iCIMS’ guide to

hiring talent

How to leverage a best-in-class approach to hiring talent

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Here’s how:1 Source potential hires from

a robust talent pool

2 Find the best matches for the jobs you need to fill

3 Make it easy for candidates to say “yes” to your offer

4 Inspire long-term commitment by optimizing onboarding

Most businesses don’t survive on their products and services alone. They succeed or fail based on who they hire.

You’ve seen the impact of great talent. They drive product innovation and positively influence company culture. Great talent builds organizations that last.

The prospect of creating your ideal team is exciting. Yet, it can also feel overwhelming. Getting to “yes” takes time, commitment, and meaningful touchpoints. It also depends on finding the right person for the right role at the right time – and then getting them up to speed quickly.

With the right tools and stakeholder support, you can hire the talent you need to help your team thrive.

For the majority of companies, the workforce is both the most expensive asset and the most important contributor to success or failure.

““- IDC and PlanScape, Digital transformation for human resources

and a strategically aligned workforce.

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Source potential hires from a robust talent poolLaying the groundwork for hiring success means building, nurturing, and sourcing from a healthy talent pool. Without a robust talent pool, it’s difficult to quickly source the talent you need – especially when you need to fill a lot of positions or make seasonal hires.

Even if you choose not to hire an applicant, don’t let that connection go. Who better to hire than people who’ve already shown interest in your organization?

Keep past candidates in your talent pool. Stay in touch. Reengage regularly. That applicant from six, nine, even twelve months ago might be the perfect fit for another opening.

If they were invested enough to apply once, chances are they may be interested in another role.

Here are some engaging ways to communicate with candidates:

• Start by maintaining candidate profiles. This data helps you build a talent pool for current and future openings. When your talent platform is integrated with your HCM, candidate profile data gets sent back and forth between the systems. This saves a lot of effort, especially if you’re hiring many of the same people year after year.

• Tell your talent pool about upcoming hiring fairs. Let them know when your seasonal hiring starts. This level of attention and care can quickly reengage a passive candidate and turn them into an applicant.

• Check in regularly by phone, email, or text. Even if you don’t have a specific job to fill, staying in touch keeps your organization top of mind as a potential employer.

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Best practices in action:Every year, Cedar Fair entertains millions of people at their amusement and water parks in North America.To make this happen, Cedar Fair must hire 47,000 seasonal workers – most of whom are in high school or college.

The company aims to rehire 35% of the previous year’s workforce. But Cedar Fair’s manual recruiting process made this problematic. Without an ATS or candidate relationship management (CRM) system, recruiters and hiring managers didn’t have an easy way to reengage the same hires year after year.

With iCIMS Talent Cloud, Cedar Fair has completely overhauled their recruitment process. They’re now able to engage with seasonal candidates throughout the off-season and encourage them to reapply for the new season. Currently, over 180,000 people apply to Cedar Fair every year, and its talent teams are routinely hitting seasonal staffing goals.

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Find the best matches for the jobs you need to fillApplications and resumes are helpful. But they don’t tell you everything about a candidate.

Take the guesswork out of your hiring process by qualifying candidates faster with fully integrated screening and assessments. Here’s how:

• Ask candidates personal and job-related questions. Prescreening questions can help you filter and rate candidates based on their qualifications. AI-powered digital assistants can help you screen candidates based on preselected criteria. They can also answer job seekers’ FAQs, schedule interviews, and encourage people to apply.

• Next gen assessment tools offer remarkable insights. They can automatically evaluate your candidates for essential soft skills, including effective communication, problem-solving, critical thinking, and time management.

• Use on-demand video interviews to get to know candidates earlier in the process. Prerecorded interviews give all candidates, including introverts, a chance to stand out from their peers regardless of how well they interview face-to-face. Recruiters and hiring managers get a feel for candidates’ skills and personalities on their time, without the need to schedule formal, live interviews.

Pro tip:On average, one-third to half of the candidates who apply for all position types are not qualified. Don’t waste time sorting through unqualified candidates. Instead, use personality tests, logic tests, customized skill tests, or “real-world” scenarios to assess and select qualified talent.

- Talent Board CandE Global Research Report

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Make it easy for candidates to say “yes” to your offer

You’ve made it to the end of the race when you’ve reached the offer stage. It’s nearly time to hand off the baton – you just need to get your candidate to say “yes.”

Convenient, effortless offer management will get you there. A slow, clunky process increases the risk that a candidate will take a job with someone else.

A consistent, professional candidate experience ending on a high note increases the likelihood a candidate will say yes – or at least not get spooked and drop out. Those satisfied with their experience are 38% more likely to accept an offer.

Use conversations to confirm commitment. Formal letters to finalize the details. And signed documents to make it official. Employers with a centralized offer management solution typically fill jobs one week faster than those without a system.

Eliminating manual tasks at this stage will create a positive candidate experience, and help ensure you’re in compliance.

Remove obstacles, and get a quick “Yes!”• Make your employer brand recognizable during every step of the process.

From tone to logos, visuals, and social links, emphasize your company culture with branded letters tailored to the role.

• Reduce the chances of error and risk. Pre-approved templates and clauses provide precise language and eliminate the need to create offers from scratch.

• Remove the obstacles to “yes.” Offer a mobile-friendly view of the letter, and an option to e-sign from anywhere your talent may be.

• Create a highly personalized experience by introducing a friendly face. Short videos from a future manager or colleague make candidates feel like they’re making the right decision by accepting the job.

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Best practices in action:Each year, Peet’s Coffee hires between 3,000 and 5,000 people to fill roles in coffee shops, roasting plants, and distribution centers across the U.S. and China. In the past, recruiters had to complete a laborious offer letter process involving systems, Word documents, and stakeholder notes. It wasn’t efficient. It took an average of four days for candidates to accept offers.

In 2016, Peet’s Coffee adopted the iCIMS Talent Cloud to condense its hiring process and simplify its workflow. Now, recruiters use one system to gather offer details, choose a template, modify the letter, request approvals, and send it for acceptance. With this new process, Peet’s offer acceptance now takes only two days.

2 days from first offer to acceptance,

down from 4 days

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Inspire long-term commitment by optimizing onboardingWhen recruiters get a signed offer letter, they sigh with relief — all the effort to attract and engage talent paid off. But before you prop your feet up, be sure you’re ready to onboard new hires in a way that will make them want to stay.

We’ve all heard first-day-on-the-job horror stories. They’re painful, unproductive, and don’t set anyone up for success.

Strategic onboarding helps candidates avoid first-day jitters. With a bit of planning, you can create a positive experience that will wow a new hire even before day one.

Here are some ways to optimize the onboarding experience:

• Forget the paper forms. Hiring new employees means collecting required information – but it doesn’t have to be painful. Digitize your employee data onboarding process. Use online forms to collect and store the data you need. Provide e-copies for employees to save for future reference.

• Map out at least the first week. Tell the new hire where to go, when they’ll attend orientation, and what their schedule will be for week one. Share the plan before they arrive so they’ll have a clear idea of the who, what, when, where, why, and how of their first few days.

• Make new hires feel supported. Including personalized videos from team members puts new hires at ease because they know they’re part of a great team.

• Include goal setting as part of the onboarding process. New hires want to succeed. Managers can help set them up for success by communicating what they expect new hires to accomplish within their first 90 days.

Benefits of top-tier onboarding:• With digital onboarding, new

employees are more productive in their first few weeks of work.

• Nearly 70% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for 3+ years if their onboarding experience was great.

• More than 50% of all organizations with a formal onboarding process get more productivity out of their new hires and have greater retention.

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1 Source potential hires from a robust talent pool

2 Find the best matches for the jobs you need to fill

3 Make it easy for candidates to say “yes” to your offer

4 Inspire long-term commitment by optimizing onboarding

Bringing it all together As the world of work changes rapidly, business success depends on our ability to hire the right people for the right jobs. Building your winning team begins with these simple strategies:

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Businesses succeed or fail because of their people. This is your opportunity to transform your hiring practices and your teams.

Get tips, strategies, and solutions to attract, engage, hire, and advance top talent.

Learn more in iCIMS Guide to Attracting Talent.

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