of first up for automation and where we’ll see, you know, the really big first wave of disruption? You mentioned we’ve heard a lot about truck drivers. Did you guys — I don’t know if you guys heard, but there was this story where the first self-driving truck drove 2,800 miles from California to Pennsylvania just November, just last month through snow, through cities, through traffic, completely self-driving. Do you think it’s gonna be truck driving or do you think it’ll be something else?

    GREG: I think it’s gonna be a lot of stuff. I think that’s gonna be — you know, I was in Europe last week and you go into — you look in any fast food establishment in Europe, there is not a single person working at a counter anywhere. You go in most checkout lanes and grocery stores and things like that in Europe today, you know, are fully automated. It just hasn’t quite made its way to the US yet. And I think, you know, that and I believe, you know, and Asia kind of the same issue, right? That’s, you know, extremely automated. US is actually lagging a little bit in that area. So, I think, you know, that’s gonna be a big area.

    I also think, you know, like I said, it’s gonna shift into more professional roles as well and, you know, I think financial, you know, any kind of like back-end financial, this starts to, you know, hit the world that we all live in, I think, you know, with HR and you start to get into more the administrative functions of HR and that admin and things like that, I think, you know, are gonna be very quick kind of early movers there…

    IMO: I mean, if you look at something like back-office finance, I think that’s a really good place where the automation is really augmenting what the individual can do, right? So, instead of having to do a lot of accounting, looking at spreadsheets, following up with clients for invoices, that part can all be automated, and then what the financial analyst can do is really look at that information to see where the opportunities for the organization to do things differently to gain more value.

    So, again, you started this at the top of the hour, Adam. I think that automation is gonna impact different roles in different ways. Some are really just gonna be augmented by the automation, and I think that’s also a very interesting thing to look at. So that skill set you need is going to change. Again, so there’s a big correlation between the automation and skills gap or where we need to go skills wise. So, again, that’s gonna be very interesting as we evolve.

    BRIANA: Yeah, I think that leads us really well into our next topic, which is all about the skills gap. And I know, Adam, you said that these two are closely related. And, Imo, I heard you just said the same thing.

    Let me back up.

    Okay. So, I just wanted to share a stat that I found from Gartner, 64% of managers don’t think their employees are able to keep pace with future skills needs and 70% of employees say they haven’t even mastered the skills they need for their jobs today. So, there’s certainly a skills gap as, you know, all of you just mentioned, but there seems to be a lot of differing opinions about what skills are most lacking. So, of course, we all just talked about automation as becoming a bigger part of our lives. We’re seeing augmented jobs or even jobs being replaced and then, of course, we’re gonna need more people with technical skills to manage all that automation, that’s pretty clear, but, you know, what I wonder is is that where the gap really lies?

    At the HR Tech conference this year, Josh Bersin said that most college graduates today already have really good technical skills, so what companies need instead are behavioral skills like curiosity and creativity, and I know creativity already came up in the discussion, so we’ll look into a little bit more into that.

    GREG: Yeah, I mean, if you’re — you know, if we’re thinking about where the biggest gap is, I don’t — again, this is — the technical skills gap has been extremely acute for a long time, right? We just simply don’t have enough skilled engineers on a global basis to keep up with the pace of change and really face with automation, the pace of change and things like that. That is a very acute problem. We’ve known that. We understand it. We’ve had it for — we’ve had it for a number of years.

    When you look at — and that really influences. So, you know, if you look at some of the World Economic Forum stats from last year, you know, one of the things that they talked about is by 2025, there’s only one country in the world that’s going to have a surplus of talent for technical skills, and that is India. The rest of the world is gonna have a deficit of skills — of skilled talent. So, super acute. We’ve known it. We understand it. We all — anybody in HR we’re living it or certainly in technology, we live in this every single day, right?

    But, I think, what Josh was talking about is a really good point because that soft skills gap or what we call enduring skills, that kind of — that need for somebody to think about their role differently is not something — when we operate in a more siloed, very technical skill, and again broad definition of technical skills, I don’t care if it’s technical skills in programming or if it’s macros in Excel if you’re in a financial organization or if it’s technical skills in HR or technical skills in sales or anything else, if the way that the impact I believe that we’re gonna be seeing over the coming years is really around how do we get — we talked about this earlier, but how do we get our existing workforce to think differently about their roles, right? And those are those soft skills, and that’s really more about creativity and innovation and empathy and all those other things that we talked about because that is really gonna define what makes a successful career in the future.

    The technical skills, that gap will continue to close as we train more and more people and that’s known, it’s defined, and we understand how to get people there. Well, we don’t really have a great understanding of from an organizational standpoint typically is how to get people to think more creatively, how do you get people to innovate faster, how to create a culture of innovation within our organization. Those are the things that I think will be truly the biggest gap, you know, and again, I’m not talking — I’m not talking 10 years down the road, I mean, in the next — in the coming, you know, in the very near future here, right? Because that’s what’s gonna define competitiveness. And as we start to see more and more automated, the need for somebody to be able to think differently about their role is gonna be absolutely the case. I think right now, we really feel the technical skills gap. I think in the very near future, I think we’re starting to feel that soft skills gap, and I think that’s really gonna be what is the major problem in the workforce going forward.

    IMO: Absolutely, Greg. I recently saw this headline, you know, ‘skills change but human capabilities endure,’ so that’s what we talked about those enduring skills, those capabilities, critical thinking, curiosity, aptitude for learning, learning agility, those things endure. And if you think about a world that’s changing so quickly due to automation, AI, again the world becoming interconnected, the ability to learn is gonna be an enduring skill, right? That’s gonna give someone an advantage not necessarily what they know today, but their ability to always be able to learn what they need to know for the future. That’s why it’s so critical. I like that you brought it up, Greg, where — if you were to ask me, those enduring skills, those human capabilities cultivating a culture for learning and improving is really what’s gonna set the organizations apart.

    So cultivating, like how do we — in HR, how do we think of cultivating these human capabilities, these enduring skills, so that people are able to adapt as we need them to and as the organization or jobs demand on an ongoing basis.

    ADAM: Yeah, I think it’s good to separate technical from soft skills. So on the technical skills side, one gap — you know, we always hear that the gap of not enough engineers and then I think a lot of us specifically mean programmers when we — when we say that, but actually two really big fields that have huge labor gaps at the moment, one are trade skills, I mean, plumbers, electricians, carpenters. I read a report from SHRM earlier this year, and I just kind of refreshed my mind on it this week in prep for this call, and there’s a 30% gap in the market for trade skills and not nearly enough young people going into studying those. So that’s massive, and we also know a lot of countries have aging societies at the moment.

    If we look outside of the US, a lot of the world, the birth rate has dramatically dropped. If we look at Japan — actually, Thailand has one of the lowest birth rates in the world right now, and there’s gonna be a massive need for nurses, anybody in the medical space. So those are big technical skill gaps in areas where people would be really, really safe from automation.

    On the soft skills side, two things that we haven’t really talked about much, I think we’ve alluded to it, but one is dealing with complexity and ambiguity. There’s gonna be so much change happening that training people to be flexible and adaptable is huge and communication. That leads us back to empathy, but training on communication skills, I don’t just mean language ability, I mean, how do you actually communicate your point.

    BRIANA: Yeah —

    GREG: Yeah, and I think — oh, sorry, Briana, go ahead.

    BRIANA: No, Adam, you just — you make a really good point. And so my next question is whether it’s a trade skill or, you know, one of those human skills, do any of you have insight on how you might train those or maybe how you go find that in your candidate pool or in your existing workforce?

    GREG: You can — I think there’s two ways, right? The way that organizations need to think about talent selection is gonna be different, right? And the way that organizations need to think about talent development is gonna be different. One, I think, from a selection standpoint, if — and, you know, just by the fact that we have some people on this call, I mean, obviously, this is a really big topic and organizations that are on here today, I’m sure, are — I mean, nobody would be here today if they weren’t really thinking about this, right? But it is an incredibly important thing when you’re thinking about talent selection that if you’re still in the mode of, “Hey I’m gonna go through this pretty subjective process. People are gonna apply. I’m gonna give them to a hiring manager. The hiring manager is just gonna figure out if this person could sell. If they can, we’re gonna hire them or we’re gonna give them a shot, or if this person can code, then we’re gonna go through some interview process really more based around technical skills.”

    We pulled back the technical skills, right? We — you know, from an HR perspective, I think we’ll probably — I think we’re good at that and not doing that, but the moment we give, you know, from a talent selection standpoint, we just see this all — we deal with some of the largest companies in the world, right? Today, we’re running, you know, Outmatch is running somewhere around 15 million candidates a year through our technology and, you know, so we deal with — we just have this incredible position to deal with some of the most innovative companies in the world, but even those, you see hiring managers still kind of revert back to what we know, which is, “Hey, can they sell? Can they code?” Can they blah — whatever it is? Can they do the, you know, the journal entries if they’re an accountant or whatever it is, right? And then they’re — and that’s how we’re making hiring decisions.

    They need to really get serious in the talent selection process where the most important thing that you’re screening for are those enduring skills that has got to lead the way. You can put some — and again, I’m not recommend- I know you couldn’t do this across. It’s a developmental organization for everybody, but you can train somebody in those technical skills. I mean, these are very often definable things that we can train into, but if somebody does not have those enduring skills, that has to be the point of the spear in the way that we’re thinking about how do we select talent. It’s got to infiltrate the assessment process, it’s got to infiltrate the interview process, it’s got to be throughout.

    And then when we get into development, that need — one of the concepts that we talked about at Outmatch a long time with our clients is this concept of lifetime value of an employee, right? That we need to constantly be pushing the value that this person can create for organization, and you only do that by taking a constant learning approach with that individual.

    Two things end up happening: Number one, you drive that value up over the life of that employee by helping them understand what are those enduring skills you need and how to acquire them. We’re all not naturally great at one versus another. And I can tell you, I’m not exactly the most empathetic guy on the planet, but I tend to be pretty creative, right? So — but that’s okay. I can learn empathy. I can kind of do these things, right? And we can provide that constant feedback to keep growing to value that organization. So that’s number one, it drives value to the company.

    Number two, I can tell you right now, if you’re not doing it, you’re gonna lose the person. Quite simply, you’re just gonna lose the person, right? They’re gonna go somewhere else who’s going to make that investment because your candidates and your employees also understand what’s happening in the workforce around them. You’ve got to make that continuous investment in constant learning to continue to drive the value that that person can create. They wanna create it, and your organization needs it.

    IMO: Right. There’s a study that that Bersin did last year — [clears throat] excuse me — they surveyed 700 organizations and found out that the average employee only had 24 minutes a week, 24 MINUTES A WEEK performer learning. So, something that HR can do is really encourage and reward continuous learning, right? So how do you encourage and reward continuous learning? Again, these kinds of rewards build habits, but you need to be able to make sure that people understand, that it — they should be taking the time to learn. Some of that needs to be self-directed. I think the traditional mindset or in the past, a lot of individuals feel ‘teach me, teach me, teach me.’ I think we can also shift that mindset to how to enable you to learn, how to create opportunities for you to learn, and again reward that learning, so that it’s reinforced within the individuals and the organizations as a whole.

    The one thing that’s happening right now that I love, you know, at different levels, I interact with different people within the Outmatch family. In our CTO’s technical organization, they’re reading a book to look at team structures, right? And one of the things he proposes us in the product organization, why don’t we read the same book? Because our teams work very closely together, and we’re thinking about ways we can optimize and improve. It’s good for us to be on the same page. So that’s self-directed. That was really great.

    On the product team, we’re also looking at other information, but we have teams encouraging each other to go out, buy books, and learn on our own, and then we create meetings to actually discuss our learnings and our findings and we’re putting them in practice in real time. So that’s an example of creating a culture of continuous learning, but also I think tactically, HR can try and reward those things on an ongoing basis.

    GREG: Here’s a great — I had actually never heard that before about the 24 minutes is the average amount of learning. Here’s a great goal for everybody going into 2020, like really go hog-wild with this, right? Like go crazy with this and get a 300% improvement and learning across your organization, just give people an hour a week. Like, I mean, it’s a tiny piece of the time, right? And, you know, but you look at the, you know, the impact that that could really have, and again, this is — we’re talking about totally unstructured stuff here, but, you know, there are obviously ways to really optimize this and really drive continuous learning, but that’s just pretty — I had never heard that number before. That’s — that’s pretty incredible.

    BRIANA: I love what you guys are saying about learning culture and even the learning philosophy kind of needs to shift within organizations. So that brings us to the topic of agile and this kind of self-driven learning is a key element of agile, so I wanted to shift this over to this topic.

    Pulling another quick stat from Gartner here, 49% of HR leaders are unsure how to design the organization to be faster and more responsive, and that’s really what we mean when we say agile. I mean, that’s why this has become such a hot topic lately. But understanding the agile philosophy and adopting some agile practices, that’s really the first step in a much longer journey to becoming agile. Truly being agile requires not just changes in thinking, but changes in how your employees are managed and motivated and trained and hired.

    So, I’ve got a question for the group here and Imo is our Head of Product or our Chief Strategy Officer, but leading the product team here at Outmatch. So, Imo, I’ll throw this one over to you since agile is really a software development term and it comes from the software world. So, what are some ways that HR can adopt some agile practices or principles?

    IMO: Yeah, absolutely. So, a great question, Briana. You know, I believe that — again in HR, a lot of the traditional thinking and what has historically been asked for from HR is create control and alignment. It’s been all about control and alignment. Here are the rules, make sure everyone’s following the rules. Here are the policies, make sure everyone’s following the policies. So, I think that that naturally needs to shift and leaders — I mean, if you’re an organization where your leader is still pushing that alone, I think you need to push back a little bit there.

    So, I think HR should think about creating opportunities and focusing on speed and responsiveness. So, again, we keep talking about the future of work. We keep talking about automation. We talked about people needing to learn and be more agile as an organization, and HR can really adopt that by taking a different philosophy. Silicon Valley is known for this, you know, don’t be afraid to fail. Maybe in some cases take that to the nth level, but it doesn’t have to be that far, but that concept of experimentation is what’s really gonna help HR be in more agile, not just talk about agility.

    So, one of the big principles of agile is launch something, test it out, experiment, get feedback, iterate, and improve, right? So, if we think about that in an HR context, when trying to make a decision with little information, what tends to happen is we go research, research, research, research. Go in the room, create a workflow map, nail it all down, and then roll out across the entire organization. That philosophy is not agile, and that, you know, you’re putting way too much on the goal of getting this right and getting it out to everybody.

    What we should think a little bit more about is how do we quickly launch something whether it’s a project or initiative, how do we pull in a cross-functional team, so when these ideas come from the front lines, how do we pull in people from the front lines to help us do the initial thinking. And think about it, you launch something, it works great, you scale it. So, launch, it works, scale. Launch something, it doesn’t work, no problem. Iterate, right? It doesn’t have to be right the first time. That’s a culture shift and a mindset shift, you know, creating an environment where it’s okay to fail, right? Creating an environment where you want to experiment, but I think that’s the key to HR agility or an agile HR practice or an agile workforce, just building that muscle of experimentation of launching things, being okay to fail, iterating and improving as we go.

    GREG: If you look at agile and — you know, one of the things for everybody on this call, if you’re not — you may have heard the term agile before as it relates to software development, I would really encourage everybody on this call if you’re not — if you’ve just kind of heard the term but you’re not exactly familiar with what it really means, go grab a book, you know, jump over to your local book store or Amazon and get a book. There’s a million of them that explained the concepts.

    The concept behind agile comes from what used to be the way that software was developed, right? And it did come out of Silicon Valley, and it was the way that software was developed. And previous to this, previous to agile, it was what was called a waterfall method, right? And if you think about the way of an organization, it’s very analogous to the way an organization tries to operate in many cases, right? Waterfall method is we have this vision for what we’re gonna do. Then what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna build this strategy that really kind of flushes out that vision. Then we’re gonna break up the strategy into a bunch of different parts and then those parts are gonna get broken down into a bunch of different parts. And now we’ve got a million different parts all over the place, and then we’re gonna start to assign out little pieces of parts to people all over the place. And magically, it’s all gonna roll up to this grand vision that we have. And organizations kept doing this and doing this and doing this, and then building software that didn’t work.

    And because when you start to parcel it out down to such a micro level, Imo said the key word there, which was you are completely relying on the fact that you got it right, and I don’t know about anybody on this call. The amount of times that I actually get it right is about not, right? Now I might get parts of it, right? And I might get like a couple ideas, right? And I might have enough right to build on, but it was, you know, that’s really where it comes from.

    So the agile method was really — the agile method software development was really about how do we do experiments, how do we take little pieces build something that’s isolated, and then how do we start to build on top of that something to just continue to iterate and iterate and iterate over time, right? And you start to see today and some of the most innovative startups in the Valley and even in larger companies today, that method of thinking about software development has now really kind of permeated down into the way that companies operate, right? Instead of saying, “Hey, there’s this.” I mean, we obviously all have a vision for what we’re trying to build, but then from that vision down to a series of experiments, how do we do something? And it doesn’t have to be right, it just has to be something that we can build on and build on again and build on again and build on again.

    And suddenly what we see is it becomes a very customer-facing, customer-first type of approach that we take because we’re iterating based on the feedback from the market, right? Now, if you’re building a product, that market is external. If you’re building, say, you know, a culture initiative inside your organization or a learning initiative inside your organization, that market is internal, but the exact same process applies. Don’t have to get it right. We just have to start, and we’ve got to get pieces of it that we can start to build from.

    BRIANA: Thank You, Greg. I really like the way you put that. It’s definitely experimental and it’s definitely about the people that you’re impacting with your decisions

    Let’s go ahead and move on to our last topic of the day. I wanna talk about AI since it’s everywhere, it’s not going away. You probably have more tools in your tech stack using AI than not. There’s huge benefits to using AI, but we also can’t forget about the people whose lives depend — or lives and livelihoods depend on the decisions that AI may or may not make about them.

    So, I found some reviews from candidates and employees that range from apprehensions to flat-out anger when it comes to employers using AI and some other processes. One candidate said, “Beware of robot recruiting systems. AI analyze everything you do from your pupils dilating to the tone of your voice.” Another asked, “How can anyone trust that? The system is biased.” And then someone also said, “I assume it won’t be long before Skynet is using this to determine which of us is part of the resistance.”

    GREG: And besides all that, candidates love it.

    BRIANA: Yeah, yeah.

    So, Adam, I’ll throw this one over to you. How can we use AI responsibly or how can we ensure that we’re using it responsibly when we do use it, and how can we help ease some of these candidate and employee concerns?

    ADAM: Sure. I think we just take a step back. All of us actually encounter AI every single day of our lives without even knowing it or at least machine learning. If you’ve ever used Google Maps, that’s machine learning. If you’ve used Grammarly to help you polish your emails, that’s machine learning. That’s AI, actually. If you shop on Amazon, well part of the way that they know how to stock their inventory is using AI. So you touch — AI touches your life every single day, every single day in tons of different ways.

    Now, when it comes to you actually as a candidate applying for a new job, you don’t want to think that a robot is making that decision. You wanna — you want to think that a human is the one that’s ultimately look- reviewing your CV and you’re gonna eventually get in front of a human instead of a robot just making that call. I guess part of the way I think about it is if you are gonna go shopping at a grocery store and you are gonna — you picked something up out of the aisle and it had no ingredients on the back and it was a complete mystery of on what’s inside of this, you’re gonna be pretty apprehensive about buying that and eating that. Same thing kind of comes over to how a candidate would feel if they’re encountering AI inside of your selection process. If it can’t be explained to them how that AI is being used and what exactly it’s looking at, well it’s almost like eating that mystery item off the, you know, the grocery store shelf.

    Some use cases for AI can feel really, really creepy, and I think that’s what some candidates are reacting to. Yeah, if it — there’s definitely AI that can read your facial expressions, look at your pupil dilation, how fast you’re speaking, where your eyes are looking, all of that, I think a lot of us inherently get a little bit of the heebie-jeebies. It’s kind of creepy.

    There’s other AI use cases that are more about augmenting a recruiter instead of replacing a recruiter, and I think ultimately, if somebody knows, hey, HR is gonna use this tool to help prioritize which candidates to spend more time with or what kinds of questions to be asking a candidate, that’s a much better use case that doesn’t make anybody feel creeped out than an AI is gonna read everybody’s resume and automatically produce a shortlist.

    GREG: Hey, Adam, can you —

    ADAM: It’s just — yeah?

    GREG: You’ve done a lot of — you’ve done a lot of writing and speaking around that concept of like different types of AI, right? Like, the black box method versus more transparent AI, can you just kinda talk about that for a second and how maybe people that are on the call today can be — when they’re looking at different types of AI technologies that may bring into — maybe consider bringing into the organization that they can think about that and in and around those different methods.

    ADAM: Sure. So, AI is essentially statistics on steroids, that’s really what it’s doing. There’s two main approaches to building an AI model, a prediction model, one of them is black box where you basically throw in all the data they possibly can to try to predict something. In a black box method — and by the way, black box are the majority of the use cases that we see out in the market today. You can’t explain how it works. So, it goes back to that grocery store analogy. You have no idea how those ingredients are stirred up and that’s where a lot of bias can creep in, and that’s where people get freaked out.

    So if, for example, we took that facial recognition concept and it was used in a black box way, we wouldn’t know or be able to show, for example, if somebody who was a burn victim or had a stroke or has a scar, are they being impacted because they can’t smile or have facial gestures the same way that other people can? That’s a — so that’s really I think something to be really conscious of if you’re gonna make a decision to use a black box tool, and those are types of questions that you really need to be asking, how can bias be creeping into this?

    Whereas with black — glass box approach or it’s in the AI lingo, everybody calls it explainable AI, you are able to see exactly how that model is working, what is being used to predict. Possibly cutting out things that are popping up is bias, and you know that they’re popping up because you can see it, you can visually see it. So, we’re doing some early things with natural language processing here at Outmatch and some of the things that we’d be able to see are, here are the types of words that when somebody uses them in a video interview are predictive. Well, if something pops up in that prediction model that we don’t like, we can cut it out and we’ll actually be able to see it with our eyes.

    IMO: Yeah, you hit the nail on the head there, Adam. Right. I think solutions are the future as providers like us build these things. We really need to think about how do we break things down to smaller components so that the user, you know, in our context it is HR or talent acquisition users can actually understand what’s happening, right? Let’s use the predictive models, let’s use the automation on the lower-level pieces, present those recommendations at the lower level, and then the decision can be made by the person that has that information at their fingertips, right? So, and, you know, the way we’ve been seeing it and the way we believe the future will be is how do you bring the information that everyone needs, make it clear, and put it in their fingertips, to then make the final decision there. So I think that’s critical when it comes to organizations thinking about using or adopting AI within technology to help.

    The other thing that I think is just important to think about and, again, this is why we’re seeing some pushback, the AI revolution or machine learning revolution has felt almost like an arms race. You know, you hear organizations or even leaders saying, “What are we doing in AI?” You know, “What’s our AI strategy?” And I think that that can be very challenging especially when it filters down to different groups where the focus is so much on AI as opposed to the outcome you’re trying to achieve and then how potentially machine learning, natural language processing, robotic process automation is helping to achieve those outcomes.

    So if you in your role are getting pressure from leadership to be more innovative, to adopt artificial intelligence, the first thing I really think about is what outcome am I trying to achieve and then is there a way that the solutions were using leverage machine learning to help us achieve those in a better way or in a faster way or in a more consistent way. Those are some suggestions I would give for any of you who are listening today that are having to do with this on the job.

    ADAM: I just think a good — a good rule of thumb is, can that solution — could you be able to sit down with a candidate and explain to them how a decision was made? If the answer is no, probably not a great solution.

    GREG: Or if your answer is, well because the technology didn’t think you’re a good candidate, that’s a really bad answer.

    ADAM: That’s a bad answer.

    BRIANA: Yeah. We have several resources actually on how you can — some things you can do to vet technology that uses AI, so I’ll share that out after the webinar. And if anybody on the call has questions even after we break today, please feel free to email me and I can help answer a question or I can get you in touch with any of our panelists if you wanna speak more with them.

    I wanted to quickly show. At Outmatch, we developed some ethical AI principles, and this will be in the deck as well in your follow-up materials and you can also use this as like five steps to using AI ethically and responsibly. So, these are our principles, but it’s also a good way to kind of help check the box when you’re looking at new technology, so be sure to look at that after the webinar.

    And before we wrap up today, I just wanted to go around the panel and have each of you give maybe a 30-second recap or maybe the top takeaway that people on the call should start doing today as we approach 2020. Greg, let’s start with you.

    GREG: Constant learning. You’ve got to be thinking about learning on a micro level and it’s got to be something — if you’re learning, if the way that you’re thinking about learning is, hey, we’ve got this LMS system that people can access and it’s got tons and tons of tons of content, you got to be doing more than that. And it’s really — it’s not about having the right technology in place to do that, it’s about facilitating that constant — that constant learning around those enduring skills. I think that’s the biggest takeaway, you know, just in listening, not only participating, but just listening today, I think that’s one I think is something that we can put in place immediately within the organization.

    BRIANA: Yeah, thank you, Greg.

    Imo, what would you say is the top takeaway or the number one thing that listeners can start doing today?

    IMO: Yeah. So, since Greg stole mine, I’ll have to recommend something else, so I think, again, Greg has already said that, I won’t say too much longer, but that continuous learning is really important. I think that’s critical. I think the second thing I’ll just come up with this, just think about outcomes or when it comes to any of these initiatives or this AI whether it’s how am I gonna help with enduring skills, what outcomes am I trying to or are we trying to achieve, and how do we create experiments — experiments to test out whether those outcomes can be achieved with something and be comfortable with iterating. You know, sometimes you can come up with why — if you’re rebuilding your onboarding process, why not come up with two or three potential onboarding processes and test those out with different groups and see what works, iterate. So that’s what I’ll give, iterate, test outcomes, experimentation. That’s about it. Thank you.

    BRIAN: I love that. Thank you, Imo.

    Adam, over to you, your top takeaway.

    ADAM: Sure. I would just say huge change is coming. It’s gonna be a complete new industrial revolution Jury’s out on when that’s gonna hit, but it’s coming soon. I agree with Greg, focus on the enduring skills, empathy, communication, innovativeness, and don’t believe that AI will be a panacea for all of your candidate recruitment needs, and definitely don’t —

  5. How to Get the Most Bang from Your Pre-Hire Assessment

    Pre-hire assessments come in different shapes and sizes, and there’s more than one way to use them – which makes versatility one of this technology’s most intriguing benefits. Post implementation, organizations often discover exciting use cases and additional value from a tool that’s historically been a one-trick pony.

    For some organizations, using a pre-hire assessment means testing for job-critical soft skills and cognitive abilities before investing in a new hire. For others, the assessment is used to provide a bias-free understanding of a potential hire’s culture fit, which job in the company they’ll be best at, or how their personality and work style will contribute to the team. 

    How and when you use your pre-hire assessment is up to your organization’s talent acquisition strategy, but to ensure you get every drop of value from your chosen solution, here are a few things to keep in mind:

    Choose an assessment that’s easy

    The last thing you want is a promising solution that could have been great – if only people had used it. 

    To help grease the wheels for adoption and change management, choose an assessment with a simple and intuitive UI. This is important for reporting and analytics, too. Modern assessments have come a long way, so look for one that empowers your teams to make quick and intelligent decisions, without needing to be specially trained or have an I-O psychologist nearby to interpret the findings.

    The assessment experience should be equally friendly for candidates. Many newer assessments can be completed in 10 minutes or less, using images, optimized test design, and even games to keep candidates engaged while collecting valuable information about their potential for success and ideal career path.

    Connect with a video interviewing tool

    Most companies are already using some type of assessment, and adoption of video interviewing software is on the rise.

    Together, these tools make a perfect team, with assessments providing much-needed data and objectivity, and video interviewing adding a human layer that allows candidates to express their uniqueness and be seen as a person, not just a score. According to Deloitte Insights, “Video interviewing can reduce pre-hire assessment questions from 200 to just five and raises the possibility of one-interview hires.” That’s a heck of an endorsement!

    The best thing you can do is integrate these tools into a seamless workflow for candidates. Just as important, you want results to be seamless for hiring teams. Rather than seeing assessments and video interviews as separate data points, find an integrated solution that can aggregate information into a comprehensive candidate profile.

    Stay agile with AI

    How can assessments predict success when jobs and skills and companies are constantly changing?

    If you’re going to use an assessment to match the right person to the right role at the right time, then you need the right profile one that’s been proven to work in organizations like yours, or a custom profile. Or, you might be using an assessment to measure culture fit, something that’s less job-specific. Either way, precision is key, and you need a solution that can use data from successful hires to create the perfect profile for your needs.

    This is how machine learning works in the world of assessments, taking in continuous streams of information, analyzing the data, and improving on its performance. This approach ensures the assessment is an accurate predictor of success, even in super-agile environments. No matter how your business pivots, an AI-powered assessment will keep pace. 

    Integrate post-hire

    Assessments are deeply rooted in the talent acquisition space. Hence the name “pre-hire assessment.”

    But, the best way to get more bang for your buck is to use this talent acquisition tool outside of TA. Take hi-po identification, for example. Gartner tells us that “high-potential employees exert 21% more effort than others, and have a 75% chance of succeeding at roles that are critical to business performance and the future leadership pipeline.” The problem is, without a way to identify hi-po’s in your company, you won’t be able to tap into or develop their potential. 

    From talent discovery and internal mobility to career pathing, development, and succession planning, assessments help in every instance – if you leverage them. So, break out of your comfort zone and forget what assessments are ‘supposed to do.” Instead, imagine what they can do. 

    Explore what’s new in assessments

    With more companies using assessments than not, it’s fair to say they’ve become a talent acquisition staple, adding important structure and rigor to the hiring process.

    That doesn’t mean you can’t get creative and have a little fun with assessments, too. There’s a wave of next-gen assessments on the market offering flexibility, engaging experiences, and analytics that didn’t exist before without sacrificing the predictability organizations have come to know and respect about these solutions.

    Finding the right use for your needs requires careful thought and consideration, paired with a healthy dose of experimentation. When it comes to getting your biggest bang, it’s up to you to push the limits!

  6. How to Find New Talent in Your Existing Workforce

    If you’re not looking inward for talent, you’re missing a huge opportunity! Watch to learn about the rise of the internal talent marketplace: how top companies are making their workforce more ‘gig,’ how they’re offering more growth opportunities to more people, and how they’re using technology to discover, market, and match their internal talent.

  7. How to Improve Candidate Experience in a Tight Talent Market

    Engaging top candidates today isn’t easy. Blame Millennials or Gen Z if you like, but the fact is, the candidate market is completely different than is was 10 years ago. All of us (yes, you included) now have incredibly high standards for the experience we have when doing something, be it streaming TV or applying for a job.

    Whether your candidates are ‘digital natives’ or ‘digital immigrants,’ everyone in today’s workforce expects and appreciates a simple, personalized hiring experience. If you want to be a competitive employer, you need to give them that.

    Your next challenge is to find a way to get the data you need for sharp, unbiased decision-making without sacrificing the experience. Do that, and you create a win-win for everyone. Here’s how:

    Tell a good story

    You can’t expect candidates – who enjoy rich, vibrant experiences online and nearly everywhere they go – to raise their hand for a less-than-exciting job opportunity. Generalities, like saying, “This is a great place to work!” won’t cut it anymore. (Did it ever?) To get candidates to click APPLY, you must first give them a taste of your company, the job, and the team they might be working with. Do this by telling stories.

    First, craft a narrative about your company’s history, vision, or culture, and weave it into every experience through the hiring process. Then, look for ways to spotlight company wins and employee success stories. A video about an employee’s growth within the company, a great relationship with a client, or a community outreach event are just a few ideas. Whatever it is that makes your company interesting or unique, that’s the story you should tell.

    Make it feel easy

    Because everything is on-demand, the days of applying and waiting are nearing their end. Candidates need to be nurtured, gratified, and kindly escorted from one step in the process to the next. Your job is to make the job of applying for a job easier than ever.

    That means all the great storytelling videos you create should be accessible and easy to find up-front. After than, think about how to architect a seamless workflow that will keep candidates engaged and moving forward – such as, auto-launching an assessment at the end of the application, or providing the option to schedule a video interview immediately after the assessment.

    It goes without saying that everything should be mobile-optimized. And, the more flexibility you give candidates to complete steps when it’s convenient for them, the better.

    Improve your interviews

    Interviews are your chance to get to know candidates on a deeper, more personal level. They’re also a chance for candidates to get to know YOU. So make sure your interviews give back to the candidate as much as they take – which can be easy to forget when using technology.

    For example, if you use pre-recorded video interviews, you can help make the experience feel two-way by having real employees on screen, introducing themselves before asking an interview question. This way, candidates will have ‘met’ a handful of team members in your company, and will be able to put faces to names.

    Ask the right questions

    Candidates can tell the difference when hiring managers are prepared with questions, and when they’re winging it. By providing on-demand interview guides with questions that are tailored to the candidate and job, you ensure the interview is a good experience for busy managers and potential hires.

    Ideally, you want interview guides to be structured and align with your company’s core values, and at the same time, be relevant and personalized to the candidate. Asking the right questions leads great job-related conversations, and makes the most of everyone’s time.

    Add a personal touch

    If you’ve implemented a good hiring workflow, then you’re nurturing candidates throughout the process. It’s important to have built-in touch points to let candidates know they’ve successful completed a step and what’s coming next. Much of this can be automated. But, you don’t want your process to be completely robotic.

    Make sure at least some of your candidate outreach or follow up comes from a real recruiter or hiring manager. Savvy candidates know the difference and will appreciate a little undivided attention. Your goal should be to automate the mundane, repetitive tasks so that hiring teams have more time to personally connect with candidates.

    To learn more about innovative recruitment…

    See how Verisk, a Forbes’ Best Employer, is attracting and engaging top college grads.

  8. How Can Talent Assessments Connect People to their Passions (And Help Your Company in the Process)

    With so much technology on the market and so many exciting avenues to pursue, HR is in a position to impact the business like never before. The challenge is not, what can we do, but rather, how much can we do to drive the business forward? This will depend on alignment with business strategy and smart HR tech investments.

    Organizations are taking a new approach to measuring things like quality of hire and employee engagement. New technology makes it possible for companies to track where employees are spending time, how they’re performing job tasks, and what their potential for success is – today and in the future.

    Some of the most exciting trends in HR tech are in the vein of discovering hidden talent, connecting people with their passions, and hiring not just to fill a role, but to set someone on a trajectory for lifelong success.

    Thanks to rapid innovation in the market, we’re seeing an explosion of new releases and platforms that are helping to turn these trends into tangibles. Even assessment software, which hasn’t traditionally been the flashiest piece of technology on the market, is becoming a game-changer for HR and employees everywhere.

    Here are 3 ways talent assessments will make your initiatives – and your employees – more successful:

    Find every person’s best fit

    Often, talent assessments are used in hiring as a way to measure fit to the job or fit to the company (or both!). By assessing hard skills, soft skills, or cognitive abilities, hiring teams are armed with insight on a candidate’s potential for success.

    Recruiters and managers can also start to see how a potential hire might fit on the team, as well as skills gaps they might be able to fill by adding this candidate versus another.

    If you’re hiring for a sales position, for example, an assessment will tell you how a candidate ranks on must-have soft skills like work intensity and follow through. An assessment might also tell you how strong he or she is in sales knowledge, such as prospecting and overcoming objections.

    Ideally, the assessment would then roll up the results into one overall score, with the ability to drill down into each different skill set.

    But say a candidate isn’t a great fit for the job they applied to. In a tight talent market, employers can’t afford to throw out applications. Rather than simply tagging someone as a poor fit, new assessment software allows recruiters to match candidates to other open positions in their company.

    This way, recruiters can make use of every candidate in their applicant pool, fill more jobs, and help more people improve their livelihood. It’s a win-win all around.

    Discover pathways to future roles

    Once you’ve got the right people in the right roles, you can sit back and relax. Just kidding! As good practitioners know, hiring is just the beginning of an employee’s *hopefully long and productive* journey with your company.

    This is where the pre-hire assessment comes back into play. One assessment can help guide the next several years of an employee’s journey. That’s why many employers see it as “the data that keeps on giving” – it continues providing value long after the hiring decision has been made.

    First, assessment results can be used as onboarding guides, helping new hires get up to speed quickly based on their strengths and opportunities in the role. Then, after ramp up, assessments can help employees and their managers see what’s next.

    Say your sales hire is killing it – hitting quota every quarter and helping the entire team succeed. She’s raised her hand for a sales manager position, and looking at performance, she’s the most deserving of the promotion.

    But, leading a sales team requires a very different skill set than what’s she’s using today. Your top salesperson is about to move into untested waters, and if she fails, you could lose her for good. Using an assessment, you can see her potential for success in a management role, along with development suggestions to make the transition easier.

    Together, the salesperson, her manager, and others from L&D can identify an employee’s ideal career path and steps to get there. The assessment creates the perfect scenario where promotions are based on skills, not just performance, and every employee has the opportunity to grow.

    Illuminate hidden skills and strengths

    Similar to promotions, decisions about who is considered a ‘high potential’ are often subjective. In many cases, putting someone’s name in the hat for a hi-po program depends on how important development is to a given manager.

    In a system like this, great people get overlooked. And isn’t HR’s goal to engage and retain as many employees as possible, not just a select few?

    Assessments can improve how you select people for hi-po programs, and thanks to tailored development plans that now come with assessment results, you can drastically scale participation in hi-po programs.

    Equally important, assessments can help re-define what you mean by ‘high potential.’ Does high potential mean potential for leadership in your company? If so, what are the mission-critical skills and competencies your leadership teams have today, and what will they need in the future?

    Assessments give you instant insight into the skills and competencies that matter most in your business, ensuring that no one is overlooked. You may find more than one diamond in the rough. Perhaps a quiet contributor today becomes a pivotal future leader.

    So, rather than let an employee’s potential wither away – or worse! – lose them to a competitor, you can use assessments to discover hidden talent and tips the odds in your favor.

    START YOUR JOURNEY WITH ASSESSMENTS TODAY

  9. How to Assess a Candidate’s Skills before an Interview

    According to new LinkedIn research, 69% of professionals believe that skills are more important than a college degree when looking for a job, and 76% wish there was a way for hiring managers to verify their skills so they could stand out amongst other candidates.

    Recruiting teams share the same wish – to see a more complete picture of a candidate, beyond the resume. But how?

    Pre-hire assessments add an additional layer of intelligence to help solve the visibility problem in hiring. Using assessments, candidates can show off their skills, and recruiters can be sure match the right people to the right roles, every time.

    Aberdeen research from a few years ago found that 2/3 of companies use pre-hire assessments. And that number has surely grown. At most companies, “pre-hire assessments are a fundamental part of the hiring strategy.” Without them, assessing the skills and strengths of your candidate pool would be slow and subjective, at best.

    What to assess?

    Pre-hire assessments come in many forms. There are hard skills assessments, like LinkedIn launched earlier this year, that measure software or coding skills, for example.

    Then there are soft skills assessments, which are becoming increasingly important as 80% of professionals say soft skills are critical to company success. According to LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends report, soft skills like creativity, persuasion, and collaboration are in high demand – but, less than half of companies have a formal process in place to measure them.

    There are also cognitive assessments that measure skills like logical reasoning or reading comprehension, similar to a college entrance exam. Abstract reasoning is a popular cognitive assessment because it measures an individual’s ability to learn, which can help you gauge their trajectory or long-term contribution to your company.

    Finally, there are culture fit assessments that measure values and motivations in comparison with the company’s CulturalDNA. Does a potential hire value collaboration above precision? Are they more motivated to drive results or delight customers? There’s no wrong answer, but knowing these aspects will help ensure happy, successful hires.

    With different assessments to illuminate different skills sets, you’ll begin to see candidates as real, multi-dimensional people – much more than bullet points on a page. It’s a quick and objective way to assess candidates for job fit, culture fit, and career potential so you immediately know who should move on the interview stage.

    Ah, the clarity!

    Most assessments can be completed in under 20 minutes, depending on the skill or type of job you’re assessing for. Once completed, your team will have data you can use to rank or shortlist candidates, as well as insight on hidden strengths and career potential that you wouldn’t have gotten from a resume, a phone call, or even an in-person interview.

    Using assessments, you’ll see your entire hiring process become more streamlined, with improved decision making every step of the way. Recruiters can focus on pursing the most promising candidates, and because results can be shared, hiring teams are aligned and able to collaborate on decisions like never before.

    Some assessments (like ours!) even generate an interview guide based on the candidate’s potential weaknesses and areas for improvement. That way, interviewers know exactly what to ask and can learn the most about a candidate in a limited amount of time.

    Best of all, candidates’ skills can finally shine through. Today, 52% of professionals say they feel their skills have been overlooked in the hiring process in the past. We’re on a mission to change that – so job seekers can get the jobs they deserve, and employers like you never miss a great candidate again!

    START YOUR JOURNEY WITH ASSESSMENTS TODAY

  10. HR Buyer’s Guide Part 2: Getting the Most ROI After You Buy

    In part 2 of our HR Buyer’s Guide series, we cover everything that happens after a purchase, from successful implementation to proving ROI. Learn the 4 must-do’s before implementing a new piece of technology, plus tips for increasing adoption, measuring the right metrics, and getting the most bang for your buck with creative use cases.

    MORE WEBINARS