Category: Employer Resources

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More companies find that people who accept offers are never heard from again; ‘It was just crickets’

 

Enervise Inc. recently found someone to fill a $75,000-a-year job. The new hire said he would move to Cincinnati and report to orientation at 8 a.m. on his first Monday. The day before, he emailed to say he had changed his mind.

Taken aback,Aaron Dorfman,the recruiting manager for the facility-services and plumbing company, emailed back. No response. “I called, too, and it was just crickets,” he said.

Add another head-scratching new feature to the post-Covid employment landscape: A job isn’t filled until the new hire actually shows up for work.

Manufacturers, restaurants, airlines and cleaning companies are among the employers seeing a surge of job seekers who accept positions—and are neither seen nor heard from again.Southwest Airlines Co.said some 15% to 20% of new hires for some jobs don’t turn up on their first day. At security and facility-services provider Allied Universal, roughly 15% of new hires disappear before starting a job.

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As a small business owner, your time is quite scarce. You need to do many things to keep a business running, and social media tends to take a back seat. Ignoring social media for a few days is quite right, but if you’re not careful, a few days can be weeks, then months. Next, you’ll know it’s been a year since you posted, and you’ll feel pretty defeated.

When you neglect to publish, you create a domain effect of despair that begins every time you look at your followers. And when you post, you don’t get any likes or comments, making you feel like you’re just posting empty content.

Well, you’re not alone.

Many companies fail to increase their social following or even reach their target audience. There could be many reasons for that, including a poor on-site engagement to social media absence. Your online store should be engaging and have features like displaying a WooCommerce thankyou page, smooth navigation, and a better product presentation.

Instead of spending more time and effort building your network, take a step back and analyze the exact areas where you may be mistaken. Like many business matters, it’s about setting priorities and working smarter, not harder.

We dive into three ways to help any small business improve its presence on social media and lay the foundation for a solid and inclusive community.

1. Choose the Right Platforms

Social media has grown exponentially since Facebook went public in 2012, with thousands of networks dedicated to everything from connecting old classmates to social activism.

So how do you choose the right one for each of these options? The advice of most experts is to follow the most popular ones, and selecting the right ones depends on your audience and your goals.

FacebookFacebook is the largest platform and is ideal for businesses that want to generate leads and build relationships. If you’re a beginner to the network, learn how to advertise on Facebook.

The business networking platform can be used by both B2B and B2C companies to build trust, build authority and engage audiences.

With a state-of-the-art platform, it’s perfect for businesses with less than 50 employees and who need to keep up with time-sensitive information such as the latest news, announcements, and trendy topics.

Instagram was so successful that Facebook bought it in 2012, just 2 years after its launch. Behind this success is to stay true to the original purpose of allowing users to post photos and videos from their mobile phones. Creating Instagram stories (an idea stolen from Snapchat!) That contains content that expires in 24 hours has enabled it to garner nearly 1 billion global users.

A phenomenon in the social media world, TikTok is a force to be reckoned with when seeing rapid growth during the Covid-19 pandemic. It is the first non-Facebook application to reach 3 billion installations due to its popularity among influencers and celebrities. In addition, the platform’s usability, the vast music catalog, and the unique filters attract younger people.

2. Be Human: Seek Relationships, Not Just Followers

That’s a big deal.

One of the worst mistakes you can make on social media is an ugly company without personality. In today’s age of transparency, people want to know more about your business.

Today, many brands are joking and not afraid to talk to their followers like they are to their friends. While brands have been criticized for appearing as robots, human presence on social media has become an expectation among many followers.

In the same way, showing the human side of your brand means showing the faces behind your social flows. Whether it’s office photos or pictures of your team in the wild, personalization with your followers will help you build a much-needed connection.

We can discuss all day whether or not your followers are a trivial measure. However, 100 followers who regularly interact with you and your content are far more valuable than 10,000 followers who ignore you.

It may be a cliché to say, but don’t leave “social” out of your presence on social media. The beauty of society is that you can instantly build relationships with your followers from almost anywhere.

3. Make a Commitment to Social Media 

Social media can be a real challenge. The best advice I can give you is to involve yourself and your staff in making social media a priority for you. Start planning: create a strategy and write it down. Be sure to use software to automate. See what your competitors are doing: How can you do better? Don’t be afraid to start.

• Establish a goal 

Develop a social media strategy that matches your goals and set metrics for success. Don’t just jump on social media without a specific reason and goal you’re trying to achieve. Instead, think about how it can help with customer retention, brand awareness, lead generation, and sales, and then take action.

• Automate your strategy 

There are several tools and resources to help marketers increase their presence on social media. Business owners can set aside a few hours at the beginning of the month to schedule posts throughout the month.

• Establish an internal team 

You can create an easy strategy to manage social media if you have a small team. Switching responsibilities between team members every week can be a great way to keep your social media channels active and provide a fun challenge for team members. You only need to set your tone initially to be consistent across your channel.

• Structure a content calendar 

Many agencies have not fully embraced the idea that social media is a separate service for digital marketing. An active community requires more than a poster here and there. Create a comprehensive calendar that maps what content is posted to when and on which channels, along with a copy on social media.

Final Thought

Communication is a two-way street for social media, so it’s vital to create meaningful and authentic customer opportunities to interact with you. As a small business owner, you want to show that you listen to your customers. 33% of consumers would contact the company via social media rather than by phone, opening more intimate and trustworthy conversations.

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As a clearer understanding of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) comes into focus for consumers this year, some apartment companies will see that VR and AR (or mixed reality) is likely to be among the top employee training buzzwords for 2022.

Though not new concepts, mixed reality applications gained a lot of momentum through multiple channels in 2021—not to mention Facebook renaming its parent company Meta, short for metaverse, which is playing a growing role in these visuals.

Consumers are also experiencing it through video conferencing, email, social networking and live streaming, giving proof that it’s not simply a fad.

Lincoln Property Company began using virtual reality training products from Interplay for some of its maintenance staff several years ago and is finding it to be a cost-effective way for teaching “hands-on” repairs and installations for things such as HVAC-related work.

Companies are finding it far exceeds engagement compared to webinar or computer screen tutorials and it also costs far less when subtracting the expense of flying employees into a centralized office for a few days.

Its primary cost is the VR headset (about $800 plus a $100 annual enterprise fee) with Facebook’s Oculus being the name brand; there are less expensive and adequate alternative products from companies such as Pico.

Lincoln Property Company’s VR Hands-On Training

Lincoln Property Company has 700 apartment communities in its portfolio and began using virtual reality training products from Interplay for some of its maintenance staff several years ago.

Training platform provider Interplay is serving over 2,500 maintenance associates with 24/7 access to more than 200 hours of career-accelerating, simulation-based training content in HVAC, plumbing, electrical, appliance repair and safety.

Margette Hepfner, Chief Operating Officer, Lincoln Property Company, said that Lincoln continues to offer a variety of training methods, including with in-house and outsourced trainers. Its supplier partners also provide free training.

“Our technicians have a wide variety of skillsets and backgrounds so it’s best to find the right training method for them,” she said. “But we had no centralized training platform, and Interplay gives us that.”

For tenured maintenance techs, “Interplay offers them a chance to brush up on a few skills on their own time,” she said. “The entire program gives us a controlled environment. It’s training on an individual level and is not classroom based.”

Hepfner said that the platform is easy to use and to navigate.

“The feedback I’ve been getting is mostly very positive,” she said. “With training that is on-demand, we don’t have to invest as much in flying in a subject matter expert for certain topics, for example.”

She said her maintenance supervisors have been very impressed with the content; they were part of the company committee that recommended using Interplay.

“Having Interplay means we don’t have the risks of techs having to rely on inconsistent training materials, such as what they might find on YouTube. As a company, we don’t have to spend all that time going in and reviewing those YouTube videos for accuracy or weed out any videos that might have been taken by amateurs who just wanted to post something.”

The courses are presented in bite-sized pieces of information and students must pass each section with a 100% score before moving onto the next lesson.

Lincoln Property Company also uses Interplay to upskill employees who are interested in learning new skills or start a new career. For example, a porter might know a few aspects about plumbing, but has never been formally trained in plumbing repair.

“This gives them a chance to grow their careers,” she said.

One negative thing that Hepfner has heard is that some advanced classes involve as much as eight hours of training, “which is a lot when you are learning on your own,” she said. “But you do get to go at your own pace.”

Virtual Reality’s ‘Cool’ Use at Job Fairs

Additionally, AR and VR are giving companies a competitive advantage during recruiting—and what industry is not looking for any edge it can get during this persistently tight labor market?

Companies are finding it to be an attractive hook during hiring—a perk to workers, according to Matt Stevens, Managing Partner, Deloitte, who studies the concept. “Virtual reality is novel enough today that it’s viewed as ‘just cool’ in job candidates’ minds,” he said. “It’s at the point that forward-thinking companies are ‘leaning in’ on the idea of using it.”

VR is also attracting attention at job fairs. Potential hires can experience roles virtually before taking them—a move it hopes will get workers to stick around a little longer, Business Insider reported.

“[MGM is handing out] VR headsets at its employment centers and job fairs so candidates can see if a job matches their expectations,” according to Business Insider. “It’s part of a plan to cut attrition in an industry experiencing especially high turnover amid a pandemic-induced labor shortage.”

Deloitte estimates that by 2024, 25% of company office meetings will have a virtual reality element to them; and by 2025, about 70% of employee training will include VR in some way.

Mixed Reality: Just What is It?

The distinctions between VR and AR boil down to the devices they require and the experiences themselves. AR uses a real-world setting while VR is entirely virtual. VR requires a headset device, but AR can be accessed with a smartphone. AR enhances both the virtual and real world while VR only enhances a fictional reality.

Despite these differences, these concepts are often spoken of together in technology circles are referred to as “mixed reality.”

According to PC Mag, VR and AR “accomplish two very different things in two very different ways, despite their devices’ similar designs.” VR is an immersive reality replacement, whereas AR adds to reality, layering graphics and information onto the real world.

Whereas virtual reality replaces your vision, augmented reality adds to it, PC Mag wrote. AR devices, such as the Microsoft HoloLens and various enterprise-level smart glasses, are transparent, “letting you see everything in front of you as if you are wearing a weak pair of sunglasses.”

AR has a distinct disadvantage compared with virtual reality: Visual immersion, according to PC Mag, writing, “While VR completely covers and replaces your field of vision, AR apps only show up on your smartphone or tablet screen, and even the HoloLens can only project images in a limited area in front of your eyes.” —P.B.

Paul Bergeron is a freelance contributor to units Magazine.

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Hiring challenges and technology have caused many apartment owners and managers of all staff sizes to rethink their staffing.

It’s a delicate situation for companies as they place greater focus on showing appreciation for their workers by establishing a welcome workplace culture. Facing competition from other industries – particularly in maintenance – retention is more important than ever.
At the same time, they must consider the potential financial benefits for adjusting or even reducing headcount. Promised efficiencies and cost savings from supplier partners through centralized leasing and the reduction of mundane tasks overall through automation is creating a compelling case for some – but not all.

Some companies are rewriting job descriptions in an effort to relieve important workers of administrative tasks so they can focus more on resident-related matters.

The consulting group 20for20, led by industry management veteran Dom Beveridge, focused on this strategy and shared insights from 20 leading apartment company executives with the release in February of the fourth annual report.

The report, which included dozens of candidly anonymous comments, tackles many issues, including the role technology is playing now and in the future for apartment companies.

“When we asked interviewees if their organizations were actively working on changing their property staffing model, the largest share (40 percent) said no,” said Beveridge, citing the feedback he received in 2021. Thirty percent said they were and 30% said they are “somewhat” doing so.

“The reasons that they gave were either pragmatic or ideological,” Beveridge said. “Three of the eight ‘no’ votes were suspicious of headcount reduction as a goal, feeling that properties seldom succeed in delivering service in the long run with fewer people.

“Others saw roadblocks, such as not having enough properties in the same markets, or not having made enough progress on analytics to have adequate control over a centralized operating environment.”

Beveridge said one expressed the refreshingly frank view that removing headcount from a budget is risky, “as it’s much harder to add the resource back in if the new arrangement doesn’t work out.”

Rethinking the Assistant Property Manager Role

The six companies in the process of changing their models represented a variety of approaches, according to the report. Half were centralizing sales operations through a combination of self-guided tours, AI leasing agents and access control technology. Most were at some stage of centralizing back-office functions, intending ultimately to rethink the assistant property manager role.

When asked what was driving the change, the answers were similarly varied.

“Some felt that it would give them a competitive edge in winning more business in markets where they could offer a centralized staffing model,” he said.

“Most viewed the combination of greater efficiency and improved customer experience as the levers that would ultimately improve NOI. One large operator added that COVID-19 had taught them that they no longer need the same staffing models they always had.”

Centralization ‘Opens Up Earning Potential’

The companies that were open to changing their model but not actively doing so were mainly considering centralizing some specific types of work.

Camden, for example, has moved to a centralized leasing strategy. Kristy Simonette, Senior Vice President ‑ Strategic Services for the REIT, said, “We have been able to take advantage of this structure and create efficiencies by combining multiple communities to form what we call ‘nests.’ Because agents can easily work leads for multiple communities, we are able to deploy resources where they are needed, when they are needed.

“With this automation, it takes less manpower to accomplish what we used to have to do 100 percent manually. It has opened up great possibilities for earning potential for our sales professionals as they can now sell across portfolios of communities.

“This has been a game-changer for us during this talent war we are all experiencing. We have leveraged the platform to the fullest and we have not missed a beat in covering higher-than-normal open positions.”

Offloading Administrative Functions

Beveridge said some companies were exploring centralized back-office functions, while others were exploring technology that could help regionalize maintenance. One operator was keen to parlay some of its single-family processes into its multifamily properties.

Several cited staffing shortages as a driver for further exploration in 2022. While confidentiality precludes sharing information about individual companies’ plans, there is a striking pattern to the three groups of respondents above, he said.

“Nearly all companies that answered ‘yes’ both own and operate large portfolios,” Beveridge said. “The majority of those responding ‘no’ were smaller portfolios and nearly all owner-operators. Those responding neither yes nor no were predominantly fee managers.”

TriCap Residential, which has 19 properties (soon to be 22) totaling approximately 3,500 units over seven states, went through a re-organization in November to address workload and potential burnout and created several new positions that were designed, for example, to take some of the administrative load off its maintenance technicians.

These new “support” roles handle work-order and turn scheduling, capital expenditures and preventive maintenance.

“By taking them from the technicians, it allows the techs to focus more on their work orders and taking care of the customer,” said Jessica Eberbach, CAM, ARM, Vice President of People and Culture, TriCap Residential.

Staffing Models Are Changing, but Not Everywhere

The confluence of AI, IoT, self-show and the virtualization of administrative processes, coupled with the general consumer preference for self-serve experiences, has long suggested a change to the conventional operating model, Beveridge said.

“The pandemic changed attitudes to self-show, and some of the public REITs have been vocal in describing how their technology has enabled them to reduce property teams.”

Beveridge said that he originally believed that these types of changes at public companies (REITs) follow suit in much of the industry.

“If some public companies are enjoying the financial benefits of a more efficient operating model, then the rest of the industry will follow, or so the logic went,” he said.

But 40% of companies interviewed are not currently working on trying tochange their operating model. To summarize the reasons stopping them:

[For fee managers] “The bill-back model makes it hard to share resources between properties.”

“People too central to our value prop.”

“We are not yet sure enough about the time savings that the technologies promise.”

“We don’t have enough properties in the same sub-markets.”

“Lease-ups are central to our business model; any change is risky unless we are 100% convinced it won’t slow us down.”

“Don’t yet have the right analytics to support centralized control.”

Portfolio Density Drives Decisions

Beveridge said that the reasons companies gave for not changing their staffing models did not read like excuses. Rather, they indicated that the opportunity to centralize functions—a critical step in changing staffing models—vary significantly from company to company.

He said, “Although many factors weigh on operational design, there are two that dictate the feasibility of centralization: The extent to which a company controls its operating environment and the density of its portfolio in the submarkets where it operates.

“Submarket density determines not only how easily staff can travel from one property to another, but also the value of training, for example, a centralized leasing team to sell multiple properties in the same area.”

Therefore, companies structured like most public REITs have the most attractive opportunity to centralize functions.

“They can select whatever technologies they want and control all personnel and the P&L for all properties,” he said. “They also operate many properties in the same submarkets, maximizing the opportunity to pool staff between properties. Conversely, centralization is an unattractive model for properties that have neither control nor proximity on their side.”

For those that do, there are benefits beyond simply reducing headcount, Beveridge said.

As one leader from the report shared: “The way that we organize property management careers is suboptimal. We promote leasing agents to assistant property managers, then ask them to do bookkeeping, which they have never done before.

“It’s better to offload that work to a shared service. We would like to offload more of these tasks that don’t make sense from a career perspective.”

Even with a clearer perspective on how to approach centralization, there remains the question of motivation, Beveridge said.

“Some companies will treat changing the staffing model as a higher priority than others,” he said. “But the combination of continued staff shortages and increasing efforts by the competition to develop will play key factors in the future.”

Paul Bergeron is a freelance contributor to units Magazine. Visit www.20for20.com to order the full report.

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By Peter Weddle, CEO TAtech

The military is sometimes criticized for preparing to fight the last war, instead of the very different conflict that is likely to occur in the future. It’s a failure of imagination that could easily afflict talent technology companies as well. Right now, the War for Talent is making for pretty good times among the industry’s solution providers, but that success won’t last forever. The War for Talent will enter a new phase at some point, and those that aren’t getting ready for it will find themselves in jeopardy.

Business is cyclical. The War for Talent has been through at least three very different manifestations since the term was coined by McKinsey & Company back in the late 1990s. Each of those variants have forced talent technology companies – whether they were job boards, aggregators and ATS companies or recruitment marketing agencies, conversational AI solutions or programmatic ad buying platforms – to develop and implement a new business strategy. The old way of winning no longer worked, and survival let alone prosperity required a new go-to-market game plan.

Today’s War for Talent has a number of defining features, but the two most important are the demand for and supply of candidates. The former is way up as employers retool for the post-pandemic market, and the latter is way down thanks to Baby Boomer retirements, women leaving the workforce and Millennials rethinking what they want from the world of work. That structural imbalance has pried opened employers’ wallets like never before. Recruitment advertising is soaring. And, investment in new talent technology solutions is off the charts.

Not every company is benefiting, of course, but many maybe even most are. It’s a great time to be in the solution provider business, but it’s also a time fraught with risk. Companies are so engrossed with squeezing every last dollar, euro, pound and yen out of today’s market, they fail to think about or make any preparations for what comes next.

Now, running a business in these heady times is hardly a trivial challenge. Even success presents a full tableau of problems, so it’s natural to focus every minute and asset on solving them. In the best of cases, however, that one-sided commitment will force the company to play catch-up ball when the market changes – as it inevitably will – and in the worst of cases, it could produce a fatal disaster.

Preparing for the Next War

I’m an old soldier who spent a number of years imagining the future for the U.S. Armed Forces, so I know how difficult that kind of planning can be. It requires that you step back from a preoccupation with the present and try to visualize what could happen in the future. What would cause today’s circumstances to change and how would that change present itself?

For example, if inflation produces a recession in the U.S., how would that downturn affect the demand for talent? The purchases of talent technology? And, would those outcomes be different if the recession were mild, or deep?

Similarly, what if yet another Covid variant – this one even more transmissible and deadly than Delta – erupted in China and threw global supply chains into further turmoil. How would that affect the talent acquisition needs in specific industries, from auto manufacturing and trucking to warehousing and the airlines?

No one’s crystal ball is perfect, and such an exercise can seem … well, a bit frivolous. And yet, failing to think about and yes, prepare for these consequences can undermine even today’s most successful companies. They must be getting ready now for what comes next. For example:
• What steps must they take to prepare for a rapid and dramatic downturn in demand and how will should they implement those steps without compromising their carefully nurtured brand?
• Should they set aside or make arrangements for capital, so that you can acquire weakened competitors or ancillary technology that will expand their presence in the market?
• How must the skill sets of their current team change or be supplemented to introduce those and other new market strategies effectively?

Getting a head start on answering those questions in the present will strengthen a company’s defenses for the next phase in the War for Talent and potentially give it the offensive capacity to rise to an even greater level of success in that battle. Instead of a failure, it’s the profiting of imagination.

Food for Thought,
Peter

Peter Weddle is the author or editor of over two dozen books and a former columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He is also the founder and CEO of TAtech: The Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions. You can download his latest book – The Neonaissance – FOR FREE at OneStoryforAll.com. And, if you don’t have time to read the entire book, just download a short excerpt of his inspirational message.

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Although most of the rhetoric around the Great Resignation is centered on American workers in office jobs, labor shortages are growing around the globe in a wide range of sectors and types of roles. Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Asia are also in the midst of labor market turbulence, relating to both so-called “skilled” and “unskilled” labor. As the world’s labor market continues to shift, the companies that retain key talent and invest in their workforces will be the ones who invest in employee onboarding.

The purpose of onboarding should be setting new hires up for success and decreasing the time it takes for them to become comfortable in their new roles. This only works if onboarding processes are designed strategically with the end goal in mind. But onboarding has become even more challenging with the rise of remote and hybrid work. In a 2020 survey by Workable, respondents in HR reported remote onboarding or training as the biggest hiring challenge during the pandemic, and it continues to challenge employers.

Even before the virtual shift, more than one-third of companies lacked a structured onboarding process, remote or otherwise. Furthermore, many organizations underestimate how long it takes a new hire to be proficient in their role. The average onboarding program lasts 90 days, but according to Gallup’s “Creating an Exceptional Onboarding Journey for New Employees” report, it typically takes new employees 12 months to reach their full performance potential.

Strong relationships aren’t built on poor foundations. If you want to improve your talent retention, you need to improve your employees’ onboarding experience. Gallup reports that only 12% of employees feel their company does a good job onboarding new team members, leaving 88% of workers with lackluster onboarding experiences. And in a 2021 survey from Principles, 94% of HR professionals who responded said people they’d hired during the pandemic have only interacted within the company virtually, and of those respondents, 31% said employees were struggling to connect with colleagues. Ten percent weren’t even sure how new hires were adapting.

Considering that poor onboarding can leave your employees with lower confidence in their new roles, worsened levels of engagement, and an increased risk of jumping ship when they see a new, more exciting position elsewhere, these statistics are concerning, especially for companies hiring remotely.

On the other hand, companies that implement a formal onboarding program could see 50% greater employee retention among new recruits and 62% greater productivity within the same group. Additionally, according to Gallup’s onboarding report, employees who have a positive onboarding experience are almost three times as likely to feel prepared and supported in their role, boosting their confidence and improving their ability to perform their role well.

The Keys to Onboarding Success

A short onboarding program isn’t the only thing hurting your new employees’ experiences. Recent hires also need opportunities to form workplace relationships with their managers, peers, and key stakeholders. In fact, the Gallup report also reveals that employees are more than three times as likely to strongly agree that they had an exceptional onboarding experience when their managers had an active role in the process. However, many managers don’t have the capacity to support or implement onboarding programs. Furthermore, most smaller companies (and even some larger ones) don’t offer mentorship programs. By failing to offer mentorship opportunities to new hires, you rob employees of the chance to develop the relationships needed to succeed in their new working environment.

As a manager, it’s your job to ensure each new employee’s experience in the workplace is a positive one — but knowing what steps you need to take to create an effective onboarding plan can feel overwhelming. The following three steps can help managers create strategic onboarding processes that set new hires up for success and improve employee retention.

1. Set clear goals and measures for success.

Before establishing a new onboarding program, you should start by reviewing your onboarding goals. And when you’re reviewing goals, make sure they encapsulate the four Cs: compliance, clarification, culture, and connection. Here are a few questions you should ask:

1. Have you clearly identified and explained the regulations, policies, and procedures employees need to comply with?
2. Have you clearly set employee job expectations and linked them to concrete, time-bound measures?
3. After completing the program, will employees have a full understanding of your company culture and be supported to establish all the relationships vital to their success?
4. Where do your organization’s capabilities need to be improved upon to execute this new program?
5. After completion of the onboarding program, how will you improve and maintain the work-life balance of new hires on an ongoing basis?
6. Once you’ve created a set of goals that address all four Cs, it’s time to decide how you plan on measuring success. Your measures should be directly linked to your goals and include quantitative metrics (like the percentage of new hires still employed at your company after a year) and qualitative metrics (like feedback from new hires about their onboarding experience). Arriving at these goals and measures requires input from stakeholders across your organization, so be sure you make time to meet with company leaders before moving forward.

2. Create a multi-departmental onboarding team.

If you want to improve the employee experience in the workplace, you need to create an onboarding process that goes beyond HR and involves other company areas, including relevant teams, key stakeholders, and the CEO.

The sooner managers can introduce new hires to their team, the better. Before making the introduction, ensure the team knows why the new employee has been hired and what roles they will play in the team or across the organization. Although facilitating strong team relationships can be a larger initial time investment, it can help boost employee productivity and performance.

It’s important to remember that new hires will also interact with stakeholders outside their immediate team. However, it’s not always obvious to new employees how they will be working with these people or the best way to connect with them. Managers can help build these relationships by making a list of names, including notes about who they are and how they’re important to the company. As a manager, it’s your job to ensure that connections are running smoothly, so schedule a time to check in with stakeholders and ensure that new hires’ networking is coming together.

An often overlooked (yet critical introduction to make) is between your new hire and your company’s CEO. If you have a smaller organization, schedule a one-on-one or group coffee between the new hire(s) and your company’s leader. If this isn’t realistic because of company size, location, or time constraints, try holding a town hall or special party with the newest employees, the executive team, and your CEO. Connecting new hires to the CEO will give them a sense of inclusion in the company as well as cement the idea that the growth they represent for the company is important.

Moreover, meeting the CEO gives employees a direct window into the company culture and what type of employee experience they can expect. A great first meeting with the CEO stays with employees for a long time to come, positively impacting their sense of belonging and commitment, which, in turn, drives better retention and performance.

3. Provide support throughout the onboarding journey.

During onboarding, managers should focus on cutting down the time spent on new hires’ administrative duties and increasing time spent on performance coaching and creating connections. Ideally, HR has equipped you with a technological platform that handles these key tasks. Using these tools, you will be able to implement and track onboarding best practices in real time throughout each stage of the process, like the following:

Before a new hire starts, you can have them register on your company’s onboarding portal so they can view a welcome video, complete their initial documentation, and receive their day-one schedule and overall customized onboarding program. You can also check whether all the relevant stakeholders have been notified of the new hire’s pending arrival.

On day one, you can track whether the new hire has successfully completed their schedule for the day, including whether they were introduced to key stakeholders, were placed in their workstation, received their business tools, and finished their day-one learning program. You also can receive feedback from employees regarding their day one experience, allowing you to take corrective action.

For the remainder of the onboarding program, you can monitor whether new hires have read critical company information, check for completion and pass rates for e-learning modules, and gauge the impact of the onboarding experience on the achievement of key onboarding goals at an individual and cohort level.

By the end of the program, you will have a comprehensive dashboard depicting the level of achievement in each of your onboarding goals so you can see what’s working and what needs to be improved.

Lastly, you’ll want to ensure this new platform integrates with your overall human resource management system. That way, you can easily track the impact of your onboarding program on actual new hire on-the-job performance and levels of new employee satisfaction.

During a time when companies are struggling to retain talent, creating a strong onboarding process for new hires is imperative. By implementing a strategic onboarding program, managers can build new hires’ confidence, increase engagement, and create an environment that retains talent for years to come.

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By Peter Weddle, CEO TAtech

The military is sometimes criticized for preparing to fight the last war, instead of the very different conflict that is likely to occur in the future. It’s a failure of imagination that could easily afflict talent technology companies as well. Right now, the War for Talent is making for pretty good times among the industry’s solution providers, but that success won’t last forever. The War for Talent will enter a new phase at some point, and those that aren’t getting ready for it will find themselves in jeopardy.

Business is cyclical. The War for Talent has been through at least three very different manifestations since the term was coined by McKinsey & Company back in the late 1990s. Each of those variants have forced talent technology companies – whether they were job boards, aggregators and ATS companies or recruitment marketing agencies, conversational AI solutions or programmatic ad buying platforms – to develop and implement a new business strategy. The old way of winning no longer worked, and survival let alone prosperity required a new go-to-market game plan.

Today’s War for Talent has a number of defining features, but the two most important are the demand for and supply of candidates. The former is way up as employers retool for the post-pandemic market, and the latter is way down thanks to Baby Boomer retirements, women leaving the workforce and Millennials rethinking what they want from the world of work. That structural imbalance has pried opened employers’ wallets like never before. Recruitment advertising is soaring. And, investment in new talent technology solutions is off the charts.

Not every company is benefiting, of course, but many maybe even most are. It’s a great time to be in the solution provider business, but it’s also a time fraught with risk. Companies are so engrossed with squeezing every last dollar, euro, pound and yen out of today’s market, they fail to think about or make any preparations for what comes next.

Now, running a business in these heady times is hardly a trivial challenge. Even success presents a full tableau of problems, so it’s natural to focus every minute and asset on solving them. In the best of cases, however, that one-sided commitment will force the company to play catch-up ball when the market changes – as it inevitably will – and in the worst of cases, it could produce a fatal disaster.

Preparing for the Next War

I’m an old soldier who spent a number of years imagining the future for the U.S. Armed Forces, so I know how difficult that kind of planning can be. It requires that you step back from a preoccupation with the present and try to visualize what could happen in the future. What would cause today’s circumstances to change and how would that change present itself?

For example, if inflation produces a recession in the U.S., how would that downturn affect the demand for talent? The purchases of talent technology? And, would those outcomes be different if the recession were mild, or deep?

Similarly, what if yet another Covid variant – this one even more transmissible and deadly than Delta – erupted in China and threw global supply chains into further turmoil. How would that affect the talent acquisition needs in specific industries, from auto manufacturing and trucking to warehousing and the airlines?

No one’s crystal ball is perfect, and such an exercise can seem … well, a bit frivolous. And yet, failing to think about and yes, prepare for these consequences can undermine even today’s most successful companies. They must be getting ready now for what comes next. For example:
• What steps must they take to prepare for a rapid and dramatic downturn in demand and how will should they implement those steps without compromising their carefully nurtured brand?
• Should they set aside or make arrangements for capital, so that you can acquire weakened competitors or ancillary technology that will expand their presence in the market?
• How must the skill sets of their current team change or be supplemented to introduce those and other new market strategies effectively?

Getting a head start on answering those questions in the present will strengthen a company’s defenses for the next phase in the War for Talent and potentially give it the offensive capacity to rise to an even greater level of success in that battle. Instead of a failure, it’s the profiting of imagination.

Food for Thought,
Peter

Peter Weddle is the author or editor of over two dozen books and a former columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He is also the founder and CEO of TAtech: The Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions. You can download his latest book – The Neonaissance – FOR FREE at OneStoryforAll.com. And, if you don’t have time to read the entire book, just download a short excerpt of his inspirational message.

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In our last post, we discussed how to optimize job posts for Google for Jobs. The other key party to optimize for, of course, is job seekers. Job boards can do a lot to improve UX for job seekers who come to their site – but for best results, they need employers to provide key information that applicants care about.

Maybe the most important piece? Salary data.

Unfortunately, most employers still aren’t including salary data in job listings. In fact, we recently analyzed more than 6.8 million jobs in our JobsIndex and found that only 7.8 percent included salary data.

The good news: employers can stand out from the pack by adding salary information now. Here are three key points to communicate to your customers to encourage them to include salary information in job listings so they can attract the best applicants.

1. Workers Want Salary Information

In a survey of more than 5,000 job seekers conducted last fall, 62 percent said that salary data would persuade them to apply for open positions. In fact, salary information was the most important thing to online applicants – ahead of waiving a cover letter and offering a sign-on bonus.

That’s particularly important given that the US currently has a four percent unemployment rate, which is what economists consider “full employment.” Combined with the ongoing “Great Resignation,” in which many employees are rethinking what they want from a job – and leaving their current roles to get it – employers should take the desire for pay data seriously.

Employers are often hesitant to publicize salary data for many reasons. They may think it lessens their negotiating power or forces them to pay candidates more than they might have otherwise. And in recent years (starting during the Great Recession) keeping salary ranges private was the norm.

But the employment landscape has shifted. Unemployment is low and workers have more negotiating power than they did a decade ago. If your customers haven’t yet recognized this reality, you may want to highlight a few points about the value of posting salary data:

It saves time. No more lengthy resume reviews, interviews, and test projects only to find out that employer and applicant aren’t aligned on salary expectations.

It signals that you’re a transparent organization. Employers know what a given position’s work is worth to their organization. They can signal that they value employees by being upfront about it.

It attracts busy jobseekers. Your client’s ideal applicant may already be employed. If a recruiter reaches out with a listing, that candidate is much more likely to engage if they see a salary number that meets their expectations.

Beyond these benefits, though, including salary data helps organizations achieve bigger goals.

2. Posting Salary Info Improves Equity

Studies show over and over that keeping salaries secret hurts women and BIPOC workers, who are less likely to negotiate for higher salaries and, when they do, are likely to ask for less money than their white male counterparts.

That’s really important given that companies with more diverse teams – and especially more diverse leadership teams – outperform their more homogenous peers.

The takeaway: posting salary data can help companies attract and retain the kinds of teams that lead to better bottom-line performance.

What’s maybe most compelling here is that including salary ranges in job postings is easy. While much of the work of improving diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout an organization is complex and ongoing, adding salary data to job postings is a simple, immediate way to make progress.

3. Posting Salary Data on Job Listings May Soon Be the Law

While there’s a clear business case for including salary data in job postings, some companies may also be legally required to do it.

In Colorado, employers have been required since January 2021 to include salary data in their job postings. That’s probably why Colorado has the highest percentage of job listings with salary data (see Figure 1), but employers still aren’t universally complying. In fact, only about 27 percent of live Colorado job listings actually include salary data.

Starting in April, New York City will require salary ranges in all postings of jobs, promotions, and transfers.

And many other states (including Connecticut, Maryland, Rhode Island, and Washington) require disclosure of salary range upon applicant’s request. Nevada employers must provide salary range regardless of whether a candidate asks.

Make sure your clients are aware of these regulations to help them avoid fines and penalties.

Figure 1: Percentage of jobs that include salary data by state

Guide Your Clients to Better-Performing Job Postings

Job boards help their clients fill vacancies by formatting listings, attracting applicants, and promoting open roles. To really deliver what job seekers want, though, they need key information from employers – including salary data.

If you’re looking for ways to communicate to your clients how including salary data in their postings can help them stand out among the millions of listings out there at any given time, feel free to pass along this post.

If you’d like to learn more about our JobsIndex tool, which delivers tailored feeds of jobs information to populate job boards, get in touch.