Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @EmployUsApp – Referral Automation

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Today on The Weekly Dose I take a look at the candidate referral automation platform EmployUs. I actually first told you about EmployUs about four years ago when they just launched, but since then they’ve improved their tech and added a bunch of stuff, so I wanted to give you a second look! 

You guys already know I’m in love with candidate referral automation. In my experience of looking at every kind of HR and TA Technology I believe it has the single highest ROI of any tech on the market, and let still relatively few organizations actually use it as part of their TA Tech stack.

EmployUS took candidate referral technology one more step and actually allows you to use it both internally and externally with your organization. Clearly we love using this tech with our employees to get more of their referrals, but what if we could also use it outside our organization to gain more referrals as well? EmployUs allows you to do that, if you choose.

What I like about EmployUs:

  • They jumped into the chatbot/AI world to help those referring candidates make it much easier and faster, and through the use of SMS they’ve actually made is super simple for hourly workers to now refer candidates in seconds! Always a draw back to traditional referral software.
  • The automation aspect truly helps make the referral process simple for your internal employees who might not be thinking of this all day, every day, but once they do decide, you need it to self-sufficient and fast.
  • Tailored email and texting campaigns so you can target parts of your organization for specific referrals.
  • A dashboard that tracks and automates payouts based on the rules you build, that also gives you the gamification aspect of internal scoreboards to keep your referral program top of mind all the time.

Here’s what we know. Most of our top hires come from referrals. Our most inexpensive hires come from referrals. Almost all of us would say we need more referrals in our hiring process.

Then we watch our old, tired, analog referral program deliver the exact same results year in and year out, and we do nothing to change it. Go demo EmployUs and take a look at what your candidate referral program should look like.

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Does This Sweater Make Me Look Fat?

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I’ve got a bit of a problem.

I love buying new clothes, jackets, and shoes. You see, I’m kind of built like a fire hydrant. Picture a fire hydrant in your mind right now. Not very sexy is it!

So, I compensate, not by eating a great diet and working out constantly! Hell, no! That’s really hard work. I compensate by buying more clothes that I think will make me look skinnier than I really am!

Do you do this?

We do this in HR and Talent Acquisition all the time!

Just replace ‘clothes’ with ‘technology’. Yeah, we suck at HR, so instead of going out and fixing our foundational issues, let’s go buy a new pretty technology to cover up all of this fat, err incompetence!

Yeah, baby, with this new shiny technology no one will ever suspect we really suck as bad as we do!

The new stuff we buy screws with our heads. Every new shirt and sports coat I buy, I look at myself, and go “oh yeah! you’re going to look so awesome when you wear this!” Then I get on stage and someone tags me in a picture and I want to starve myself for a year!

Buying new stuff to make us look better than we are is the biggest lie we tell ourselves, ever.

So, before you go buy that new technology to fix all of your problems of why you suck at HR or TA, you have to know one truth. That truth is technology doesn’t fix why you suck. If you suck, great technology will make you suck faster. Bad technology will still make you suck, you just won’t be as fast as sucking!

Just like clothes won’t make me skinnier, new technology won’t make your function perform better.

 

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Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: The Return of Disco! @trydisco

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Today, Disco launches an AI-based communication platform that enables workers to recognize fellow employees as they work by giving them kudos and micro-feedback on their tasks and efforts. Disco helps companies motivate the 68% of disengaged employees, while also rewarding those who are contributing to a positive company culture.
Designed to enable micro-feedback interactions throughout the normal course of daily business, Disco uses a combination of keywords, AI and natural language processing (NLP) to make it easy for employees to give and receive recognition.
Disco aggregates recognition data like task- and behavior-specific props, kudos, and thanks to consumable reports for company leaders. The data is then used to facilitate more meaningful and friendly communications, to drive high-visibility recognition, and to supplement performance reviews with peer-based micro-feedback. The outcome is that business leaders are better able to craft and
cultivate the company culture through a better understanding of their employees.
So, what’s is Disco really? 
– Disco is an easy-to-use, AI-based, NLP conversational UX for Slack and Microsoft Teams, with more communications platforms coming soon.
– Disco is the brand relaunch of Growbot. Basically, it’s an appreciation and engagement mechanism employees use within Slack to recognize and reward each other.
– Already over 20,000 organizations are using Disco because of its ease of use within Slack and Microsoft Teams.
– Your cultural data rolls up into a powerful dashboard and gives you actionable insights tied to sentiment, goals, and productivity.
If your organization and your employees use Slack or Microsoft Teams, Disco is definitely something you want to check to help you drive higher levels of engagement and appreciation. It super easy to begin using and fairly inexpensive, and really becomes an addictive part of how your organization communicates with each other. Go check them out.

The Weekly Dose of HR Technology – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some of the great HR and TA technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on the Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends 2018

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Each year, over the past few years, I look forward to reviewing LinkedIn’s annual Recruiting Trends report. The 2018 version is no different! It’s sixty pages of insight and case studies and really digs into the hottest trends in recruiting we are all facing. It’s definitely something every TA pro and leader should read.

One reason I like this report is that the data comes from over 8,000 TA pros from an almost perfect cross-section of small, medium, large and enterprise-sized organizations. This is rare. Usually, these types of reports are all enterprise-focused, but LinkedIn works to get each segment to be a quarter of the respondents.

LinkedIn found four main trends across all sized organizations in Recruiting:

  1. Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.
  2. Interviewing
  3. Data Analytics
  4. Artificial Intelligence

At first glance, this doesn’t seem very surprising. I don’t think any of us could have thought Diversity could have gotten bigger as a trend, but when you have a current political climate in America like we have, well, diversity has never been more important. Interviewing as a trend seems strange, and it makes me think there’s probably something LI is pushing from a product standpoint. The LI data shows interviewing is a trend because of how it’s evolving in selection.

Data and A.I. are also things that also seem to be solid trends that most TA pros are in the midst of trying to figure out. A.I. is an easy one, it was huge in 2017 and it’s not going away. Data was giant in 2015-16, and every HR tech vendor became a ‘data’ company, but the fact remains most TA leaders and pros still struggle to get their arms around this and the LI data shows this as well.

I read the entire report and took away two really cool ideas:

– Diversity and Inclusion are giving way to ‘belonging’. It doesn’t matter that you hired more women or more of whatever it is you needed to look like a United Colors of Benetton ad. If those you hired don’t feel like a part of the organization, you’ll never keep them anyway. 

This level of diversity is really hard. It’s actually easy to check boxes and get to a point where you’ll look politically correct as it relates to the diversity of your employees. It’s super hard to get to a point where people feel like they truly belong. Like they’re home. The LI report gives some great case studies on how organizations are doing this.

– TA uses of data are fairly robust, and nowhere to be found where those uses concerned with Days to Fill! (see picture below)

 

#1 – Increase Retention

I’ll scream this from the mountain tops until the day I die! Employee Retention should be owned by Talent Acquisition. HR doesn’t care! If someone leaves, HR processes some paperwork. The real work of replacing that employee falls on TA. HR has no vested interested, in most organizations, to retain employees. TA always does.

The easiest hire TA will ever make is the one they don’t have to make because a good employee didn’t leave.

It’s rare that an organization would place the entire bonus goal on HR around employee retention. If they did, you would see a cultural change that is incredibly positive in terms of how HR works to keep employees. The organizations that have the foresight to do this have really strong cultures.

I love that LI was able to show TA pros and leaders from every size of organization view Retention as the top use of data. It shows that TA pros are understanding the importance of data analytics a very high level. It also shows a major trend that LI kind of skimmed over. In 2018, Retention of talent is critical for organizations. It’s not sexy to report on, but it’s a fact.

Go download the report and check it out!