After the Job Post: 6 Moves That Drive Better Applicants

Lori Cole (00:05):

Hey everyone. I’m Lori Cole. I am a certified career coach and content creator and brand ambassador here at iHire. And I want to thank everyone for being here today. Let me offer you a warm welcome to this webinar After the Job Post: Six Moves That Drive Better Applicants. So before we get started, I’d like to point out some features of the webinar platform that will really put you in the driver’s seat. The widgets that you see on your screen, you should have a whole line of widgets at the bottom of your screen. And that allows you to move and resize windows, explore content related to today’s presentation. Make sure you find that ask a question widget and submit your questions at any time during the presentation. Only our producers will see those questions and we will get to as many as we can after the webinar.

(01:06):

I would also like you to try out your emoji widget right now. It takes just about 30 seconds for those to start coming through. That should as well be at the bottom of your screen. And our presenters just love it when you send a hard emoji or a thumbs up emoji when they’ve said something that you can really relate to. Also, keep an eye on your inbox tomorrow for a recording of this webinar. And lastly, just a quick reminder that you’ll earn one credit today for SHRM and HRCI recertification. And I’m starting to see those emojis come through. That’s wonderful. Thank you so much. So stick around until the end of the webinar and we will tell you exactly which buttons to click and which certification widget to click to get those SHRM and HRCI recertifications. And with that, I’d like to present our presenters today, Molly Floyd and Robert, or as we lovingly know him, Bobbo Oakley.

(02:18):

Molly is iHire’s customer success director. She focuses on the unique challenges of iHire’s clients and develops solutions to ensure that our clients’ experiences with our industry-focused recruiting tools are personalized and seamless and rewarding. Welcome, Molly. Thank you for being here with us today.

Molly Floyd (02:41):

Thank you, Lori. Happy to be here.

Lori Cole (02:44):

Then we have Bobbo. He is an account executive here at iHire. He is known for asking the right questions and truly listening. Bobbo builds strong relationships rooted in trust and understanding. And you will see he has a passion for this topic. He has a passion for data-driven solutions and an extensive background in our product management area. He really thrives on helping employers solve hiring challenges with measurable results. Thank you for being here with us today, Bobbo.

Robert Oakley (03:23):

Thank you, Lori. Very happy to be here.

Lori Cole (03:28):

All right. We are going to start things off with a poll. What do you do? This is easy one. What do you do immediately after posting a job? Refill your coffee, take a stretch break, give yourself a high five, grab a snack, or send a meme to your workplace bestie. So while we are waiting for those results to come in, I am going to ask Bobbo to kind of run through our agenda today and what we’ll be covering.

Robert Oakley (04:00):

Okay. Thanks, Lori. Yeah. Topics near and dear to me. There needs to be some strategy once that job posting is up. So what we’re going to cover today, how to get the word out to update or create your career site or career page, often known as join our team as well. Focus on your employer brand. We want to target passive candidates as well. Get yourself and your team organized and track your ads performance.

Lori Cole (04:31):

All right. Let’s see what our poll results say here.

Robert Oakley (04:39):

All

Lori Cole (04:40):

Right. We’ve got a little bit of everything here. Give yourself a high five. That’s a good one because it is a lot to get a job posted anymore, it seems like, and to do it right. Well, no matter what you do, if you need help in this job posting area, we are going to make sure that we cover a lot of topics for you today. So Molly, let’s start with you. I imagine a lot of employers think that posting a job in one place is enough. What are they missing when it comes to getting the word out about that job posting?

Molly Floyd (05:19):

Yes. It’s definitely about maximizing your reach. So one place is a good place to start, but you need more. You really want to post your job on your career website and across multiple job boards, other sites, other platforms. Really get the word out there. So fortunately, when you post once with iHire, we do promote your position to our unique database of users and automatically distribute it across top sites and platforms through our partner network. So this includes other big job boards and more targeted industry specific boards. Before paying to post your job anywhere, you do want to do your research and ensure that you’re getting the best reach to maximize your investment. Sharing your job on your company’s social media channels is an additional way to get the word out there and maximize your reach. Posting in relevant industry groups, forums you may be a part of or that the candidates you’re seeking would be a part of, and other communities where you think those ideal candidates might be.

(06:30):

Also, encouraging your employees to share the listing within their own networks is a great way too. Referrals are a great source of quality applicants.

Lori Cole (06:41):

I would agree. We have always loved referrals here at iHire. They have been our best source of good people coming through our door. So now once your candidate hears about the role, they’re going to start doing their homework. So Bobbo, what should employers have ready before applicants start knocking on their door? Which I don’t think they really knock on your door anymore. They knock at your email. What do they

Robert Oakley (07:13):

Do? Yeah. Well, with all the golden nuggets that you’re going to harvest from this, this is the one. 80.12% of candidates will come back to your website, to your company website, once they see a job posted online or on your social media to learn about why they should work there and to be able to apply for the job. And some of you do really good jobs with this and some of you don’t even have one. And some are just in the middle. And that’s what I really want to stress here. They’re going to research a company, especially the best applicants. The ones you want to apply, they have choice, they’re doing their diligence. So you have to have a career site presence on your webpage. You want to ensure that your jobs are there. And if you think about, we all talk about posting jobs and we get applicants that aren’t really qualified and we don’t understand why.

(08:06):

Well, there’s a low trust level on the candidate side as well.

(08:12):

They don’t know you’re going to get their resume when they apply off of your website, so they’d rather apply on your website. They don’t know if the job’s still open, but if they see it on your website, that trust level goes way up. So actually having the open jobs on your website on a careers page is really important. And this is your opportunity to really show the value proposition of why you’re a great place to work. We do a really good job of why you’re a good place to buy, why you’re a good place to have to work with, but we need to do that same thing on why you’re a great place to work. And we do that by highlighting benefits and perks. We need to show what it looks like to work there, not what it looks like to buy your product, but what it looks like to work there.

(09:00):

You want to include photos and videos, and we’re talking holiday parties and staff functions. If you have really up modern equipment that’s going to be appealing to employees, you want to show pictures of that. Testimonials from some of your long-term employees that really love to work there go a long way. Any awards, anything in the news, this is your opportunity to sell yourself to the best applicants. And you get the chance to control the narrative here on what it’s like to work at your company. Very important.

Lori Cole (09:34):

It’s really a good point about candidates that want to apply on your website instead of applying maybe even through a job board. I think that just gives them a feeling that that job is real and it’s not something that’s been out there for six months or eight months. And it’s a stale job. They like to see those jobs on your website. All right. Bobbo, employer branding goes really beyond the website. What should employers do to really shape how candidates are perceiving them?

Robert Oakley (10:17):

Yeah. What you’re seeing here is this is iHire’s backend. You’re able to build-

Lori Cole (10:23):

I’m going to start it over again, Bobbo. I am so sorry. I forgot that that was the demo. So I’m going to start you over again, okay? Perfect. Yeah, sorry about that. All right, here we go. Nope.

Robert Oakley (10:50):

Yeah, this demo that Lori’s loading will segue us well into the next slide anyways. So this is an example of iHire’s join our team page, work at iHire. This is our career site. And in your iHire account, if you’re a customer of ours, you are able to build this. It’s very simple. We break it out into a number of easy steps in the template. We’re going to let you brand it. So you have your colors, you have your logo, you are themed properly. We’re going to allow you to add a company video. What is it like to work there? Take that video, list all your benefits. And some benefits are not even obvious. Gym membership, whatever it might be, you want to list everything. You want to list what are your core values? Show them right here. This is the company culture that appeals to these candidates.

(11:47):

Add photos. We talked about how we want to show what it looks like to work there. Add anything you can like that. You want testimonials from your best employees. You want to be able to indicate any awards that you’ve won where you got wrote up in the news as a great place to work. If you have that, this is your chance to really tell your story to the best possible applicants. It not only increases the number of applies, but increases the quality of the applies in a big way.

(12:18):

Once all of that is put together, you now have a robust career site that is going to tell your story and have your job listings. I’m going to switch over to the view mode. What does it look like? Once we’ve put this all together, you can see that right up there is directly addressing the candidate. We have a video. iHire’s a choice employer, so we’re showing that badge. We list every benefit that we offer and iHire does a really good job of taking care of its employees and it’s obvious here. We have a few articles on our core values, why we’re a great place to work, and it’s pretty clear. You can get a pretty good idea looking at those photos that we have a pretty good time over here. And this is your opportunity to tell that story. Yeah.

Lori Cole (13:10):

And the thing that I’m really impressed with is how easy it is to build your website with that tool.

Robert Oakley (13:21):

Yeah, it’s great. And we’ll cover this a little later, but one of the things we offer to our customers that don’t have a page like this or a marketing team to build it or the time to build it, we will custom build these for you very simply and easily and take this on for you.

Lori Cole (13:41):

So Bobbo, what else should employers be doing to shape how the candidates perceive their company?

Robert Oakley (13:49):

Yeah. I mean, we want to ensure we’re making a strong first impression. That very first impression is actually in your job posting. You want to have the qualifications, you want to have the requirements, you want to kind of list some of the things that candidates expect, but you should have a little blurb in there probably closer to the top on why you’re a great place to work. And your join our team or career site is very much going to support that, but you want to start that. Don’t assume that there’s a lineup of people out the door that want to work for you. It’s very much, and I know a lot of us experience this, that you’re competing for employees and you need to start to tell that story right away in that job posting. There’s reviews out there. Glassdoor Indeed has a review area where employees and former employees can actually talk about what it was like to work there.

(14:40):

And I think we all know how review systems typically work. They generally attract the disgruntled, and those are the ones that post. So you want to be responding to each of those and be aware of where you’re being reviewed so that you can address the issues and help, again, have some control over that narrative and your image. Behind the scenes, content on social media, what a wonderful page place to let people know that you’re looking for work. It’s also a great place to let people know you’re an awesome place to work. And even if you’re not actively hiring today, show off that holiday party, show off these things because you never know where your potential new employee comes from. And often it’s going to be word of mouth through a customer of yours and they see that you’re hiring and they see you just build that story over time.

(15:36):

Employee testimonials are critical. We want them to sound real for sure, not bots. And there’s a lot of employees that love working for you. And if you don’t have any of those, then that’s probably a culture issue you get to face, but you want to give them the opportunity to brag about you a little bit. It goes a long way. Positive candidate experience, this apply flow has got to be smooth. In many cases, if people have ATS, we will integrate with them. We will host the apply flow on our site so that we have less friction. You want to make it as easy it is for a candidate to apply and encourage them along the way that they want this job. Maintaining a strong employer brand at all times, not just when you’re actively hiring, this is critical. Just because we get kind of fold up, we’re not hiring for a few months or maybe a year in some cases, we kind of neglect that and we never know when we’re going to have to fill a spot.

(16:44):

So it’s really important to maintain the employer brand to prospective applicants at all times.

Lori Cole (16:54):

Yeah. I love what you said about posting the holiday photos and the pictures of your parties and things because people do see that on Facebook and people in the back of their mind will say, “Oh, that looks like a cool company to work for. Maybe I should explore them at some point.” So you’re always recruiting, always having your information out there for people to look at.

Robert Oakley (17:21):

Yeah. To build up ... Oh, sorry, go ahead, Molly.

Molly Floyd (17:24):

I was going to say, I think in most of our internal interviews, the candidates will mention, “Oh, your 20th anniversary party looked so fun. They mentioned the videos on there and really buy into the culture.”

Robert Oakley (17:38):

Yeah. And to build upon that a little bit when we’re thinking about our social media and stuff, customers like to see that people like to work for you. It’s your culture. It’s part of your brand and it’s good to show that off. If your employees are happy, that trickles down to your potential customers and your current customers. So don’t be afraid to show that off.

Lori Cole (18:02):

Great point. Now, while your job is attracting active job seekers, there’s a whole other audience out there, Molly. How do employers tap into candidates who aren’t even looking yet? Yeah.

Molly Floyd (18:19):

So this is a really good source to utilize in a strategy to proactively search for that potential new hire. So while your ad is out there attracting the applicants who are searching on our site, you at the same time can be looking through resume databases like iHires and also in professional networks and communities. So tap into your existing talent pipeline as well. These could be candidates who applied in the past, but ultimately weren’t hired. Maybe people who expressed interest in your company on the company profile page, you can collect that lead and maybe you weren’t ready for a particular position at that time, but revisiting those are great strategies. Also, former employees, a. K.a. Boomerangs, we have a few of these that I hire and often employees will go out and experience something different, learn some new things, and then come back and want to stay and apply those to your company.

(19:31):

So those are strong areas to look in. Sending personalized messages to these candidates is really important to encourage them to apply. You can start with a template, and we do provide some of these, but you definitely want to customize your outreach to be the most effective. As Bobbo mentioned, it’s competitive. It is your responsibility and duty to really convince this person, especially if they’re not actively job searching, to consider a career change. So we can show you coming up here, our internal messaging tool.

(20:14):

This is where ...

Lori Cole (20:17):

I started it. There we go.

Molly Floyd (20:19):

There we go. This is where you can message candidates directly within the iHire platform. So you have an option to send a text message, an email, or both. And to save time, you can start with one of our pre-built templates or customize one of your own. Lots to choose from and the history, the choices stay there, so you can pull from which one makes the most sense. And we also have a built-in feature, this AI assistant that can help personalize the message, improve grammar, adjust the tone to be more formal or casual, to better align with your company brand. And all of these conversations are saved in iHire, making it very easy for you and your team to track the communication and revisit any of those interactions at any time.

Lori Cole (21:15):

All right. Once candidates start coming in through all of these different channels and things can get pretty chaotic pretty fast. So Molly, what does it look like to set your team up for success before those applications start coming in?

Molly Floyd (21:33):

Yes. You definitely want to be proactive here in getting organized and being ready for when the applications start coming in. So you can set up folders, use tags in your ATS to categorize applications as they come in. Definitely blocking off time on your calendar to review resumes, conduct interviews. That’s helpful to just know when you’re going to dedicate that focus time. Creating a checklist of certain tasks that you want to make sure are done throughout the hiring process, and then making sure that your team’s aligned from the get- go, aligning with the hiring managers on that ideal candidate profile, so that as those applications come in, you each know exactly what you’re looking for. And then just sharing updates with your team as you make progress on reviewing candidates and determining what best next steps there are for each of them.

Lori Cole (22:35):

All right. And we have an ATS and multi-user tool demo. I’ll get that started here.

Molly Floyd (22:42):

Yeah. So in the My Candidate section of our iHire applicant tracking system, you can easily organize and manage candidates for your open roles here. Candidates can be moved through customizable workflows that match your hiring process. As an example, at the top here, you can see the default workflow begins with prospecting, moving into screening and evaluation, and then ends with a finalist stage. You can take bulk actions when working with multiple candidates at once. For example, you can add tags to help categorize candidates. You can choose from existing tags or create a new tag on the spot while organizing those candidates. And it makes it easy to mark things like skillsets, hiring priorities, or internal notes that are helpful for your team. At the individual candidate level here, then you can see those tags. You can remove them if they’re no longer relevant. And so it’s a nice way to kind of just keep things organized.

(23:49):

Another bulk action you can take is adding candidates to a talent pool. And talent pools allow you to organize candidates into groups that make sense for your hiring needs. And this can make it easier too to reconnect with those strong candidates for future opportunities that you’re possibly pipelining for. So as candidates progress through the hiring process, you can move them between stages to keep everything organized and visible. And then to help you quickly find the right candidates, you can also apply filters to narrow your view so that you can search for certain criteria and look at just that. In addition to organizing candidates, you can customize these workflows. So iHire provides a default workflow to help you get started, but you can easily edit or create an entirely new workflow based on your team’s hires. Within each stage, you can add, remove, rearrange categories to reflect your hiring process.

(24:55):

I mean, for some roles, you may require only a few screening steps, while others may include multiple interviews or evaluation stages. So there’s lots of flexibility here, many options to fit your team’s hiring process. And once you create a workflow, you can save it for future use. You can update it as the process evolves or even remove it totally when it’s no longer needed. So this tool, along with the candidate messaging tool, really allows your team to track candidate activity and interactions directly within the system, gives visibility into notes, communications, next steps, and really just being able to monitor that hiring pipeline. You can identify bottlenecks and make data-driven decisions that just support an efficient recruitment process, which is really key to hiring and retaining that quality talent that you’re after.

Lori Cole (25:57):

So I’m going to put one of you on the spot here. I don’t know which one you guys will have to decide who wants to take it, but I wanted someone to talk about our ATS and how we integrate with all the ATSs out there, because that can really help it become more of a seamless process, right?

Molly Floyd (26:17):

Sure. Bobbo, you want to take that one?

Robert Oakley (26:20):

Sure, Molly. Yeah. ATS integration is critical on a few different levels. One is that if you have an ATS, you’re probably of the size that you have quite a few job requisitions. And the manual posting and updating and even managing pipeline and candidate applications in another platform or multiple platforms can be quite cumbersome. So the more automated you can get, the more time you save. Depending on the level of integration available, ideally what you want is you want while somebody might be applying, say, through iHire, you don’t want them to have to leave iHiRE to go back to your ATS and then fill out the application so you’re now in your ATS. That can be done, no problem, but eliminate as many points of friction as possible. So for the candidate, if they see a job on iHire, they stay on iHiRE through that apply, and then you want that application to land inside your ATS so that you can manage all those applicants in one spot.

(27:29):

So it’s to reduce friction and it’s to greatly increase the efficiency of the HR staff or the TA staff. And we can walk you through that on how we can help you do that.

Lori Cole (27:44):

Thank you, Bobbo. I just thought that was an important and the right place to talk about our ATS integration. So once we have this process in place, we may also want to make sure that the ad itself is pulling its weight. So Molly, how should employers actually be tracking or what should employers actually be tracking and what should that data be telling you about when it’s time to make a change?

Molly Floyd (28:16):

Yeah. So there’s definitely lots of metrics that are helpful to monitor throughout the posting process. And you definitely want to track that performance of your job to give you insight into where maybe there’s a breakdown. Views, clicks, ultimately applications. Those are the most important metrics. You can identify then which platforms are driving the most qualified candidates your way, and then you can adjust your strategy based on the data. So maybe you need to reword the job description or target different platforms. Making sure the job description’s clear, inclusive, the salary range is competitive, benefits are there. There’s many different ways to sort of test what’s working and job titles impact it and keywords can help with impressions. And we’ll get into that. We have an analytics piece to share with you within the platform, but definitely a lot of metrics to monitor as you judge the performance of your job ad.

Lori Cole (29:27):

Right. I’ll go ahead and start that demo video for the analytics piece.

Molly Floyd (29:33):

Okay. So within the analytics tab here, iHire offers plenty of insights to help you understand how your jobs are performing, what market trends may be positively or negatively impacting performance, as well as insights straight from our candidates. So you’re privy to what exactly they’re looking for when searching for a new role. Understanding the application journey from impressions to job views, to apply starts, and ultimately those completed applies that can help you know where you’re performing well and where you may need to invest more time and make some revisions. We offer this insight in terms of percentages that will help you understand how your job’s performance compares to others within the industry. Next, you can understand what candidates have in common who are applying to your job. And this helps you know at a bird’s eye view, if you’re attracting the right talent. So most common skills, job title interests and work preferences are all displayed here.

(30:39):

At the bottom of this page, you can understand where your talent’s coming from, knowing where there may be hiring hotspots or patterns can help you adjust your strategy accordingly, and we also offer quick ways to improve your job ads performance depending on how the funnel looks above. For example, if you need to increase overall impressions and visibility, we offer tips on adding more relevant skills and keywords, or how to apply a feature that will extend your reach. So each step of that funnel comes with supporting recommendations. This hiring market insights piece of the analytics tab is a newly released feature that offers industry specific insights at the market level. So you can gather data based on specific job titles within an industry or down to a specific skill that you’re looking at. Location is also a factor in how this data is displayed. As we know, recruiting for specific roles in a rural area is different than that same role in a heavily populated area.

(31:46):

So you can see by the green percentages when there are more candidates than jobs in any given area or within a specific job title or skill type. In these circumstances, you have a larger talent pool to choose from, which allows you to be more selective with your requirements and focus on identifying that best overall fit for your team. The red percentages indicate where the candidate pool is less than the number of opportunities in that given area or skill that you’re looking at. So in these circumstances, competition for talent is higher, and it will be helpful to review your job requirements, adjust your expectations, and expand your reach to attract more qualified candidates. You can increase the number of skills or jobs that you’re looking at to gain as much information as possible. There’s top 10, top 25. And again, we offer ways where you can use those insights to optimize your job ad.

(32:48):

Adding skills, expanding your reach, considering similar roles, or opening up your location are always to increase your potential talent pool. And small adjustments really do make a big impact. This third tab under our analytics tab here is around candidate insights. And this allows you to choose any recent survey that we have shared. The top three questions are provided here and you have insight then into what the candidates are really thinking. You can see how important salary, culture, initial brand awareness may be for a specific industry or at the job title level. And understanding the job seeker’s perspective and outlook on their challenges can really help you attract the talent you’re looking for. Understanding feedback about how long a hiring process or salary expectations, it allows you to know what information to provide and how that experience should be for the candidate to attract them. So using the data within those three tabs collectively can really be key in how you strategize and execute on hiring that next candidate.

Lori Cole (34:13):

I’m sure that is such helpful information for employers to know. And I love being able to slice and dice the information all those different ways with the filters and all the maps and things that they have in there. So well

Molly Floyd (34:28):

Done. Yeah. It’s a lot to take in. And we do have our hiring success strategist team that’s here to support and walk through those and help even just talking through a strategy together can be helpful in knowing what to tweak next to see how that impacts the performance.

Lori Cole (34:51):

All right. So Bobbo, I can’t believe we’re at the recap slide already. Go ahead and recap all of these areas for us and bring it all home.

Robert Oakley (35:05):

Okay. Yeah, that was a lot. Pardon me. That was a lot there to consume. And just a little refresher. So after you post your job ad, you don’t stop. It’s number one thing. There’s more things to do. You want to promote your job strategically. We’ve talked about that. We want to optimize your employer brand, career sites, a lot of other different ways. We want to source passive candidates proactively. This is pretty critical. Sourcing resume databases, reaching out to those that may not actively be seeking. We want that two-pronged approach, especially if it’s an urgent or a critical role. We want to put a hiring process and a team in place getting organized, and then closely monitor your ads performance and adjust as needed. It doesn’t do any good to wait two months and then wonder why you’re not getting the right kind of applicants or the volume of applicants.

(36:05):

Usually within two to three weeks, that’s a really good indication of it’s time to tweak. And I hire, as Molly mentioned, we have hiring success strategists often dedicated to your account, and they’re here to work with you on a few of those tactics.

Lori Cole (36:24):

Very good. So we’ve got a bunch of questions, but that doesn’t mean we can’t take more. If you have any questions, now would be the time to go ahead and put those in your ask a question widget. And we are going to try to get through here and speak to as many of these as we can. So the first one is, how long should we wait before deciding if the job posting isn’t performing well?

Molly Floyd (36:51):

I can take that one. We work with many employers and it’s often natural to start to get anxious almost immediately if there aren’t responses. So it’s important to just step back and let the platform do its job and then monitor those KPIs, those key metrics that we’re talking about. But typically you will start seeing meaningful engagement within the first week or two. We often tell our employers that we need to give it two weeks to see what’s happening, and then we can revisit and go through that funnel and determine maybe certain areas that we need to revisit. If after a week or two you’re seeing low views, low clicks, or zero to very few applications, then it’s time to strategize and review what we can do. So you don’t want to immediately just give up and quit, but we can do things like reviewing the job title.

(38:00):

Short and sweet, is it easy and searchable? Keywords, SEO is a big deal and helps get your ad in front of the right people. So make sure you have strong keywords in there that will match with candidates who are looking for certain skills. And salary is huge.

(38:24):

If at the very least it’s to provide a range, do that because candidates, as you will see in the insights that candidates offer, it’s really important. They want to know right away what to expect. And then just making sure it’s distributed across the right platforms and as many as possible. So there’s lots of things you can do before ultimately saying, “This job post isn’t performing well.” It’s a constant revisiting, re-strategizing process.

Lori Cole (38:58):

If we’re getting a lot of applicants, but not the right applicants, what should we adjust first?

Robert Oakley (39:08):

Yeah, I can take this one. Well, it’s a good problem. In a way, you’re getting applicants, but if they’re not the kind of applicants you need, there’s a lot of ways to address this. Some of them are similar. If you’re not getting applicants, you want to look at your career title. Is it too general? Is it too vague? If you’re getting a lot of applicants, you can probably hone in and be a little bit more specific. You want to look at the job description. Maybe you can be a lot clearer about what you’re looking for. Maybe in your mind you’re pretty clear, but your job description’s too general, so you want to clarify that. Also, one of the things you can do when I hire is you can, with your skills that are extracted from the description, you can make the must have required or nice to have.

(39:55):

You can make adjustments to those to make it a little bit tougher. Screening questions are brilliant. And yes, a candidate can lie, but most don’t. We trust that most humans are good. And so you want to add screening questions in there that will automatically disqualify people if they don’t have certain things. And that’s a really good way to start to filter that number down to a more targeted base. And then you can use your ATS if you’re using one or if you’re using a hire to actually do some searching so that you don’t necessarily have to go through everyone. You can start to pull out the people that you maybe have some of the keywords that you really require.

Lori Cole (40:37):

Thanks, Bobbo. I want to let our producer know that question three disappeared from my queue. So if you could put that back, Alexia, that would be great. All right, let’s move on to this one. If we don’t have a career page, Bobbo, I know that this is your specialty. What’s the best way to get one started?

Robert Oakley (40:59):

Yeah. Well, if you are small micro business and you manage your own website on your own as one of the million hats that you wear, you could certainly go add careers, join our team, employment, whatever you want to call that menu item, top level menu item on your website, you could add it and then build out a page that starts to include a bunch of the things we talked about. If that’s out of your wheelhouse, then you call me or somebody on my team. We specialize in custom building these and helping you tell your story. iHire will host the page, you’ll add join our team, we’ll give you a link, and that’s it. It’s really that easy. If you’re a bigger company and you have a marketing team, really try to get them on board to get leadership on board to help you build out a career site or make it much more robust.

(41:51):

A lot of you out there have career sites, you have a careers link, but maybe it’s just got a form and that’s it to fill out. It’s not telling your story, put some effort into it. And if you don’t have the time or resources, reach out to us.

Lori Cole (42:10):

Right. How often do you refresh a job posting and what is the best strategy for what to change or what to keep the same?

Molly Floyd (42:24):

Yeah, I can take that one. So how often do you refresh a job posting? A lot of sites like iHire will automatically refresh the posting for you. We do approximately every 10 to 15 days, depending on what sort of product you’re using to recruit and post for. That really just brings it to the top of the search results. But if your role is open more than 30 to 60 days, that’s really a smart time to not just refresh it or repost it even, but really take a look and evaluate, are there additional keywords I can add? Should I tweak the title to something a little different that might help get it out there and match to more candidates? Take a moment to review the salary and is there something that you can adjust there? So really just using it as an opportunity every 30 to 60 days tops, just to review and see what tweaks you can make to enhance it and then post it again and give it another shot.

Lori Cole (43:39):

I don’t know exactly what the statistic is, but don’t jobs get a lot more applicants if they do have their salary ranges posted?

Molly Floyd (43:50):

A hundred percent, yes. I want to say the percentage is very high. Bobbo, you’re the data guy and you have numbers memorized. I don’t know if you have this one, but candidates are much more likely to apply to a job that has salary or at least a range visible.

Robert Oakley (44:11):

Yeah. It’s upwards of 30 or 40% more applies. And if you can think about it, these candidates, especially the tough to fill roles, they are evaluating you. They’re evaluating your job against choice. And if one person’s going to tell you how much they’re going to pay and another’s not, they’re not applying for that job. And in other cases where the supply and demand is maybe flipped, they’re probably applying to everything regardless. But in most cases, these tough-to-fill jobs, they want transparency early on.

Lori Cole (44:53):

One of the this other answers I thought of to the second part of that question for what’s the best strategy for what to change or keep the same, I would ask your marketing department if you have one. A lot of times HR and marketing don’t really cross over or help each other a lot. And I think that if you have that marketing department in your company, take advantage of their expertise and maybe they can change the ad, rewrite some things and just make it sound a little bit more exciting, a little bit fresher, but I would really take advantage of your marketing department if you’ve got one.

Molly Floyd (45:39):

And if not, we have our hiring success strategists here to help talk through those conversations as well. That’s

Lori Cole (45:47):

A great point.

Robert Oakley (45:48):

Yeah. And I did see a note in chat there too that we failed to mention. Many states are requiring salary now on your job postings and you need to be aware of that and only more will be added. So it’s a really good practice to get into.

Molly Floyd (46:05):

Definitely. Yeah. And if you don’t include it, often the platform will estimate a salary to put there. So you have more control over it when you are the one determining what the salary range is. Yes.

Lori Cole (46:24):

All right. Does iHire provide a trial period?

Robert Oakley (46:30):

Yeah, I can take that. iHire does not have a free trial. It’s just business decisions that we made. iHire has been around for 27 years. You can see on the Q&A slide that’s up in front of you, we have 57 industry focused communities. All of these candidates have come to us on their own, created their profiles, uploaded the resume. There’s high, high value in there. When you post your job, we have a whole marketing engine. We’re actually spending money to promote it, not only to our internal candidates, but to attract the right candidates for you outside of iHire. And our resume database has just really, really high value. So for those reasons, we don’t offer a free trial. However, any product that we offer, we will allow you to try out month to month without any longer term commitment at all. So we definitely give you a very affordable and easy way to get started with us and test us out and our chance to build that trust with you.

Lori Cole (47:39):

How many follow-ups are appropriate when sourcing candidates?

Molly Floyd (47:46):

I can take that one. There’s definitely multiple follow-ups that you want to do. At least three is usually what we tell our employers, and we have different ways to do it. So as you saw in our messaging center, we have the ability to email a candidate, text them if they’re opted in, and you don’t want to forget about the phone call either. So using three different outreaches, three different techniques is a good practice. And sometimes it takes that third one to put everything together for the candidate. So they want to receive the email, maybe have some time to search your company, check things out, and be able to hear a voicemail, like put a voice to the company name. So you definitely want to do different methods and a handful of attempts to engage the candidate.

Lori Cole (48:50):

All right. What would you do differently for hard-to-fill roles?

Robert Oakley (49:00):

You want me to take that one, Molly? Or maybe we’ll share it. Yeah, we can share that one a little bit because this happens all the time. If a role’s easy to fill, then people probably aren’t in this webinar. So hard to fill roles. Without knowing what you’re already doing, it’s hard to say what to do different, but I can talk a bit about some of the stuff that really this webinar was about is proactive sourcing, 100%. You need to be in multiple spots. That net has to get wider. And I know it’s not fun and you don’t want to be throwing money at stuff, but if it’s a hard to fill role and that’s necessary for your business to provide service, scale and grow, that is the reality. Again, the career page, not just having one, but really telling your story is just going to greatly increase that when you do have that perspective good applicant, they’re going to apply and they’re actually going to show up for the interview and stick around.

(50:01):

Molly, I’ll let you add a few more here.

Molly Floyd (50:04):

Yeah, you definitely hit on all good points. In the job description itself, I think we touched on this, it really is competitive and it’s your opportunity to persuade a candidate to want to work for you, especially if they already have a position. You want to attract them with your different benefits and a higher salary and opportunities to grow professionally. So including all of that information in your ad is a way to attract talent to those harder to fill roles.

Lori Cole (50:46):

All right. How long should your job ads be? And do people really read the lists we add of responsibilities and qualifications?

Molly Floyd (50:58):

Do they really read them? Yes. You definitely want to organize your ads so that it’s easily digestible. We do offer tips in our posting flow, the sweet spot, and I want to say it’s between like 500 and 700 words. Does that sound right, Bobbo? So not too long and not too short. So it’s definitely a balance of including the right information, but concisely and in a way that the candidate can digest it. We have insight within our analytics. There are large percentages of candidates reviewing your job ad and going through the application process on their mobile device. And so you want to take that into account. And that goes back to what Bobbo was saying, and a nice short and sweet application process, collecting the bare minimum information at first. That’s enough to let you know that that’s in a candidate you want to pursue and learn more about.

(52:02):

So yeah, it’s a balance of organizing and including the most important information to attract that candidate.

Lori Cole (52:13):

All right. I would like to take a shot at this next one and then have you guys pile on and say if I am thinking about this correctly. But this question, we’re at a remote mountain resort. How important are virtual versus in- person interviews? And the reason that I wanted to take a stab at it is because from the career coach standpoint of it, I think that a candidate would appreciate the virtual interview first, but if you are asking them to come on site and to work there, maybe you do that virtual interview first and then you have the in- person interview for candidates that you’re very serious about and that you want to take to the next level because you’ll want to show them around, you’ll want them to meet the team, you’ll want to get a feel for how they communicate with you because virtual is a lot different than the being in person, right?

(53:21):

So if you’re in that situation and you’re not sure, virtual first and then in person, Molly, Bobbo, what do you think?

Molly Floyd (53:32):

I think that’s a great answer. That makes a lot of sense. And yeah, I think depending on the role itself, like you mentioned, if it is a virtual remote position, then that type of interviewing process is probably sufficient. If you do require a candidate to come to your headquarters every so often, then you might want to get them out there to see how those interactions go. So I think, yeah, you covered it well. Bobbo, what do you think?

Robert Oakley (54:02):

Yeah, often it depends. Every employer is unique without knowing, I think it was Valerie that posed a question without knowing the specifics. If it’s seasonal jobs and they’re kind of like entry level or lower pay, like flying somebody out or having somebody come out, it may not be possible, but if it’s a permanent position, it’s somebody that you want to be a part of your team for a long time, it’s going to be critical. And I would say there are some tips and tricks for sure out there of how you can actually convey your culture a little better in a virtual interview and garner the personality and that person as a culture fit in a virtual. And so I would put some effort if that is your only option before you actually hire someone to find some ways to, maybe you need multiple first is virtual interview to just qualify them.

(54:58):

And if they’re qualified, then to actually get to know them and then to get to know you. That’s the important part too. You may think they’re a great fit, but if they get there and you’re not. And a virtual interview, if I’m not coming out there before I take the job, I probably want a little tour. I want to walk around. I want to see a few faces of some other people that work there. And if as an employer, if I really like this person, I need to make that connection so that we don’t have them not show up or show up and leave.

Lori Cole (55:28):

Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you both so much. It’s all the time that we have for today. You should be seeing your certification widget on the screen now. So this would be the time to go ahead and click that certification widget so that you can download the certificates of completion for SHRM and HRCI. Thank you all again for being here today. Molly, Bobbo, great job, great job on those demos. I know that that’s always tough when they just start to roll on their own. If you don’t have a career page, as Bobbo has said, please call or make an appointment with one of our hiring solution advisors. You can do that in the resource widget on your screen and they will be happy to show you how easy it is to set up those profile pages. If you have any other questions, you can always reach out to our customer success team at [email protected], and we’ll make sure that you get connected with the right person.

(56:30):

Keep an eye on your inbox for an on- demand recording of today’s webinar and an invite to our next webinar should be headed your ways within a week or so, maybe a couple weeks. I hope you have all a great rest of your day and thank you so much for being here today. Again, Molly and Bobbo, well done.

Molly Floyd (56:53):

Our pleasure. Thank you, Lori. Thank you all for coming.

Robert Oakley (56:56):

Yep, my pleasure. And I love, and so does the rest of my team to talk about adding join our team pages. So don’t hesitate to click that link and book a time with us.