Neither did most of the emerging SAAS startups still in their nascent stage.

It was long before when India counted a new ‘unicorn’ every other week, or when tech platforms got listed on the stock exchanges amidst huge interest from the general public. Even angel investors saw the Indian SAAS startup scene with cynicism and skepticism back then. The holy grail for startups, back then, was the US market.

Why the US attracted SAAS startups?
The US market was grown up; they understood how SAAS products worked, paid fairly, and weren’t perturbed by cutting-edge technology being added to their existing systems. The Indian market, on the other hand, was only getting introduced to world-class tech, management teams were generally skeptical about tech products, and those who ‘piloted’ such solutions only paid peanuts.

Fast forward to 2021, and we made 50+ customers in one year. Mostly from India and APAC. Yes, we penetrated the US market, but 2021 proved one of our significant decisions to be correct - Focusing on the Asian market.

Why Should startups focus on the Asian market?

To begin with, the Indian market is maturing when it comes to SAAS solutions. Companies have seen homegrown tech products scaling up and have begun to feel comfortable in trying avant-garde solutions. The scenario had started changing even during pre-covid times. Then Covid arrived, and the entire tech landscape changed. Companies that were only testing digitization now went fully digital. Others who had never tried tech solutions now needed to automate a lot of their processes. Many companies that never used any ATS in the past are now adopting solutions like Skillate to digitize their recruitment process. These effects have lasted even after the first and second pandemic wave. Organizations that have realized benefits during this period are happy to pay competitive prices for such solutions. Tech solutions are no longer a ‘good to have’ it is on the top of the list of things to ‘must have.’ We are also seeing a more regular and hassle-free approach to renewing contracts and upscaling the solution.

What do Enterprises want from Startups?

Ensuring data security is a major factor that tech startups need to figure in. Enterprises are a lot more comfortable when they know that their technology partner is credible and will keep their client’s data safe. Skillate facilitated it this year by getting ISO Certification, providing Microsoft Firewall protection, and enabling PII encryption in our solutions.


Transparency is the Best Policy

Another thing that worked for us last year was - Customer’s word of mouth. We have kept our marketing primarily organic, and most of our engagements are from the goodwill of our solutions and customer support. Our customer webinars have also been hugely popular - where we discuss their experience and the benefits and flaws of our products.

We have extended such transparency to our customer support team as well. We now have a full-fledged customer support platform in which queries are answered via automated modules or one-to-one calls depending on the seriousness of the issue.

Why are Companies preferring Indian Startups?

Enterprises in our country also realize the benefits of working with their native counterparts. Gone are the days when Indian companies relied on US-based tech solutions. Indian tech startups are providing state-of-the-art technology , better customization, and technical support due to a better understanding of the market and having the advantage of working in the same time zone.

Indian startups also have been flexible when it comes to product-market fitment. For example, at Skillate, our solutions can be used as a stand-alone recruitment solution for small to mid-size companies. We also integrate with traditional ATSs like Oracle Taleo and SAP SuccessFactors to add a layer of AI to their system. In fact, we are the only recruitment solution in India that integrates with the SAP ecosystem! Such nimbleness and very little deployment time attract enterprises and growing startups alike.

Going Forward…
2021 was an eye-opening year for us. A year where we processed over 73 lakh applications, worked with 15+ unicorns and expanded into various countries. However, if you would ask me the direction for Skillate from here on, I would say - “Look East.”

Skillate’s 2021 in a glimpse:

The employee market is getting more competitive every day. Today, hiring managers from different industries are more intrigued by modern technology to hire new candidates. Data-driven recruitments are getting in trend. If you want to hire new people for your team, you can easily streamline the hiring process.

If you are new to the recruiting team and are planning on hiring new candidates for different departments of your company, you need to know about the top recruiting metrics that are in trend.

What are recruiting metrics?

Recruiting metrics, also known as staffing metrics, are the complete set of points that recruiters need to track, manage, and optimize for the hiring process. In simple words, recruiting metrics are used to monitor and keep track of the hiring success and the process of hiring for a specific organization. Recruiting metrics can help the recruiting team understand whether they are hiring the right people in the right way.

In this article, we will discuss about the top ten hiring metrics that every recruiter should focus on. There are more than a dozen different recruiting metrics. Still, we will only discuss the most popular and helpful ones in this post.

If you are new to the recruiting team and are planning on hiring new candidates for different departments of your company, you need to know about the top recruiting metrics that are in trend.

What are recruiting metrics?

Recruiting metrics, also known as staffing metrics, are the complete set of points that recruiters need to track, manage, and optimize for the hiring process. In simple words, recruiting metrics are used to monitor and keep track of the hiring success and the process of hiring for a specific organization. Recruiting metrics can help the recruiting team understand whether they are hiring the right people in the right way.

In this article, we will discuss about the top ten hiring metrics that every recruiter should focus on. There are more than a dozen different recruiting metrics. Still, in this post, we will only discuss the most popular and helpful ones.

Ten recruiting metrics hiring managers should know about!

Considering these metrics in the hiring process would help you get the best team for sure! Let us dig into the details of these metrics.

Application Completion Rate

You can easily understand how smooth your hiring process is by tracking the application completion rate.

Some organizations prefer candidates to complete a form to understand how relevant the candidate is for the job position, but not all job seekers are interested in filling out Google forms when applying for a job. Rather they are simply interested in dropping their visual CVs in your inbox. So if you are worried that your application completion rate is low, you can easily boost it by accepting drop-in applications and resumes. Drop-in resumes are trending these days because applicants today have the ease of creating attractive resumes with the help of a resume builder. These online CV makers help candidates create resumes. Still, they also help them share their applications/resumes on different job listing platforms. In short, these modern resume builders play an important role in connecting seekers with recruiters.

Another factor that might be leading to incomplete applications, is the need to repetitively fill in the same information from resumes time and again. The Skillate resume parser auto-fills the application forms on your career page to make the process faster and easier for the candidates.

Like all other recruitment metrics in this list, this one is also considered helpul and crucifocusingr. You can easily understand how smooth your hiring process is by tracking the application completion rate.

Time to Hire the Candidate

Often confused together, the time to hire is different from the time to fill. Time to fill refers to the time a recruiter takes to fill an empty position in the company. In contrast, the time to hire is the time your recruiting team would take to hire a candidate. The hiring process consists of different stages. This includes receiving the resume or job application from the candidate, detailed analysis of the resume, comparison with other resumes received, calling for the interview, and of course, final hiring.

Different companies take different amounts of time to hire. This time is dependent on the recruitment process of the team. Suppose you are the only person responsible for the hiring process. In that case, you might recruit a candidate in less than a day. Still, if you have a complete channel through which a candidate's resume has to go through, then it can take a couple of days to a week to hire a new candidate.

Using a cutting-edge ATS that can take care of the end-to-end hiring process might be a great way for most enterprises to significantly cut down the time to hire.

Source of Hire

This metric can help you find out the sources from where you are getting the most job applications. You can easily post your open roles on these platforms if you know about the sources where most job seekers drop their resumes and applications. You can always use the same sources to find the most relevant candidates. Posting jobs on the right sources would help recruiters save a lot of time and cost!

Today, hiring managers are inclined to post job ads on social media platforms and paid advertising channels. Job seekers are active the most. Today candidates are using creative resume templates to create attractive resumes which help them pass the recruitment process.

Cost Per Hire

This metric refers to the amount of money you have spent hiring optimize to fill out a specific position. You have to consider both the internal and external resume matching and be consumed to fill out the job.

To calculate the cost per hire, You have to add the total internal and external c and divide the sum by the total number of hires during a specific time. The answer would be equal to the product offering total cost per hire.

Cost per hire = Total internal cost + total external cost / Number of employees hired during a particular period!

Here, total internal cost refers to the internal expenses incurred by the organization for hiring an employee. This would include a referral bonus, infrastructure, space rental if you need it, and of course the salary of the recruitment team.

External cost is what you have paid to external vendors and platforms to advertise your open job positions. In some cases, this cost can increase if you have to pay a recruitment agency fee, job fairs, and any signing bonuses.

Time to fill

Time to fill is the most commonly used and helpful hiring metric. This refers to the total amount it takes for an employer to hire a new candidate. There are different ways you can measure time. The most commonly used is measuring the days between when you have published the advertisement for the job and the day you have hired the candidate.

Time to fill in a very important metric that you need to consider, but before that, you should know that supply and demand in the market is the most influential factor on this metric. The number of days to hire a candidate depends on the number of people applying for the job and how quickly your team operates when it receives job applications.

Time to fill is essential because it gives the hiring manager and the team an idea of how long it would take to fill or replace a position in the team. The Skillate recruitment dashboard provides hiring managers with data-backed insights and analytics of the recruitment process. It ​​gives you an in-depth analysis of your own hiring trends and provides you with analytics based on location, experience, education, past companies, and skills.

Diversity and Relevancy of Candidates Applying

Diversification in the hiring process is getting common these days. In fact, in some industries, this metric is considered an essential part of the hiring process. Diversity recruitment helps you in sourcing the top talent for your company.

If you want to get diverse applications, you need to make sure that you post your open positions on multiple diverse platforms like social media. You also have to monitor the data closely to see the candidates that are applying for the job. Open candidate surveys and hiring feedback can help you focus on the diversity of candidates. The more diversified your workplace would be, the more people are interested in working with your company. You have to ensure that you hire people from both genders, all colors, and don't discriminate against any candidate based on their demography!

Also, you need to ensure that you are attracting relevant candidates for a job post. If you have posted a job post for an electrician, you would not want resumes dropping in your pipeline related to candidates having experience in plumbing. So always ensure that you focus on highlighting relevant skills and experience required to fill the open position. Today, thanks to the resume maker, candidates are creating multiple resumes for different kinds of job posts, making it easier for recruiters to get relevant and job-specific resumes.

Skillate’s automated solutions minimize human bias in your recruitment process to ensure that candidates are hired only on the basis of their merit.

Candidates Applying per Opening

This is another important metric that tells the recruiting teams about the number of people for the job position you have listed on different platforms. This metric is very helpful as it tells the team how productive their job post has been in the employment market. If the job post you published didn't get much application or got you some unqualified candidates, then it is time that you take a step back and find out what's wrong in your post or with the platform. Sometimes changing the job description or the application criteria can help you attract more candidates towards the job post.

Whenever you post an open position in the employment market, you have to make sure that you know what kind of applicants you will find there. You have to ensure that the eligibility criteria are not too difficult for the candidates to apply.

Offer Acceptance Rate

The offer acceptance rate would tell you and your team whether there is room for improvement in your recruitment system or you have reached perfection. Those of you who don't know how to calculate the offer acceptance rate should simply know that the total number of job offers accepted divided by the total number of job positions against a specific time frame would give you the exact offer acceptance rate in your company.

If the offer acceptance rate is higher, it is a good sign that your company has a good employer brand in the market. Most candidates are interested in working with your company. But in case your offer acceptance rate is low, then it means that there are some flaws in the recruitment system. If you are getting tons of relevant and good quality applicants, but still, these candidates are not accepting your joining offers, you need to work on your flaws and take some corrective actions to grow this rate.

Relieving your recruitment team of mundane tasks, and allowing them to focus on valuable objectives like candidate experience would be a great way to increase the Offer Acceptance Rate.

Recruiter and Hiring Manager Happiness

Happiness matters a lot, and you don't have to be an expert to understand it. The recruiting process doesn't only revolve around the comfort space and happiness of the candidate but also around the satisfaction of the hiring team. As a recruiter, you must understand that you need to satisfy your team to make the recruitment process better.

The more you work on internally improving your team and communication in the hiring process, the more beneficial it would be for hiring new candidates. You have to consider what the hiring team thinks of your decisions and your hiring procedure. It would be best to get feedback from your team and welcome suggestions and constructive criticism, which can be favorable for the hiring process. As a recruiter, you should always be open to working forward for improvements with the help of your team.

For instance, if you like the old-school hiring process and are not interested in getting resumes built with online resume builder tools, you have to make sure that your team is on board with this opinion and plan of yours before you execute a job post. The more effectively you can communicate with your team members, the better your recruitments.

Attrition Rate

The attrition rate refers to the rate at which your company loses employees in a given period. Some companies also call this hiring metric the first-year attrition rate. You must understand that the attrition rate is a big recruitment concern. You might end up consuming a lot of your expenses in hiring the best candidate who would probably leave as the first year ends.

You have to consider the cost involved in hiring and replacing an employee before you start thinking about new ones. High attrition rates are common in companies that don't accurately communicate their expectations with their new employees. We have seen that lack of communication results in loss of employment as soon as the probation period ends. There are multiple reasons why a new employee might leave the company. The leading one is a lack of transparency in defining roles and responsibilities at recruitment. So this is an important metric that you and your recruitment team have to work on before taking new employees on board.

Conclusion

Hiring candidates for new job positions is better if you focus on data-driven recruiting and the metrics discussed above for you and your team. You must also know that the process and metrics related to recruitment keep on changing from time to time and according to the modern trends in the employment market.

Today, you can see different recruitment industry changes like resume scanning tools for short listing relevant CVs. So the only suggestion we would give you, in the end, is to consider all the recruitment metrics but keep yourself updated with the modern trend and changes so that you can update yourself and your team along with the process of hiring new candidates. The more you take help from modern technology and data-driven tools, the more valuable candidates you can find for your company.

Skillate is an advanced talent intelligence platform to make hiring easy, fast, and transparent.  The product helps in optimizing the entire value chain of recruitment beginning from creating the job requisition, to resume matching, to candidate engagement. Skillate’s sophisticated AI engine goes much beyond a simple keyword search, to find the perfect fit. As a product offering, Skillate integrates seamlessly well with ATS platforms like SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle Taleo, and others. The best part is that any end to end recruitment platform (even homegrown systems) can also leverage the AI capability of Skillate within their own Platform.

When thinking about advertising for the recruitment of new team members, it is important to understand certain notions that govern what a good recruitment ad looks like. To best understand how an advertisement can help you attract more applications and increase your chances of choosing from a large pool, you should start thinking about what your ad will look like to job applicants. Use this thinking as a starting point in making your dream advertisement.

Understand the Basics of Recruitment Advertising

The type of ad you manage to make will in large part determine the kind of applicants you will be able to attract. To best use the little space you have, think twice before making any bold decisions. Thinking ahead will save you a lot of resources as well as a good recruitment ad will resonate more strongly and will attract the kind of people you are looking for. What follows are our top recommendations for running successful recruitment advertising campaigns.

Grab Their Attention

Ways to grab the candidate attention in Job advertisement:

1. Place your attention-catcher in the first 5 seconds of an Instagram video ad
2. If using YouTube, make sure that your hook is WRITTEN in captions rather than spoken, as video previews are silent
3. On Google AdSense, favor GIFs over static imagery and go for strong meta-descriptions with a hook in the first 158 characters for in-results ads on Google results page
4. Facebook is a great ad platform, with a slightly different approach since Facebook is more text-focused. Using your findings from Digital Marketing strategies, you can use professional writers to more easily implement them in the text describing your company and what you are looking for. A more visual approach is a good thing to do, but your intentions may fail with a fraction of viewers
5. Pinterest is as visual as it gets. The platform is perfect for photo-based ads and tag-based searches and may attract more women than men. Keep this in mind when looking for your next recruitment advertisement platform
6. LinkedIn is the best bet you have with recruitment advertisements. Thanks to their algorithms that connect professionals from various fields, they can present your ad to your desired audience. This is the perfect platform for the more tech-savvy, moving in specialized circles.

Make a Good First Impression

Making a good impression is the first thing that you should think about. You should specifically recognize what kind of job applicants you are looking for and what you may or may not like. Allow your findings to guide you through the rest of the ad-making. Always allow brainstorming and coming up with motos and visuals that could attract your desired audience's attention.

Work on the Outlay

Even before any words are read, a good outlay will attract the eyes of the client. Making sure that the visual aspect of the text is taken into account is also important, so choose your text formatting wisely and include it in a picture, rather than leave it as a chunk of text. Screens of different sizes easily reformat your text and break the cohesion, which cannot happen with an image.

Tips for text outlay for Job Advertisement:

• Be using different font styles and sizes for different levels of hierarchy,
• Be justified since it makes the best use of screen space and looks styled and formal,
• Use up to three shades of the same text color. Make sure the colors either match or complement your logo palette.
  

Reasonable outlay speaks volumes about your company. Although not everybody wants their ads to be too formal, organizing a text and making it visually appealing will make you sound more professional and serious. After all, we all remember the difference between well- and badly-made college notes.

SEO-Optimize Your Ad Campaign

Making your ad content as search-friendly as possible goes without saying. Go for the optimization once you've decided on the target audience, the medium, and styling. Instead of overstuffing your short form with repeated keywords, go for synonyms and various possible search terms. Hire the best professional thesis writing service to make sure that the writing assignment is well composed. Sometimes, hiring professionals who can summarize huge volumes of data for you can pay off more than you think.

Writing an effective ad will attract as many job-hunting eyes as possible and inform and present the basics of what you are looking for. Stop for a moment to think about the questions applicants may have had during your previous recruitment campaigns, and try to answer those questions beforehand.

Guide Through Visuals

Use visuals as much as you can. People can retain 65% of what they see, unlike reading, where only 10-20% is retained. The visuals should have internal cohesion that should stem from your company's idea and logo colors. On some platforms, you can even add captions to an image to make sure that your message stands out. You can hire a writing service to come up with catchy slogans and sentences that resonate. Having cohesion of this kind will ensure that you guide your applicants through a streamlined process with a constant feel.

Use Bullet Points

Using bullet points is good for several reasons:

• You can organize your ideas
• You can present snippets of information
• You can give a visual element to your ideas
• You can avoid content that is prolonged and watered down,
• You can interest people who skip over longer chunks of text.

Use Numbered Lists

Use numbered lists for the following reasons:

1. They are a great way to organize ideas hierarchically,
2. They can organize ideas chronologically,
3. They give the idea of separate chunks of information, unlike the bullet lists,
4. They are a great way to propose step-by-step information (such as the application process).

Do Not Sound Too Salesy

Avoid sounding too salesy. Making wild promises and presenting your workplace as a heaven for people you are trying to attract can be counterproductive. Any serious applicant with a lot of experience (i.e., people you should try to attract) will avoid overly romanticized job offers since they know that every workplace has its pros and cons.

Conclusion

Making sure that your recruitment advertising campaign runs smoothly and productively will turn into a successful recruitment advertising campaign. Remember that it is not the number of applicants, but rather the quality that you are looking for. Apply our tips on effective recruitment advertising for the best results. A successful ad should include all the relevant info wrapped in your colors and your idea of what an ideal job candidate should be like.

AI platforms like Skillate provide real-time feedback on JD for recruiters to more robust and detailed job descriptions. Learn how cutting-edge technology can provide you with better quality candidates here.

This is the second part of our blog on How Job-Resume Matching Engine Works

In the first part we discussed the first three sections of the Resume screening process - Vocabulary and AI training models, Resume Indexing and Job Indexing. In this article, we focus on the final and perhaps the most important bit - AI Matching Algorithm.

The overall screening process in recruitment is the combination of resume screening and phone screening process. Resume Screening is the process of finding the relevant profiles/resumes corresponding to a job from the pool of candidates.

After shortlisting the matching profiles, recruiters collect additional information (which generally are not present in resume documents like CTC, notice period, preferred location, etc.) over the phone call. This process is known as telephone screening.

In Skillate, we have tried to automate both processes. To automate the resume screening process, we have created an AI-powered Matching Engine, whereas, for the phone screening step - we have created an Intelligent Chatbot.

Let’s go one by one on how these steps work:

How Resume Matching works? Matching involves two steps:

• Indexed Filtering: To filter out the top (also max) 500 candidates with the help of a job indexed query.
• Stack Ranking: Using a deep neural network, stack rank those 500 candidates via the job-resume matching algorithm.‌

Indexed Filtering

As discussed in our last blog, via Job Indexing and Resume Indexing, the indexed information of both resumes and jobs are stored in SOLR. The JOB SOLR query is then built to filter top or max 500 candidates from the candidate database pool. This step is significant as it (indexed query) retrieves the top 500 candidates in milliseconds.

Stack Ranking

After retrieving the best 500 candidates via Indexed Filtering, every candidate goes through the Matching Algorithm for calculating the matching score between a job and a candidate. The ranking of all candidates happened via decreasing order of matching scores.

Matching Algorithm

Matching Algorithm is the AI-powered algorithm to compute the matching score between a job and a resume. The algorithm (powered by the Deep Neural Network) uses multiple matching signals that broadly include:

• Experience
  • Industry
  • Years of Experience
  • Title or Designations on three layers - based on title, role, and role category.
  • Seniority Level Matching.
    Example: CTO of a 25 members company and having five years of experience doesn't mean he is qualified for VP Technology in any Multinational Companies.

• Education
  • College Relevance - according to the requirement mentioned in the job description else, no biases in college preference.
  • Degree
  • Major - which is closely related to the job skills requirements.

• Skills
  • Functional Skills Example: JAVA, Enterprise Sales, Invoice Processing, etc.
  • Behavioral Skills Example: Critical Thinking, Communication Skills, etc.
  • Recent Candidate Skills

The Matching Algorithm uses the above matching variables in computing three scores - Skill, Education, and Experience. And according to the weights (which can be configured by the organization) given help in calculating Overall Matching Score.

Matching Score = f(Wt_Skill* Score_Skill, Wt_Education*Score_Education, Wt_Experience*Score_Experience)

Once the recruitment team completes the resume matching, the next step is to know more about the details that are not provided in the resume by calling the candidate.

Here is how we automate this step:

Chatbot Screening

To optimize the phone screening process (which consumes a significant time and bandwidth of the recruiters), Skillate provides Conversational AI chatbot functionalities where the chatbot interacts with the candidates and collects relevant information beyond resumes.

By leveraging Named Entity Recognition (popularly known as NER) and the ongoing conversation, Conversational AI Chatbot understands the intent of the candidate response and drives the remaining interaction accordingly.

For example: let's assume the chatbot has humbly asked the Current CTC, and the candidate has responded with just 200,000. The chatbot will find the information incomplete and ask further questions like "Whether the CTC is per year or month" or "Please provide the currency".

Apart from optimizing the phone screening process, the other significances of Conversational AI Chatbot are:

1. Making existing Resume Database fresh and updated after collecting updated resumes via chatbot.
2. Quickly rediscovery of the potential hire from the resume database saving huge time and cost.

Skillate Chatbot converts passive profiles into active candidates. Multiple conversations can be configured to ask different sets of questions depending on role type, industry, domain, etc. To know more about Skillate solutions, visit the link below.

Missing out on a quality candidate in a swarming number of applications is a prevalent problem for recruitment teams worldwide. Not only is it virtually impossible for recruiters to scan through every application received, but the mundane task also takes up the valuable time of recruiters.

To address this issue, we at Skillate created our AI-based matching engine to ensure that recruitment teams never miss out on a quality candidate.                   This is how it works:

How does an AI-based Matching Engine work?

Step 1:Vocabulary and AI training models

To begin with, we needed to train the Skillate system with various profiles so that it understands the multiple terms and vocabulary used in the application. The Skillate AI engine is introduced on over 120 million profiles and almost 3 million jobs to understand the following information:

Skills Similarity

The Skillate system has a vocabulary of 44,345 skills across domains. The system represents every skill with a vector, finding cosine similarity. Example:

•  Sim(Java, Spring) - 0.8
  

•  Sim(Java, Sales) - 0.1
  

•  Sim(Sales, Business Development) - 0.9
  

•  Sim(Sales, Customer Success) - 0.6
  

Since sales and business development are complementary skills the system classifies them in one cluster giving it a high cosine similarity score. Same with the JAVA and Spring framework.

However, in Sales and JAVA, the skill set is very alien to each other, thus getting a low cosine score.

So, if a candidate has worked in an AI SAAS company, But has worked as a Business Development Manager. The system would recognize business development as the dominant skill via the context in his or her resume and cluster it with BD or sales profile rather than an AI or ML expert.

Company Industry Mapping

The other part comes in mapping companies with their respective industries so that once the JD demands applications from certain sectors, those profiles are given higher preference. For Example:

College Ranking on the basis of QS World ranking university:
The Skillate system uses QS World ranking to index universities across the world. This parameter is especially helpful for recruiters emphasizing the candidate’s educational background or only considering applicants from a specific university tier. Helps few companies who look for the pedigree more than anything else with a typical experience range in between 0-3 years.

Title Mapping with Role/Seniority Level and Role Category:
Skillate understands the various positions and the terms used to communicate similar position levels on hierarchical.

Major Similarity

Similar to how we generate cosine scores for various skillset, we do the same for the various education sectors.

For example, A candidate with a degree in CS and IT would be given more preference for an IT role, than someone studying Economics but with mentions of Computer Science in their resume.

Normalization

Understanding the commonly used abbreviations and industry terminology is one of our features:

Step 2: Resume Indexing

The Skillate resume parser uses deep learning to extract information from the most complex resumes. You can learn its detailed working here.

However, extracting the information is just the beginning of the process to different index profiles; we need to map different information present in the Resume. For Example:
If the candidate is Principal Software Engineer at Accenture, MSc from UIUC, pursuing a major in CSE in 2011. Apart from parsing the relevant information, we index the additional/indexed information as well from the training data:

Here,

Similar information computation is done for all the current and past experience and education of a candidate. This helps the system in understanding the candidate’s experience in the specific industry, his seniority level, and how fast he has progressed in his career.

• Finding the core competencies and ignoring irrelevant skills

A lot of times it is difficult to gauge the primary skillset of a candidate from his or her CV. in order to understand the best fit, it is important to the the relevant skills. This is done in 2 phases:

1. First, the Skillate system finds all the possible sets of skills that can be extracted from the resume.
2. Then for every skill, we check the candidate proficiency on the basis of his/her work experience, projects, and publications:

For example, let's say for skill “Machine Learning”, we compute the skill proficiency on the basis of :

Work Experience: What is the candidate's current designation, and his past designations, whether he is working as a “Data Scientist” or “Machine Learning Engineer” and has worked in the libraries like Theano, Tensorflow, Deep Learning, SVM, etc. And also the duration/freshness for which the candidate has worked on these skills which are related to “Machine Learning”

Projects: Whether the candidate has worked on the projects like “Video Classification using AI”, or “Text Classification” or “Sentimental Analysis” which uses AI-related skills.

Education: Whether the candidate’s education major is similar to the skills. For example, there is a high chance the computer science candidate is more suitable for “Machine Learning” skills as compared to other disciplines.

So, we calculate the rating proficiency of all possible skills and accordingly compute the core skills which are used in matching with the job.

Step 3: Job Indexing

The Job indexing algorithm is used for understanding the job description in a detailed manner. Most of the JDs are written in unstructured format and the system needs to convert them into a structured format. Better the understanding of the job, better the matching results. At Skillate, we have created an AI-powered JD assistant that provides real-time feedback to recruiters.

From the entire JD, we first classify the entire job content into two categories, “Current Skills and Expertise” and “Roles and Responsibilities” using NLP based classification model.
For example:

1. “The candidate should have expertise in Java” will be classified into “Current Skills and Expertise” and “The candidate will be responsible for building web applications using Spring Framework” will be classified as “Role and Responsibilities”.
2. From the above sentence “Spring Framework” will be given higher weightage as compared to “Java”. This is because the recruiter would prefer those candidates who know both - “Spring Framework” and “Java”

After computing the core skills, we also normalize and calculate the additional fields from the Designation, Industry, Major,  Degree in the same way as we compute the core skills.

At Skillate, we have created one of the world’s most sophisticated Resume Parsing and Matching Engine that can get up to 93% accurate information from the most complex resumes around the world.

In this part, we have discussed the first three factors - Vocabulary and AI training models, Resume Indexing, and Job Indexing. We will discuss the final two parts - Matching and Chatbots in the second part of this blog.

The underestimation of college graduates' capabilities is slowly decreasing. In fact, job opportunities for grads have seen an increase of 12% between 2019 and 2020.

What is driving this shift towards giving more opportunities to fresh out of college youth?

It is quite simple. Companies are starting to recognize that college graduates are tech-savvy, enthusiastic, and they compensate for the lack of experience with volunteering, college clubs, and internships. They are the perfect choice for an entry-level position and they bring possibilities of shaping them into competent and loyal employees.

As the employers’ attitudes towards graduates improve, the pursuit of talented grads is getting more challenging. You need to step up your game to recruit promising individuals. Look beyond college career fairs and online job postings.

If you want to improve your chances of successfully recruiting and hiring college grads, consider these tips.

Tips to hire College Graduates:

1. Time Your Recruiting Efforts

“Better three hours too soon than a minute too late,” Shakespeare famously wrote. Let this thought be your mantra in the recruiting process.

It's better to begin earlier with your recruiting efforts than to struggle with a scarcity of applications later on. Try to time your recruiting activities to match the graduate’s academic calendar.

Most of them will go on the job hunt shortly before they graduate. Bear that in mind when putting your recruitment in motion.

You want to be up and active when the majority of grads enthusiastically start looking for a job. That first wave will bring you the best and most diversified options.

Discovering the right candidate takes time. So, you want to keep your possibilities at a decent level until you find what you’ve been looking for. When you can take your time and don’t rush the recruitment, your chances of finding the perfect match will be much higher.

2. Build and Highlight Your Employer Brand

Gen Z and Millennials want more from the workplace than a paycheck. They want to take pride in their job.

The younger generations are generations of strong beliefs, ethics, and standpoints. They are the generations that grew up with endless availability of information and they know that they have a choice.

Being a company that graduates would want to work for will lay the foundation for recruiting top talent.

Put under the spotlight what your company stands for. Develop a unique brand identity that candidates will be able to relate to.

Some of the ways to build and promote your employer brand are:

• Tell your story
• Present your mission and vision
• Emphasize your greater goal
• List your beliefs and values
• Share employees’ testimonials
• Replace employer-employee attitude with “we are a team” attitude
• Publish behind-the-scenes content
• Invest in your social media marketing
  

3. Set up a Graduate Career Page

For young people, everything happens online. If they need information, have a problem, or want to kill the time – the internet is where they go. For this reason, you should boost your online recruiting efforts with a graduate career page.

A graduate career page is a page on a company website dedicated to hiring graduates. This page should be specialized for attracting and recruiting recent grads.

Adapt this page to your target candidates. Create a well-designed, engaging, and attractive segment for potential graduate candidates. Add images and videos to make it more appealing. Don't forget to use a friendly and more casual writing style that will resonate with a younger audience.

Put up testimonials of employees who came to your company as grads. Hearing success stories will grow the candidates’ interest. This can elevate that “This could be me” thought.

Optimize the page to make it discoverable by potential hires. Use relevant keywords to bring job seekers to this page. Also, you can include a link to this page on social media or your job postings.

4. Use Social Media Recruiting Strategy

Social media can be a powerful recruitment tool. You want to seek graduate talent on their territory – social media platforms.

Use networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube to spread awareness about your vacancies. Start a proactive search for candidates and establish a relationship with them.

LinkedIn, for example, allows you to connect with graduates that seem promising. Don't wait for them to come to you. Take the matter into your own hands and approach the best talent before someone else snatches them.

You can use Twitter to post content with relevant keywords that would attract graduate candidates. Do the same with Instagram and Facebook.

It’s imperative that you create content that graduates will be drawn to. If you need ideas for informative and well-written social media content, resort to free online sources. Free essay and flashcard database https://subjecto.com/ can help you with that. You can use this high-quality, educational website to get inspiration for social media posts.

We also mustn’t forget to mention the power of video in recruiting. Companies like Siemens, Shell, and Deloitte create videos about their graduate programs and post them on YouTube. Considering that this platform has 2 billion active users, they have a good chance of catching a graduate’s eye.  

5. Reach Out to a University’s Career Center

University’s career center can help you introduce your company to candidates and discover the perfect graduates for your company culture.

Take on the role of a benefactor. Get involved in actives organized by the career center. Establishing a relationship with the center and graduates can streamline your employee recruitment.

How to contribute to this community, you ask?

For example, you can sponsor events related to your niche. These types of events will gather graduates that are in your industry and familiarize them with who you are and what you do.

6. Adapt the Requirements

The biggest mistake in graduate recruiting is demanding work experience. The research found that 61% of “entry-level” jobs ask for 3+ years of experience. Such impossible requirements can turn away many grads with great potential.

Rethink what you want to put the focus on. Instead of hands-on-experience, bring attention to skills and grads' ambition. You can look at candidates':

• Transferable skills
• Extracurricular activities
• Volunteering
• Internships
• Part-time jobs

Another aspect that is worthy of your attention is their emotional intelligence. The ability to accept feedback, manage emotions, work with others, and overcome stress can be of huge value to the company.

If you are using an AI-powered matching engine, set your parameters to give equal importance to the candidate's skill set. Modify everything from job posting to the selection process to suit the newly prioritized requirements.

Conclusion

It may seem that there is plenty of fish in the sea when it comes to graduate recruitment, but the reality is different. Finding competent grads who can benefit your company is a challenge. Everything from the time you start the search to the channels you use matters.

Apply these tips if you want to notice a positive change in your recruitment strategy. Don’t just rely on the good-old job posting on a single website. You need to diversify and amplify your efforts to make a successful hire. For recruiting help, go to Skillate and get automated AI-powered resume matching.

They Are Wrong!

Another argument is that remote hiring as a concept is in some way inferior to traditional hiring in its efficacy of assessment. I hear that.

Remote hiring entails a conversation over an internet connection. It lacks the intimacy of an in-person conversation. This obviously leads to certain aspects not being evaluated as well as one might desire for. Body language for example. Quirks. Testing emotional intelligence. A blue ocean talent pool, not knowing where to start looking.

Over the last year though, it has become abundantly clear to me, that the merits of remote hiring far outweigh the flipside. The tradeoff is a no-brainer.

The Benefits of Remote Hiring

Remote hiring as a concept has opened hitherto untapped talent pools to recruitment teams globally. One of the biggest project in every organization worth their salt was finding ATPs (alternate talent pools). The imperatives that COVID brought about in hiring and indeed, work cultures have automatically killed this project for a while for all of us. Physical locations have become redundant. You can hire from anywhere for anywhere. A few years back, that was utopian.

Having said that, a remote workforce is a concept that we are yet to master. Especially in large lumbering organizations where everything moves at a certain pace, especially change. Policy changes need to be more agile and managerial mindsets less parochial. But we are getting there. With every passing month of the WFH existence, we as professionals are perfecting it. Eventually we will master it. We will realize that our productivity has gone up working remotely. We end up (I count this as a negative) working a lot more hours in a WFH set up, given the professional personal line's blurring due to the lack of cohabitation in an office space. Agility is up. Collaboration is up. Diversity is more accessible. Top lines and bottoms lines are up. Enough said.

How To Prepare For Remote Hiring

So, when this epiphany dawns upon pervasively, remote hiring will be all the rage. This is why we as talent acquisition practitioners need to be ahead of the curve to prepare for that glut. So how do we become future-ready?

1. Build agile, engaged, and informed teams. Structure is everything.

Building teams in a remote landscape can be challenging. people aren’t physically co-located, which could lead to clusters of performance. It becomes critical then, that these teams are equipped with the right vision with crystal clear goals and expectations. Disburse assignments in a collaborative way instead of a siloed approach that may work in an in-office setup. This would ensure that people don’t feel alienated about their work and builds an additional check for performance by getting multiple parties invested in success. The thing that has stood out the most in the WFH setup is that work can be a deceitful shapeshifter, with timelines and expectations changing drastically as the deliverable firms up. This necessitates lesser person dependence and greater task obsession. Agile teams can deliver faster based on information that is available to everyone in the team. Give the team a formal structure and framework of operations.

2. Keep investing in your team and managers

The remote environment will need a set of people with serious skills to deliver.  They will need to speak the business language, be avid networkers, killer assessors, voracious technology adopters, and have that crucial second level of detailing in everything that they do. Please reflect on your teams. If they do not possess these key competencies, then there is a high chance of failure in the remote environment. Build these. It's an imperative. Also, equip your managers, behavioraly and professionally to be adept at managing remote teams. It is different to an office set up. Acknowledge it and adapt to it.

3. Invest heavily in your employer brand

In the good old days of in-person hiring, you could invite the candidate to your office. Wow them with your infrastructure. Give them a firsthand whiff of the culture. Now, they have nothing but the content available online to go on. Your employer brand hence needs a significant bolstering to attract all and sundry. Fence sitters especially. Glassdoor reviews, company social pages, and collaterals you put out will all contribute to this. Most of you would be past masters on the ‘how’ but if you are reading this without a strategy for the remote landscape, you need to get to it. Fast.

4. Technology first recruiting

If you don’t have the tools and the technologies to enable seamless hiring, you are a long-gone loser in the remote game. The biggest investments over the last one year in the recruitment space have been made in technology. From state-of-the-art interviewing platforms to cutting edge sourcing and screening platforms; AI has come a long way in recruitment and makes life a lot easier for the recruiter, who can then focus on the talent. Freeing up your team’s bandwidth to concentrate on the key aspects of remote hiring is a prerequisite for success. Don’t ignore the basics. A high-speed internet connection isn’t to be taken for granted.

5. Broaden your talent pool horizons

The biggest advantage of a remote work environment is unmitigated access to talent pools globally. Talent acquisition teams need to build business cases to frame policies formally to lift the remote work culture. A lot of companies are still playing catch up in the remote game but a lot of them have made giant strides. The latter would have seen a strong lobby from the recruitment teams, with their ability to hire from anywhere and staff for anything significantly strengthened. Also, focus on diversity. Everyone else is!

Nikhil recently spoke about the trends and future of remote hiring. To listen to the talk in full, visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8k1lOxul7s

This article is a part of our ongoing series by industry influencers. To contribute as a guest blog, contact: sreshtha@skillate.com

Resonate: to affect or appeal to someone in a personal or emotional way.

I often think about what resonates with individuals when I am solving for ways to build a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment at UPS.

It’s a heavy lift. But I love a good challenge.

As a diversity and inclusion – and now – equity director for several years, I have been fortunate to be able to help architect mission statements, policies, best practices, training, awareness, and aspirational goals to drive impact across an organization of more than a half-million employees serving our customers in more than 220 countries and territories.

Of course, those are all important building blocks, but they’re not what is heaviest on my heart and mind after a year like 2020.

Simply put, it is people. No matter our background, we are wired as humans to belong…to feel connected…to be heard…to be visible.

Respecting Differences

While in college in the Midwest back in the early 1990s, I remember a program launched by school administration to support diversity on the campus. What I can recall from that campaign (because it was more than 30 years ago and my memory has definitely slowed) was the tagline Respect Differences.

I didn’t fully realize at the time that this initiative was designed to help us students understand that different is good.

Our affinity bias makes that difficult to recognize. We gravitate towards people ‘like us.’ We try to fit in because we can all remember a time where we felt left out and how uncomfortable that made us feel. On the playground, in the classroom, at the lunch table, in the office meeting –- and now, even on Zoom video calls.

The reality is that being around people who are different makes us smarter. Solve more problems. Perform better.

Now that I’m thinking about that ‘respect differences’ campaign three decades later, I wonder how much progress we’ve made in understanding, embracing and encouraging differences across our global communities.

How to build a culture of Inclusion?

Building a culture of inclusion requires empathy, humility, advocacy, listening, authenticity, trust, professionalism, psychological safety, open-mindedness, awareness of bias, accountability – and of course, respect.

It calls for a social movement for good. When you share your personal stories about those defining experiences, it begins to resonate with others. And when you listen to others share their stories, you practice empathy or what’s commonly referred to as putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. It gives you an understanding of another person’s perspective, experience, and feelings. But remember, we have to keep in mind how they feel – not how we would feel.

We are all unique individuals who want to belong and who should be celebrated and respected for our differences.

No change is small

Whether you create a movement in your neighborhood with 20 people or with 20,000, the social movements you create – no matter how big or how small – can change the world for the better. As a leader of a social movement for good, your task is really to help unite others with a common interest and help them discover the tools to address a need – and then to champion change for the better.
-Derrick Feldmann, author of Social Movements for Good: How Companies and Causes Create Viral Change,

At UPS, we are elevating our efforts to new heights as diversity, equity and inclusion are one of the company’s strategic imperatives for 2021.

We are inspiring a culture of inclusion based on our company’s purpose, ‘Moving our world forward by delivering what matters.’

What matters and resonates with me right now: being part of a social movement for good.

What resonates with you?

What is Employer Branding?

An employer brand refers to your organization's image as an employer in the eyes of job seekers and current employees. Building a good employer brand needs a good employer branding strategy that helps attract and retain top talent in your organization. But creating a compelling employer brand is easier said than done. There is no one correct strategy to create an employer brand because every organization is different, and every industry has different facets that could affect your employer brand.

Benefits of Employer Branding

Research shows that building a strong employer brand over the years can help your organization reap significant benefits. Consider these statistics –

a. 95% of candidates consider employer reputation an important facet when applying for a job.

b. A strong employer brand can reduce your cost per hire by 43%.

c. Companies with strong employer brands have 28% less employee turnover.

d. Companies with a poor employer brand may need to offer up to 10% higher pay packets to attract top talent in certain industries.

This brings us to the question of how. The key lies in drafting a strategy to build an employer brand over the long-term. Here is a 7-step plan to help you build your employer brand –

Steps to build a strong employer brand:

1.Identifying The Unique Value Proposition

The first step in building your employer brand is identifying what makes your company unique and a great place to work. Identify your business objectives and work backwards from there to define the kind of talent you want to attract. This will help you determine the right mission, vision and values that your potential candidates can identify with.

2. Employer Brand Audit

An employer brand audit is an act of finding out more about how current employees and job seekers perceive your company. This can help you understand where you currently stand. Assess internal employee opinions and external opinions by conducting employee surveys, social media searches, and reading reviews on career sites like Glassdoor.

3. Drafting an Employee Value Proposition

An employee value proposition is a marketing message that speaks about the values and benefits of working for your company. You should draft this message with great care to say something that your current employees will agree with. The employee value proposition message is useful for employer branding on your website, on social media, especially LinkedIn, and on recruitment materials.

4. Make Your Employees Your Brand Ambassadors

Usually, when a job seeker is considering a new job, they assess word of mouth. Give your employees a reason be your brand advocate and encourage the top talent to join your company. Ask employees to post about company events, outings, or giveaways on social media. This can help you create a better image among the general workforce in your industry.

5. Strengthen Your Sourcing to Onboarding Process

The onboarding process is the first experience an employee has with your company. Research says that employees with negative sourcing to onboarding experience are twice as likely to look for a new opportunity in a short time. From the beginning of the hiring process till the end of the onboarding process, ensure that they are motivated and excited to join your company. For example, design an onboarding process that equips employees with all they need to excel at their job.

6. Tell Your Brand Story

One of the critical aspects of strong employer branding is to reach out and use different mediums to talk about your employer brand. Communicate your message on various online and offline mediums through blogs, videos, photos and slideshows wherever possible. Leverage social media to reach a large audience and put out relatable content that projects your company as a coveted place to work.

7. Diversity & Inclusion Initiatives

Companies with strong employer brands invest a lot of time and efforts in diversity and inclusion initiatives. Ensure that your workplace has a diverse group of people who bring different perspectives to the table. Think of innovative ideas to promote team bonding and healthy workplace culture to create positivity about the workplace.

Employer branding is not a one-time event in the life of an organization. This is a perpetual process that needs to be updated and worked upon regularly. Building an effective employer brand involves planning, implementing and revising your branding strategy to ensure relevance. One of the best examples of excellent employer branding is Starbucks. Here are some great points from the Starbucks employer branding –

a. Starbucks refers to its employees as 'partners'. This practice creates a connection between the employees and the company and instils pride in the job.

b. Starbucks extensively promotes their employment opportunities on social media.

c. Starbucks also has regular updates wherein they show appreciation and say good words about the work done by their employees.

d. Starbucks actively talks about their mission, vision and employee stories on various platforms. This helps evoke passion among potential candidates and attracts only the top talent.

In the Industrial Revolution 4.0, it would not be wrong to label it a missed opportunity if AI is  not looked at as a sought-out option for many processes that are technology-enabled.

As the businesses are making deliberated decisions on digitization agenda with a renewed  interest into Agile adoption which is triggered by present times and driven by need, in a similar  way AI is being looked at as an ingrained technology in these transformation journeys and is the very fabric of the enterprises that invest in tech applications.

HR too is no different to align with this fast-picking technology adoption. While AI has been  on the horizon for some time, it is only now that organizations are switching to AI-powered tools and chatbots to automate HR helpdesks. More so in today’s virtual world which has made these features inevitable.

To enhance efficiencies, reduce cost, and deliver better employee experiences, organizations  are quickly introducing AI as one of the core elements in their digital transformation strategy.

How can AI help automate recruitment?

AI can help recruitment to automate by bringing down hiring efforts through efficiency in shortlisting  candidates based on predefined metrics, communicate with applicants, scheduling,  streamlining the onboarding, and also orienting the  new hires about the organization. An ATS (Applicant Tracking System) can harness the power  of the digital age to make the most of enterprise recruiting data. AI-enabled ATS does the rumble  work. The benefits of using software to track hiring efforts go beyond saving a few clicks to in-time response in the competitive talent-driven market. The built-in analytics that comes with the system will help and refine the most effective  and consistent hiring practices.

AI-powered chatbots can help reduce response volumes HR  have to answer for repetitive and transactional ones.

Role of AI in People Analytics

Human Resource is one area where intelligent automation can streamline and personalize many HR process for different categories of employees across geographies, and assist employees at various stages.

With People Analytics being one of the fastest-growing areas of HR. AI is most impactful.  People analytics is contributing millions of value to top and bottom lines. By not limiting to reports and dashboards, it provides insights to the business of how they are doing. The  actions organisation’s take can drive value to both employees and customers. With increasing  scope  of  analytics at in areas like resource  planning, skills inventory, talent development, internal mobility, candidate experience, and employee experience as well. There is an increasing need for HR  professionals expected to be more analytical, more data-driven, more digital. If we can  unleash the power of workforce data it can create astounding value to the business. AI can be the rudder in managing huge volumes of data.

Conclusion

AI has the ability to intelligently capture data, bringing down the turnaround time to  respond and in creating experiences. It certainly is an enabler that helps in capturing correct data empowering HR to drift focus on smart thinking, more on ideating, solutions that  would be of business value while basing decisions that are data-driven.

Note: The article is an extension of the discussion we had in our virtual event: Vision 2025. To listen to the full discussion, head here.

This article is a part of our series on guest blogs from industry influencers, if you want to be a part of our blog, contact us.

As migration and commute become more accessible, diversity is slowly coming to the forefront of corporate discussion as a major problem for many industries. According to CNBC, 64% of workers in entry-level positions were white, with 85% of executive positions also being held by Caucasian employees in 2020. Subsequently, support and operations staff consisted of 64% white employees, with white unemployment dropping (14.2%>12.4%) and African-American rising (16.7%>16.8%) during last year.

Regardless of how innovative your business ideas may be, a lack of diversity in your ranks can severely hurt your business’ reputation in the long run. With that, let’s explore how you can redefine your recruitment strategy to be more inclusive and fair to everyone regardless of their ethnicity or beliefs.

The Importance of Diversity in Recruitment

Why has diversity recruitment become such an important part of contemporary business culture in the past years? In short, everyone wants to have an equal shot at building a career no matter their skin color, religion, or gender – it’s really that simple.

According to a report published by LinkedIn in October of 2020, men still dominate most industries and roles compared to women, including most leadership positions. This is only the tip of the iceberg, as diversity issues crop up in a variety of ways, including reliance on nepotism. As a result, employees will often look for work elsewhere if they are dissatisfied with management’s treatment of minorities, LGBT communities, and anyone different.

Florence Garvey, writing service support team lead and writer at Essay Assistant spoke on the topic of diversity recruitment: “Diversity recruitment is a balancing act of being inclusive while also not discriminating your existing workforce. The color of our skin or the way we dress doesn’t determine anyone’s skill level or expertise. Don’t make the mistake of hiring people based on their ethnicity or beliefs without looking into their resumes and portfolios. This can easily backfire for your existing workflow and company culture, so approach diversity recruitment carefully and with clear goals in mind.”

So, why should you care about investing time and resources into rethinking your recruitment strategy to be more diverse? For one, positive PR and employees’ satisfaction with your practices will do wonders for your retention, word of mouth and B2B networking opportunities. Beyond that, some of the practical benefits of recruitment diversity are:

●       Diverse perspective on problem-solving, creativity, and innovation within the company

●       Higher and more stable employee engagement, manifesting in better retention

●       Improved brand reputation and access to a wider pool of recruitment candidates

●       Lowered barrier for entry into new marketplaces due to your language and cultural diversity

●       Increased company profitability due to improved business culture and client appeal

Transforming your Diversity Recruitment Strategy

1.Audit your Company’s Workforce Diversity

The best way to impact your diversity recruitment strategy going forward is to look back at how you’ve handled the process so far. Based on Medium, racially and ethnically diverse companies outperform industry norms by 35%, with 67% of candidates placing emphasis on diversity when looking for employment.

Rethinking your diversity recruitment starts with an internal audit of your current workforce and hiring processes which led you to where you are now. Is your workforce predominantly Caucasian with few to no minority groups anywhere near leadership positions? Why is that? Of course, it’s worth noting that a Europe-based company will have different diversity standards than the one based in the US given religion and ethnicity. Regardless, analyze your workforce and talk to HR to get a sense of what currently works and doesn’t work in terms of diversity recruitment.

2.Rethink your Business Culture

Companies often neglect to review their business culture, mission statement and long-term goals in light of recruitment diversity. For example, if your company is focused on IT development, “workplace diversity” and “inclusivity” can easily become the pillars of your mission statement.

Review your PR, website “About us” section and analyze the public perception of your company so far. Are you viewed as an inclusive and warm or rigid and distant company by ex-employees and clients? Before you attract new, diverse talent to your company, you will have to rethink your business culture thoroughly to make it more appealing and welcoming.

3.Consider using AI for Selection

Human bias is at the crux of the problem when it comes to diversity recruitment. To avoid being accused of bias or favoritism, you should use a dedicated AI-powered matching engine during your candidate selection process. This will allow you to examine far more candidates in a shorter amount of time-based on selected KPIs and resumes.

AI-powered algorithms are designed to select the best possible candidates available from the database you’ve inserted into the platform. Such a tool will quickly discern which candidates are suitable for your company and score them based on your KPIs and their skillsets. Most importantly, you will make the recruitment process as objective as possible in the process, avoiding any potential bias.

4.Look for Candidates through Employee Networking

You can always turn inward and ask your employees for recommendations on whom to recruit for any given position. If you have minority employees in your company, consult them in regards to potential friends or colleagues who would be interested in working for you.

Onboarding people who are recommended to you by existing employees can be seen as very positive by both your workforce and outside onlookers. However, recommended candidates should still go through a proper interview and screening process to determine their fitness for the open position. In this case, chatbot screening can help you speed up the process and make it easier to discern the candidate’s potential for long-term employment easily.

5.Create Diversity-Centric Internship Opportunities

A great way to attract candidates from minorities and abroad is to create internships with specific diversity recruitment requirements. This is a great way to give students and young graduates from minority communities a chance to shine and show what they can do.

Make sure that you consider long-term employment quite seriously when it comes to these interns, however. Giving people false hope of employment can be seen as very negative by both existing employees and the public at large. Use internships as a means to attract young and ambitious individuals to your company and then retain them to bolster your diversity strategy going forward.

6.Offer the Same Development Opportunities to Everyone

Finally, it’s important that you follow through on your diversity recruitment strategy by levelling the playfield for everyone on your payroll. Make it clear that everyone has identical chances of being promoted or groomed for a leadership position as anyone else.

When it comes to seminars, professional development courses, and other opportunities, the same rules and odds at selection should apply for everyone. This will create a more inclusive and friendly business culture in your company due to a newfound understanding and camaraderie among employees. Don’t play favorites and put your diversity promises into practice by offering the same opportunities to everyone on your team.

In Conclusion: The Future of Diversity

Implementing a universally accepted diversity recruitment strategy is a fickle prospect and you will undoubtedly be met with criticism and comments from existing employees. Apply the above-mentioned steps in your recruitment strategy in tandem with a professional diversity and inclusion tool to get the best results from your initiative.

Doing so will allow you to achieve the best of both worlds – finding the most suitable professionals for your positions while also annunciating recruitment diversity. Start transforming your recruitment strategy today and reap the rewards of doing so as soon as tomorrow.

50% of all hiring is a failure.

Sounds impossible, isn’t it? In a process involving experts with years of know-how of recruiting, as well as hiring managers and interviewers with decades of industry experience, it is unthinkable that the success rate of hiring decisions is  not more than the probability of heads in a coin toss!

Why does it happen, though? Why do years of experience and knowledge result in such mixed results?

The answer lies in the single biggest problem in recruitment - ‘Bias.’  

Human decisions are inherently biased. And with time, the biases only become more concrete. Whether it is attraction towards similar personality, affection towards particular institutes, confirmation bias, halo effect, or ignorance or hatred towards a specific community, all these biases tend to come at work when it comes to hiring.

Hiring biases not only keeps the best candidates away, resulting in more failures; but it also can severely damage the employer branding of organizations. Recently, American Express invested $1 billion to advance racial and gender equality to promote social justice among the masses.

Understanding the importance of the subject, Skillate has introduced AI into the recruitment process, aiming to minimize biases by removing human interventions. This is how the process works:

Masking PII:

Skillate system ensures that any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) like  name, email, photo, gender, religion, ethnicity is masked to ensure that there is no bias because of the given information.

• Skill similarity and culture:

Skillate’s AI understands the skills required from the JD, and also has the knowledge of the ‘cluster’ associated or similar to a particular skill. For ex:

If a recruiter is looking to hire a data scientist in the field of ML, he or she might get confused with software developers who mention ML simply after doing a two-month virtual course.

The Skillate system on the other hands understands the ecosystem around ML as a technology and would prefer candidates who have worked on Computer Vision, NLP, Deep Learning, Neural Network, CNN, RNN or used TensorFlow/ Keras etc. This differentiation in terms of the level of skill helps recruiters immensely.  

The Skillate AI refrains from using the notorious “Past Hiring Pattern Analysis” that is known for aggravating hiring biases in the past.

• Title Relevancy:

A practical problem that most recruiters face is searching candidates by job titles. While some functions have clearly defined job titles, most new-age positions are named in a multitude of ways. For example: while searching for a sales role - any of the following job titles will be a good fit - Sales Manager, BD Manager, Zonal Manager, or Assistant Manager Sales.

The Skillate AI has the knowledge of different job titles that can refer to the same position. This ensures that a quality candidate is not missed out even if his or her position is named differently.

• Data Normalization:

Traditional keyword matching often searches for exact terminologies in resumes , meaning if you are looking for someone who has worked in AWS, you might miss out on someone whose experience is of working in Amazon Web Services!

Skillate’s vast library of 120 Million profiles tells the system about the various formats and abbreviations of a particular term, meaning you never miss out on quality candidates whatever terminology they use!

• Contextual understanding:

Consider the following two statements:

'Currently working as a Data Scientist at <Amazon>’ and,

‘Worked in a project for the client Amazon ’

In the first statement, “Amazon” will be tagged as a company as the statement is about working in the organization.

But the latter “Amazon” should be considered as a normal word and not as a company. It is evident that the same word can have different meanings, based on its usage.

Skillate AI understands the context behind terms used in the resume , and treats them separately as - simple phrases or specific names as intended. Here is how the technology works:

Now consider one more example, with two statements:

‘2000–2008: Professor at Harvard’

‘B.Tech in Computer Science from Harvard’

This is how Skillate AI processes it:

Here,  Harvard is treated as an Employer Organisation in the former statement and as an Educational Institution in the later. We can differentiate between the two meanings of ‘Harvard’ here by observing the context. The first statement has ‘Professor’ which is a Job Title, indicating that Harvard be treated as a Professional Organisation. The second one has a degree and major mentioned, which point towards Harvard being tagged as an Educational Organisation.

Skillate applies a deep learning model Named Entity Recognition (NER) for information extraction in resumes.

• Industry Relevance:

Recruiters often like to hire parallely from industries similar to their organization’s. The Skillate system recognizes this requirement and ranks profiles from similar experience and backgrounds higher than the others.

For example: If a recruiter is looking to hire a salesperson for an FMCG company. The search results will rank a sales profile from Mondelez higher than that from Accenture.

• Removing educational biases:

An often complained bias, specially from candidates is that companies have too much focus on the pedigree of the institution and not enough on the relevant skills or experience. Not only does the Skillate system takes into account a combination of skill, experience and education to rank a profile; but it also has the knowledge of the particular courses relevant to specific institutes.

For ex; if a recruiter is searching for an engineering talent - a graduate from MIT will be a preference. However, if he is looking for an MBA talent - the profile from Stanford would rank higher.

• Measuring Diversity:

One of the most overlooked processes while assessing diversity in recruitment is a procedure to measure its different elements.

Skillate reveals your current hiring trends based on gender, ethnicity, age, geography, etc. to highlight any existing biases in the current recruiting system.

Skillate has been at the forefront of using AI to eliminate human biases by automating recrutement. Other global examples like Microsoft using its SEEING AI and ORBIT (Object Recognition for Blind Image Training) to facilitate inclusivity for the disabled  and Gartner predicting a three fold rise in the number of specially- abled hires by 2023 due to AI and emerging technologies only strengthens our vision to remove recruiting biases via AI.

AI in recruitment has evolved over the years. After its initial limitations, it is now not only empowering inclusion in organizations but is also amping up the hiring success rate in the process.

Use it so that your next hire has more probability of being successful than a toss of the coin!

References:
Analytics India| Business Insider

According to the recent LinkedIn Future of Recruitment survey, 47% of recruitment professionals believe that there will be a cut in their company's recruitment budget in the coming year. Most also believe that recruitment-related travels or events would be significantly affected by the current global pandemic. Though a significant proportion believes that their organizations will continue to spend big on recruitment technology, as companies want to become more efficient and cut down recruitment costs.

Another interesting component of the current situation is - the supply and demand of the labor market. The current pandemic has left a lot of quality talent on the lookout for a job. However, at the same time, many organizations have been forced to cut down on their staff size to compensate for the losses. Now, with businesses slowly getting back to normal, most companies have a high requirement for labor without a lot of cash in the company's budget sheet.

In such a scenario, most companies are facing an unprecedented situation - a decreased recruitment budget with an increasing demand for talent and technology. In such conditions, the traditional templates for recruiting budgets can go for a toss. Recruitment teams need to re-think the basics, and this calls for redesigning the recruiting budget altogether.

Here is a step-by-step process to create a recruitment budget:

1.Estimate the number of new hires and Cost per Hire

The first step towards creating a recruitment budget is to know the number of hires required in the near future from all the hiring managers. The estimates need to be based on the company's historical churn out ratio for different roles and departments. Here is how the requirement sheet looks like:

2.Account for marketing costs

To get the best possible hires, job postings need to be advertised in order to reach the maximum possible relevant audience. Recruiters need to take into consideration the cost for - external agencies, social media postings, traveling, job fairs, employee branding, events, and internal employee referral rewards.

To know, how recruiters can cut down their sourcing costs, click here.

3.Factor in Training and Development Programs

One of the easiest ways to retain employees as well as upgrade them to fill higher positions is to put them in various training and development programs. HRs need to include seminars, workshops, coaching sessions, technology, and reading materials to their recruitment budget.

4. Include technology to update the recruitment process

Keeping up with the technology trends will not only keep your recruitment processes upgraded and efficient, but it also saves a lot of costs in the long run. However, implementing technology requires an initial investment. HRs need to factor in the cost of the ATS, video interview tools, latest resume parser, and other automation tools that they would like to implement.

5. Don't forget Unforeseen Costs/ Emergency Funds

The harsh reality is that even after all the planning, every budget faces some unexpected events (the recent pandemic says Hi!). Hardware and software updates, freelance hiring, contractual hiring for peak season, new careers page, interview expenses for candidates from abroad, and relocation expenses for new joiners are just a few examples of unplanned costs creeping up to the budget. Recruiters, therefore, will do well to keep a buffer and ask the budget for the same.

HR professionals need to understand that the actual work is not to create a budget and ask for the money but to showcase how much the recruitment budget saves costs. To do so successfully, we recommend using our recruitment budget plan given in the link:

If organizations focus on Professional Intelligence (PI), work stress can be drastically reduced if not eliminated.

What is Professional Intelligence?

The Professional Intelligence of a person is a concoction of varied skills and qualities like work ethics, compassion, competence, etc. In today's world of ever-changing work dynamics, the PI score of each employee and cumulative score at the organization level is of immense importance for the growth, sustainability, and continuous development of an individual as well as the company one is working for. Higher PI scores in a team ensure a positive working culture, great team dynamics, faster decision making, and, most importantly a compassionate team that works relentlessly towards a common goal.

The impact of professional intelligence is phenomenal, especially in areas like recruitment, where due diligence is given not just in matching credentials and job descriptions but also a comprehensive deep dive into the potentiality of success for the role.

Here are the top 9 qualities that make the Professional Intelligence Quotient:

Compassion: A rare and finest quality at an individual level that ensures that the person hired is a powerhouse of positive energy, empathy, and a loving culture

Agility: The ability to change as per the given situation and adapt as required is a quality of paramount importance, especially in the ever-changing and fast-growing startups.

Honesty: Employers do not want to hire people who cannot be trusted. Honesty is the strongest pillar of a high PI score and simply cannot be compromised.

Creativity: Employees who are generally creative will ensure that they bring new ideas and concepts to all kinds of problems and opportunities.

Harmony: Employers like to recruit people who can get along seamlessly with colleagues and work in harmony no matter what the situation is. Flexibility and the art of taking a team together is a foundation for successful leadership.

Learning attitude: An attitude to keep learning at work is the quality of a great leader as well as a team member. This ensures stagnancy is kept at bay and there are efforts made both at individual and company levels to keep investing in new skills and competencies.

The art of Communication: The ability to communicate by email, on the phone, in person, and with body language. Communication also includes listening skills and putting your point across in the most constructive way. Providing feedback, most fruitfully and assertively is an art.

Personality: Personality plays a significant role at work. Personal grooming, carrying yourself, and being a charmer will automatically ensure an employee’s higher likability scores.

Persistence: The key is to work hard and keep moving forward with determination and putting efforts continuously in self and organization development.

In a large-scale study of over 3,000 employees conducted by Anna Nyberg at the Karolinska Institute, results showed a strong link between leadership behavior and heart disease in employees. Stress-producing bosses are literally bad for the heart.

Hence, creating a positive and healthy work culture depends on an overall higher individual PI score.

With organizations working remotely, Professional Intelligence is becoming even more critical for organizations as they struggle to keep up the team spirit. Both recruiters and candidates will do well to focus on this key aspect if they want to excel in the hiring game.

"Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge must-have tech recruiters on his mind when he wrote these lines for “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
It is perceived that tech recruiters have the most straight forward job on the planet.

However, talk to any tech recruiter, and you would understand that the reality couldn’t be any more different. With an ocean of talent in front of you, recruiters are expected to find the rare pearls that can fit in their organization. What makes the task even more challenging is the industry’s dynamic nature that means the continuous evolution of roles and skills required.

Let’s talk about the 7 Don’ts shall we ?

The 7 Don’ts for tech recruiters:

1. Being Condescending

Hiring for an awesome role ? Great! One of the things which really scares away good talent is a condescending message or a condescending post about a job. Recruiters need to be proud of the company they work for & the role that they are trying to fill, however, a recruiter who is condescending easily scares away good talent.

An example of this would be using the following words in your message/email or job ad:

1. Excellent Opportunity (So are opportunities without this phrase bad ones ?)
2. Immediate Opening (If so, will the offer letter be released as soon as the interview is completed ?)
3. Urgently Hiring (All active roles at any company need to be filled at the earliest)

Last but not the least, the below is the easiest way to scare away really good talent: “I know that you are not looking but we will double your salary & guarantee a fast track promotion, looking at your profile it looks like you have not been promoted in the last 2 years.”

2. Spamming via email & social media

No one likes to be spammed via email, social media. Ever received these huge messages which never end & more often or not had nothing to do with your profile? Felt that a 100 other people would have also received the same email or message?

Personalized emails or  messages which are tailored for individuals return a much higher response rate. Good talent is always in demand, which means that other recruiters would also reach out to the same candidate that you have reached out to.

How do I stand out from the crowd?

Easy! Quote at least 2-3 things from the candidate’s profile which made you reach out to them. This shows the candidate that you have done your research about their profile before reaching out. Let’s face it, everyone loves a few compliments!

3. Pretending to be a technology guru

One does not need to know tech to hire for tech (If recruiters were tech gurus, should n’t they be in engineering)? It is ok to tell your candidates that you do not understand a particular term or buzz word. Most candidates are happy to explain about their work in layman's terms.

Engineers get easily annoyed when a recruiter’s words do not make sense about something which engineers are passionate about. Ex: Let’s say you are talking to a Big Data expert, do not go into an in-depth conversation about Big Data technologies when you have absolutely no clue.

While one does not need to be a technology guru to fill tech roles, a basic understanding is needed, else you would reject candidates for your “Hadoop Role” because your hiring manager wanted someone with a minimum of 20 years of experience with Hadoop!

4. Ghosting

While a lot of recruiters complain about candidates ghosting them at interviews, at the offer stage or just before joining, this is a two way street. Here are some of the reasons why this should not be done:

1. The candidate you ghosted can be a future employee or stakeholder.
2. The news about you ghosting candidates would spread.
3. The world is small, you may directly or indirectly interact with this candidate at your next organization/project.
4. It is NOT a nice thing to do.

However, candidates do appreciate recruiters who close loops. Hearing “Thanks for interviewing with us but we currently would not be proceeding, let’s stay in touch” is much better than never hearing back. These updates or even “Update - No Update” (Updating someone that there is no update as of now) help provide a good candidate experience & helps build trust with candidates.

5. Rushing the phone conversation

The minimum average time for a meaningful conversation with a candidate is 30 minutes. This time should be spent to get to know the candidate better with respect to the candidate’s interests, goals, motivation, timelines & work location preferences (This is really important when a candidate is relocating to another city or country for a role). This conversation should ideally be a 2 way conversation and the most important thing for a recruiter to do here is be an effective listener. This helps you know & understand your candidate. Knowing your candidate helps troubleshoot and problem solve in advance.

6. Scrutinizing the candidate’s resume

Good talent who are passive job seekers often do not have a resume which is ready or updated. (Especially in tech). Candidates also often do not mention each & every detail about their projects & achievements. While a resume or a LinkedIn profile does provide at least 60-70 % of the info about the candidate, a lot of additional info can be obtained from a simple phone call. Judging a candidate purely based on the titles of the candidate’s resume, projects mentioned, technologies mentioned & achievements can be misleading.

Example: Let’s say if you are looking for someone who is an NLP Expert & has architected large scale distributed systems in a particular domain (Payments). The chances that all the candidates who fit this criteria being highly detailed oriented on their resume are low. There would certainly be candidates who are a great match for this role but whose resume may only match 70 % of the job description.

7. NOT Having updated Social Media Profiles (LinkedIn, Twitter)

Note - The reason I have mentioned LinkedIn & Twitter is because both sites have helped me find talent & interact with them.

The first thing you do when you want to purchase a product or service online is check their reviews & rating right ? This is done to get an idea of other’s experiences with the product/service & also to validate the authenticity of it. Having updated info & testimonials help build trust.

When you reach out to a candidate via cold calling, messages on social media or even emails, having an updated social media profile shows that you are authentic & does build trust with your potential candidate. (Let’s face it, there are a lot of fake profiles out there which have a lot of fake job ads)

What to have on your social media profile?

1. A photo of yourself (So that candidates know that you are not a Ghost or a bot)
2. Info about the company you work for & the roles that you are hiring
3. An Email Id (So that those you viewed your profile know how to reach you)

A little bit of personal information about yourself is good too (Favourite Sport, Favourite Book, Your influencers, hobbies). Getting creative here helps you stand out of the crowd.

To summarize, think about it this way, if you were to view your own profile from another lens, would you trust the recruiter (Yourself) & network with the person?