How to Attract, Screen, and Manage Your Talent in Today’s Hiring Landscape

BY Stephanie Reed | July 17, 2024

Companies are more focused on retention and internal mobility than ever. From this focus, hiring talent externally has become more convoluted. The technical complexity of job boards generates a large pool of applicants who are not necessarily matched with the right jobs. So how can businesses optimize their search for qualified external talent within these talent pools? Heidi Barnett, the CEO of ApplicantPro, shared critical methods of optimizing the recruiting process during From Day One a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s June virtual conference.

Knowing who you are as a business provides valuable information for sourcing. It’s imperative to clearly define who you are as a business, including your values, unique attributes, and what customers and employees love about it, says Barnett.

ApplicantPro empowers businesses to streamline their hiring processes by posting jobs across multiple job boards, conducting thorough applicant screening, and offering guidance to hiring managers. One of ApplicantPro's key insights draws a parallel between job boards and search engines.

Heidi Barnett, the CEO of ApplicantPro, led the thought leadership spotlight (company photo)

By understanding that job boards prioritize higher visibility based on relevancy, businesses can develop more effective recruiting strategies, says Barnett. For example, job boards such as Indeed are optimized for the search of job seekers – not companies. To give job seekers the most results catered to their needs, Indeed provides visibility to newer jobs, jobs with more reviews, and higher click-through rates. “So their core focus is on candidates and candidate flow, not on companies that are posting jobs," she said.

Reaching more applicants isn’t necessarily a disadvantage either. “What we’re going to want to do is cast the widest net: allow more people to see the jobs so they have interest. And then on the back end, we’re going to search for quality. And we're going to make sure that, not that we don’t have this huge influx coming in, but we’re focused on quality.”

Barnett provided several job ad optimization strategies tailored to draw in the ideal talent from vast talent pools. First, include your salary. Otherwise Indeed creates an estimation that may not accurately represent your business. Next, close the job position if it hasn’t been filled within 21-30 days. Instead of reposting it, which will make Indeed block your traffic, rewrite its contents so that it will be recognized as a new job.

Finally, prioritize the disposition of your candidates: by reviewing and engaging with your candidates, Indeed offers you more visibility and you get to screen candidates more efficiently. Barnett also advised businesses on what not to do, such as using redirect URLs in your ad that will take applicants away from your job post.

Screening Tools to Identify Key Talent

Effective screening tools can help identify top talent. Barnett recommends open-ended screening questions with multiple response options to gather comprehensive information from candidates. This approach allows a more thorough evaluation of applicants' skills, qualifications, and potential match for the organization.

Candidate matching has also emerged as a valuable tool for businesses to identify and interview top talent quicker than before. AI-powered candidate matching tools assist in analyzing job screening questions, resumes, and years of experience. This newer technology streamlines recruiting, allowing businesses to make informed hiring decisions more quickly and efficiently.

Pre-employment assessments also serve as a valuable tool for identifying candidates, says Barnett. These assessments provide additional insights into a candidate's alignment with the desired qualifications, offering a more comprehensive understanding of their suitability for the position. This allows organizations to make informed hiring decisions, increasing the likelihood of selecting qualified talent.

Lastly, video interviews are a transparent method to gain insights into applicants' personalities and assess their potential suitability for your organization's culture and values.

Using these strategies, businesses can effectively “make sure that you’re not only getting these positions filled, but navigating all of the different quality challenges,” she said.

Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, ApplicantPro, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. 

Stephanie Reed is a freelance news, marketing, and content writer. Much of her work features small business owners throughout diverse industries. She is passionate about promoting small, ethical, and eco-conscious businesses.

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Enhancing The Employee Experience With Innovative Technology

Some say high turnover is simply the cost of doing business, and for many industries, that will always be the case. But the numbers tell a different story. Disengaged workers cost the world economy $8.8 trillion in lost productivity, according to a 2023 report from Gallup.“A number like this shows that the opportunity cost of not investing in the employee experience fully outweighs the investment that you would make. 8.9 trillion dollars [is] 10% of the world’s economy. That’s a staggering number to think about,” said Josh Parente, the director of sales at LineZero. Parente spoke about the cost of employee disengagement, and how to re-engage them during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Salt Lake City conference.Doing Employee Engagement WellLineZero is passionate about the employee experience: “We live our values of ‘People Matter.’” “We focus on building and enhancing the employee experience through technology,” said Parente. LineZero has a long-term partnership with Meta’s Workplace and current partnership with Workvivo, and they’ve taken that experience to new organizations they work with. “Our objective when we work with a lot of our partners is to act as an extension of their organizations. We work with our partners to help them build and deploy their employee experience through technology.”Parente says they start with an employee’s experience from day one, “not just throughout maturity.” They focus on that starting point and “continue to push that positive momentum throughout the lifecycle [of the employee].” HR professionals and leaders should think about how connected their employees are to the mission and whether or not they're “excited and inspired” to clock in every day.During an impromptu survey with the audience, Parente sussed out a few key items that highlighted the lack of employee engagement and what companies are doing about it. Building trust turned out to be the number one challenge attendees were facing in their organizations. Email was how they were dealing with it. And, budget was one thing they'd increase to mitigate disengaged employees, if a “genie” was available. “Investing in the employee experience leads to 43% less turnover, an 81% reduction in absenteeism and a 20% increase in productivity. So if we’re looking at the budget and we’re looking at the opportunity cost, not investing far outweighs the cost of actually making the investment.”Slide from Parente's presentation, highlighting statistics shared When asked whether the above statistics shocked anyone, not a single hand went up. “80% of employees feel lonely. 3 out of 5 are burnt out. These are statistics that clearly articulate that we are facing a massive problem when it comes to the labor market today. So the question is, what are we going to do about it?”Looking back at the Great Resignation of 2022, the data paints a clear picture. Many boomers took early retirement, while millennials left their jobs in droves. But one statistic stood out to Parente. “Of the millennials that turned over during the 2022 Great Resignation, 47% of them were high performers.” That’s a big deal. “High performers outperform the average employee at a rate of four to one, and they make up about 15% of your organization.”If companies want to build strong cultures and retain top talent, they need to invest in the employee experience—especially for those high performers because they will help drive the employee experience and "push the [company] culture forward." Millennials, on average, change jobs every two to three years, meaning another wave of turnover is coming. “There’s a good opportunity here for us to start diving into ways to stop this mass turnover, especially with our high performers,” Parente said.Parente shared another chart inspired by Simon Sinek’s work with Navy SEALs. The takeaway? “The high performance, low trust person—this is a toxic team member. Even though they’re driving high performance, they would sooner select somebody that has low performance, high trust over somebody who has high performance, [low] trust.”Parente's slide on the relationship between trust and performance Take that to heart: The most elite teams prioritize trust over raw talent.Encouraging the Entrepreneur to be an IntrapreneurAccording to a chief people officer at a major enterprise Parente and LineZero works with, “Within the U.S. economy, [that company] [does] a really good job of inspiring and encouraging entrepreneurship,” the officer said. But when companies invest in employee experience, they don’t just keep workers—they create “intrapreneurs,” employees who think like entrepreneurs but stay within the company.The key is investing in high-trust employees.“Those high trust categories are those intrapreneurs that you want to encourage within your organization,” Parente said. “Those are the 15% that you want to continue to keep and continue to encourage to be part of the culture.” The solution Parente says is better technology. Right now, organizations juggle multiple platforms—productivity suites, HR systems, endless apps—but they don’t talk to each other. “What if we had one? One that connected everybody, our cultures, our productivity tools, and our HR systems? The truth is, we have that at our fingertips today.”Yet, many companies still rely on outdated communication methods. “Email is still number one." But mass emails with critical company updates? They get buried. “I don’t know if you guys read them, but they usually fall to the bottom of my inbox.”Parente says we all need to move in a different direction. “Legacy and top down communications [are] something that showed hierarchy. It showed clear efficiency, but it's not effective. It’s not inspiring, it’s not empowering our employees and our team members to go out and be entrepreneurs for the business.”As organizations look to the future, the way they communicate and engage employees must evolve. Creating an environment where employees feel encouraged, not overlooked, when sharing ideas is (or should be) the future. “If we’re not evolving and moving our organization forward, those statistics are going to stay at 60% of burnout. They’re going to stay at 80% of loneliness,” Parente said. “I don’t know about you, but if I go into work and I know that 80% of my coworkers feel lonely. That’s not an inspiring thing. We're not inspiring change. We're not inspiring communication and collaboration. We’re just staying the same.”Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, LineZero, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight.Matthew Koehler is a freelance journalist and licensed real-estate agent based in Washington, DC. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Greater Greater Washington, The Southwester, and Walking Cinema, among others.(Photo by Sean Ryan for From Day One)

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Prioritizing Benefits That Drive Impact for Your Employees: A Successful Case Study

As companies compete for talent with increasingly generous benefits packages, many are discovering a frustrating truth: robust offerings alone don’t guarantee employee satisfaction or utilization.“You can have millions of programs available to your employee population, but if they’re not educated, if they’re not aware, we’re not going to see any value,” said Preeti Nadendla, senior global benefits partner at Marqeta. Nadendla spoke during a From Day One webinar about “Prioritizing Benefits That Drive Impact for Your Employees: A Successful Case Study,” in conversation with Britt Barney, manager of customer success at Northstar.Nadendla’s perspective comes from navigating the complex landscape of global benefits at Marqeta, an Oakland, CA., based financial technology company that provides backend systems for payment card programs. With approximately 850 employees across the U.S., UK, Canada, and Poland, Marqeta exemplifies the challenges faced by growing international companies.When Nadendla joined Marqeta two years ago, she found herself in a scenario familiar to many benefits professionals: excellent offerings that went underutilized because employees simply didn’t understand them. "The sheer volume of benefits information was overwhelming," she recalled. “Employees weren’t utilizing them effectively and didn’t understand the value of what was being offered, which created a lot of frustration,” she said. As the sole benefits professional at the time, Nadendla methodically rebuilt the company’s approach from the ground up. She transformed vendor relationships from transactional to collaborative partnerships, establishing regular meetings and leveraging vendors to help educate employees. Britt Barney of Northstar spoke with Preeti Nadendla of Marqeta during the webinar (photo by From Day One)With open enrollment looming just months after her arrival, Nadendla orchestrated multiple virtual education sessions with partner vendors, created accessible FAQs, and ensured recorded sessions were available across global time zones. 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While many companies struggle to provide equitable benefits across different regulatory environments, Nadendla has developed a philosophy where benefits should be “globally competitive but locally relevant.”Northstar, the financial wellness platform, provides personalized guidance to employees through dedicated advisors, helping them navigate their benefits options and broader financial decisions. As Barney of Northstar says, the platform focuses on building relationships. “In my 13 years of working in financial services, there isn’t a single question that doesn’t tie back to money. So from a benefits perspective, we'll talk about budgeting and saving for emergencies, paying down debt and having a family retirement, all of those types of things. But we’ll also talk about which health plan you should choose,” she said. Marqeta and Northstar put Nadendla’s principles to the test when addressing issues within the UK’s pension program. 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