Like many industries, the beauty industry has grown to be one of the fastest evolving markets with consumers who demand authenticity, representation, and innovative products that fit their unique needs. At The Estée Lauder Companies’ (ELC), our collective vision is to be the most inclusive and diverse beauty company in the world as well as the employer of choice for diverse talent and the brand of choice for our global consumers. Because of this, we understand that talent today don’t just want to know what companies WILL do as it pertains to inclusion, diversity, and equity, but have a genuine track record and a commitment to current and future leader’s career advancement.

We are consumer obsessed and because of this we focus our priorities on ensuring our employee population reflects the communities we impact by ensuring equitable access to professional development and advancement opportunities.

Driving Professional Development within HBCU Communities

As an organization dedicated to professional development and education, we pride ourselves in our ability to deliver on our ID&E commitments through external programs with our employee populations and HBCUs. To date, ELC has partnered with Howard University, Spelman College, and Florida A&M to provide virtual networking and career advancement programs for alumnae seeking ways to transition to the beauty industry.

• She’s Howard – ELC’s partnership program with Howard University was inspired by ELC’s longstanding relationship with the University that began in 2018 through an increased focus on HBCU recruiting. Since its inception in 2021, the program continues to be a resourceful networking tool for all Howard Alumnae. 

• Let’s Talk Beauty – ELC’s partnership program with the National Alumnae Association of Spelman College was designed to serve as a platform for ELC to connect with Spelman Alumnae through intentional conversations, panel discussions, and networking opportunities to provide career coaching and insights into the beauty industry. 

• FAMU 10-Week Travel Retail Program – ELC’s partnership program with Florida A&M University was designed to engage rising juniors and seniors by providing an inside look into the fast-paced world of Travel Retail. Participants join for a 10-week program during which 41 merit scholarships of US$10,000 were awarded to students in the University’s School of Business and Industry over the course of five years by the University on behalf of The Estée Lauder Companies. 

Leading From Every Chair

We believe in the power of leading from every chair and are committed to creating space for talent with unique backgrounds and perspectives to support and lead innovation. As one of the world’s leading manufacturers and marketers of quality skincare, makeup, fragrance and hair care products sold in approximately 150 countries and territories, we offer a number of opportunities for undergraduates, early career professionals and our internal community of employees to continue to challenge themselves and contribute to a number of exciting business priorities. 

• Lauder Summer Internship Program – A 10-week program that offers undergraduate students in the U.S. the opportunity to think critically in real-world corporate situations. Students have the opportunity to apply for openings in our corporate functions or at one of our brands, and they will be assigned based on their academic backgrounds and interests once they are accepted into the program. 

• Presidential Associate Program – An intensive, 18-month rotational program specially designed for undergraduates. This program integrates professional rotations with continuous leadership development, coaching, mentoring, hands-on practical experience, group networking opportunities, and strategic thinking initiatives to optimize talent and build business acumen and capability.

• From Every Chair Program – In June 2020, William P. Lauder, Executive Chairman, and Fabrizio Freda, President and Chief Executive Officer, shared ELC’s Commitment to Racial Equity. As part of our ongoing commitment to ensure Black employees have equal access to leadership trainings and mentorship programs with senior executives, the Global Talent team and the Inclusion & Diversity COE, in collaboration with the Network of Black Leaders and Executives (NOBLE) Employee Resource Group, created the From Every Chair (FEC) Leadership & Development Program. This 9-month Sponsorship and Mentorship program for current employees focuses on one-on-one mentoring sessions, curated professional development seminars and dedicated coaching from highly regarded executive coaches. Since its inception, the program was designed to develop and advance Black talent through enhanced programs focused on soft skills and career coaching for all participants.

• ELC Grow – In 2022, ELC launches its internal Talent Marketplace designed to connect employees to personalized recommendations for full-time roles, project and networking opportunities that can empower our community to grow their skills and careers. By matching employees with internal opportunities autonomously we encourage an environment of continued learning and fueling future career aspirations and interest.

Head over to The Estee Lauder Company’s company profile to learn more about the company and for information on open roles!

The post Learn How The Estée Lauder Companies Champions Diversity & Career Advancement in the Beauty Industry appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Calling all undergrads and recent grads: kickstart your career with Kohl’s! Finding the right path after college can be overwhelming, but Kohl’s offers internship and trainee programs that prioritize your growth and leadership development. 

Kohl’s has developed leadership programs that are a launchpad for a meaningful career, allowing self-motivated and inspired individuals to grow, both professionally and personally. Ideal for college students and recent graduates, the Kohl’s Store Leadership Internship and Store Leadership Trainee Program are both designed to give young professionals the tools needed to grow into great leaders. 

For current college students, the Kohl’s Store Leadership Internship is an interactive, 8-week paid structured training program created with development in mind. Interns are given a peek behind the scenes at running a $10 million to $20 million dollar Kohl’s store. More than just hands-on experience, interns are also invited to exclusive networking events and curate their own individual development plans with their mentors. The Store Leadership Trainee Program is designed for leaders ready to jump-start their careers. Over the 12-week paid program, Store Leadership Trainees (or SLTs/Leaders in Training) develop the skills and experience needed to become a Merchandising Manager at Kohl’s. With direct experience in store-merchandising, sales, and human resources, it is a program built with development in mind. 

WayUp was able to speak with some impressive individuals who have completed the Kohl’s Store Leadership Internship and are either working towards becoming a Merchandising Manager or currently succeeding in the role.

One key takeaway from our conversations is that the true strength of these programs is the people. Both professionals mentioned that their favorite part of work was the team they are a part of and how supported they feel. Whether they grew up shopping in the store or strolled by the booth at their college career fair, the connections they made with this brand go beyond what a typical internship offers.

Additionally, both individuals applauded Kohl’s for their dedication to development.While many internships provide a summer experience, Kohl’s programs are designed to not only provide a summer experience but one that provides hands-on experience and develops leadership skills. At Kohl’s, these programs are designed to enhance your leadership skills so you come out the other side as a Merchandising Manager. 

From networking events to assigned mentors who help map out career paths, it’s evident from our conversations that Kohl’s is committed to developing the next generation of leaders. These programs are ideal for any current college student or recent grad who wants to kick start their career in the right direction.

About the Leaders in Training

Shiyan Reed is someone who knows how to set goals and get after them. As an aspiring intellectual property attorney, Kohl’s was not yet part of her long-term plan. But, after speaking with some Kohl’s store managers at a Texas State University career fair, it was clear the Kohl’s Store Leadership Programs were where she wanted to grow as a leader. Shiyan completed the internship and trainee program at the Pflugerville, Texas location before stepping into her current position as Merchandising Manager at the Leander location.

As a current Store Leadership Trainee, Sandy McGlothlin has her sights set on her path ahead. Upon completion of her 12-week program, she will step into the role as Merchandising Manager in San Diego. With a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Marketing from the University of Arizona, her analytical mindset helps her find solutions to problems in an efficient and effective manner.

Q: What originally brought you to Kohl’s, and what keeps you there?

Q: How has Kohl’s fostered and supported your development?

Q: What are your career goals at Kohl’s?

Q: What’s one piece of advice that has stuck with you through your career that you would also give to someone newly joining the workforce?

When it comes to starting your career off on the right foot, making the first step can feel overwhelming. What Kohl’s offers in their leadership programs goes beyond a resumé–it’s an experience that jump-starts an impactful, meaningful career.  

Want to learn more about the Kohl’s Store Leadership Internship and Store Leadership Trainee Program? Head over to Kohl’s WayUp profile to learn more about the company and browse open roles, upcoming events, and more.

The post The Launchpad for Leaders: How the Kohl’s Store Leadership Programs are Setting Up Early Professionals for Success appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Deciding on a career path can be daunting, especially for students early in their post-secondary education. BDO USA, PC offers a unique opportunity for students to participate in a one-on-one mentoring program and explore a variety of career options through its Pathway to Success Program. This program is designed to provide mentorship and personalized career guidance, while giving students a forum to ask questions related to their educational programming and future career goals.

The Importance of Mentorship

Bernie Pieters, BDO’s Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer and People & Culture Principal, reflects on the power of mentorships, “Mentorship contributes to an individual’s personal and professional development. When you willingly and joyfully mentor others, you create a legacy of leaders.”   

What sets BDO’s Pathway to Success apart is the exclusive mentor/mentee pairing. Students are matched with a dedicated BDO professional who volunteers their time to assist with career exploration. This relationship allows students to ask questions, bounce ideas, and seek advice on educational programming, major selection, and career exploration. The goal is to foster a relationship that continues long after the six-month commitment.

Sarah Turcotte, BDO’s National Campus Recruiting Leader, emphasizes that the program is open to both freshmen and sophomores, offering them insights into the profession and preparing them for future internships. She notes, “Really the primary purpose is educational and giving back, trying to help students find the best path for them as individuals and exposing them to new areas they may have an interest in.”

Open to All

The program is open to any freshman or sophomore, regardless of university affiliation, major, GPA, or extracurricular involvement. There are no barriers to entry, making it an authentic initiative to give back to the community and guide future professionals into majors and careers that best fit them.

Discover BDO and Yourself

Participants have the chance to learn about BDO, its roles, business lines, clients, and company culture. More importantly, they gain insights into themselves and what they should seek in their educational and professional careers. No prior experience is needed, and BDO provides resources and guidance on starting and maintaining successful mentorship relationships.

Sarah highlights the benefits, stating, “It’s personal growth and development. If they are looking to be engaged with BDO, there’s an added benefit to getting in our pipeline early. Even if they choose a different path, the experience they gain will serve them throughout their careers.”

A Two-Way Relationship

The program emphasizes the importance of relationships. BDO professionals dedicate their time to nurture and mentor early-career individuals, but it requires participants to engage actively as well. The more effort students put into the program, the more they will benefit.

Amritpal Gill, a former mentee, shares his experience: “I remember frantically applying for internships around my sophomore year. I wasn’t completely sure of what I was doing but when doing my research, BDO was the only firm that I knew of that had a mentorship program.”

Through BDO’s Pathway to Success Program, Gill was paired with Laura Anna Lisi.  Gill and Lisi had similar interests and through Lisi, Gill learned about the firm and developed a lasting relationship. Lisi was working on the same types of clients Gill had a curiosity in and they bonded over shared interests. “BDO paired me with a professional that I had commonalities with. Through Laura, I learned about the firm and when it came time to apply for an internship, I wasn’t just cold applying. I knew where I wanted to be…it was always interesting and exciting.”

Lisi, an Assurance Principal at BDO, reflects on her role as a mentor: “Pathway to Success is a wonderful program. Ultimately, real success is dependent upon the mentor and mentee forming a relationship. Amritpal and I formed a relationship, and I enjoyed helping him define his path. A lot of my success was due to forming relationships with a lot of people and networking.”

Bridging the Gap Between Learning and Application

The Pathway to Success Program is not just about selecting a career or major; it’s a transformative experience that teaches students how their education translates into a professional career. Gill, for example, entered the program unsure about his future. Paired with Lisi, he discovered potential career paths and gained clarity on his professional journey.

Amritpal reflects on his relationship with Lisi: “Whenever I would reach out…knowing how busy she was…she always made time. That’s what allowed me to build a relationship.”

The Pathway to Success program’s structure and objectives are designed to attract top talent and prepare individuals for internships. The interviews highlighted the program’s emphasis on diversity and inclusion, ensuring a diverse pool of candidates and creating meaningful relationships.

BDO’s Pathway to Success Program offers a gateway to success, providing students with the tools and relationships needed to thrive in their careers. These skills will be beneficial throughout the duration of their career. 

Whether you’re looking to clarify your major or explore different professional opportunities, this program is your steppingstone to a successful future. To learn more about BDO and their Pathway to Success Program, visit their WayUp profile and their website here.

The post Beyond the Books: Mentorship and Guidance with BDO’s Pathway to Success Program appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Early career opportunities vary from summer internships and externships to entry-level positions. When exploring possibilities in the beginning of your career, rotational programs offer a unique opportunity to gain diverse experiences and to learn how to work with multiple teams – all within one company.

Synchrony, a Fortune 200 financial services company, inspires career growth from day one. Synchrony is at the heart of many U.S. financial transactions that are made every day and is committed to providing hands-on experiences for its early career talent. The company has a robust early career development program that aims to identify, attract and develop the company’s future leaders.

Synchrony’s driving force is to be essential to people’s everyday lives by making it easier for the tens of millions of people who rely on us to access their essential needs and everyday wants with consumer financing that works for them – from their first credit card to a lifetime of flexibility. The company is recognized in the industry as a top employer, recently named by Fortune as one of the nation’s top five best companies to work for.

The Business Leadership Program

One of the programs that makes Synchrony stand out is its Business Leadership Program (BLP). These early career development programs are designed to accelerate the careers of tomorrow’s leaders.

The summer internship program is a 10-week program for rising juniors and first-year HR graduate students. As a BLP intern, you will work on projects and participate in meaningful work in your desired field while experiencing the support of the team, mentors, and Synchrony’s award-winning culture. If you are interested in the summer internship program, learn more here.

The Full-Time BLP program is a two-year, rotational program for graduating university seniors designed to facilitate your career growth across three different disciplines. If you’re still undecided on what you want to pursue professionally, a rotational program could be a great opportunity for you to explore after graduation.

The Synchrony BLP program has more than 10 different tracks, from sales and relationship management, finance, data analytics, and other areas across the business. The program includes community service, networking and social events.

The BLP program helps transition graduates into the working world by offering experiences similar to what students had with student clubs and organizations. The participant-led committees include Development, Wellness, Recruiting, and Engagement, providing real-world opportunities for new grads to grow in their communication, planning, and leadership skills.

Beyond the leadership development gained through the committees, the BLP program also helps accelerate individuals into positions of leadership.

Creating a Fast Track for Leadership

One of the top appeals of the BLP program is how it offers early career candidates access to leaders within the organization and helps to advance opportunities for leadership for themselves personally.

Due to the nature of the program, you gain diverse work experiences across multiple teams and practice areas and are steps ahead of your peers as it relates to career growth.

Wyatt Craig, SVP Digital Finance – PayPal, who was in the first cohort of the BLP rotational program shared that the biggest differentiator is the support from leadership. Leaders and mentors help you define what you want to do in your career and suggest experiences to help you achieve your goals.

The investment from leaders continues long after the program ends. Wyatt mentioned the value of the alumni network, which provides mentorship to BLP participants. To help recent graduates transition into the corporate world, these alumni provide guidance on what a career path post-BLP could look like.

Synchrony continues to invest in its employees and offers ongoing learning opportunities, including tuition benefits, which was essential for Wyatt when he decided to pursue post-grad education.

Cultivating a Culture of Flexibility and Well-Being

Through its people-centric culture, Synchrony co-designs programs and initiatives together with employees. The company offers flexible work options, allowing employees to work from home, in the office, or both in a hybrid work environment while redesigning its workspaces to encourage meaningful connections.

Josh Mugabe, a HRBP BLP, described the company’s emphasis on flexibility and choice.

Josh also shares how purposeful engagement provides valuable ways early in your career to meet and interact with people in the office. The Synchrony “hubs” or workspaces also provide a collaborative atmosphere to build relationships.

Synchrony also prioritizes employee well-being in the workplaces, providing comprehensive wellness programs and benefits. For example, the company provides a psychologist onsite and employees can have up to 12 sessions per year at no cost to them personally. The program was built with everyone in mind, including interns.

Angela King, Sales & Relationship Management BLP, was the first BLP to lead the BLP’s Wellness committee.

Initiatives include physical activities like intramural sports, the Brooklyn marathon and ice skating in Bryant Park as well as stress reduction and wellness programs including a cooking class, financial literacy, and virtual monthly conversations.

Gaining Real-World Career Skills

Angela shared how fast the two years went by and how much she accomplished and grew during that time. She learned about Synchrony and business acumen and increased her confidence, gained insight into her own strengths and weaknesses, and developed leadership skills.

A rotational program offers tangible work experience that could help you solidify the direction for your career. The program dedicates time for you to explore your interests and learn from different roles and leaders. As you consider possibilities for your life after graduation, we encourage you to look into Synchrony’s rotational program. If you don’t have plans to graduate yet, then you can learn more about the summer 10-week internship program.

You can learn more about the company here. If you’re interested in starting your career at Synchrony, visit us here to find out more about the internship program, the rotational program, and other early-career opportunities.

The post Inspiring Career Growth at Synchrony appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is an IT services, consulting and business solutions organization that has been partnering with many of the world’s largest businesses for the past 50 years. TCS believes innovation and collective knowledge can transform the future with greater purpose.

TCS employs over 600,000 of the world’s best-trained consultants from 150+ nationalities with operations in 50+ countries. Diversity is a value of TCS as evidenced by the fact that it’s one of the world’s largest employers of women in the IT industry.

Notably, in North America, TCS was recently recognized as:

• The #1 Top Employer in the U.S. by the Top Employers Institute
• One of the 50 most community-minded companies in the U.S. by Points of Light
• One of Fortune Magazine World’s Most Admired Companies^TM list, a global barometer of corporate reputation, for the second straight year

Working for the Greater Good

TCS believes in building greater futures by making its communities its priority and by connecting people to opportunities in the digital economy. In line with the values of its parent company, The Tata Group, TCS’ Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) efforts are driven toward initiatives that contribute to the creation of a fairer and more equitable world for all.

With its proactive stance on climate change and award-winning work with communities across the world, TCS has earned it a place in leading sustainability indices such as the MSCI Global Sustainability Index and the FTSE4Good Emerging Index.

Globally, efforts include helping marginalized individuals and communities with literacy, education, employment and mentoring for entrepreneurial endeavors. In North America, these CSR efforts are specifically designed to help advance education equity, close the STEM skills gap, and prepare students for the future global workforce.

Two programs that engage with youth and support potential leaders in the IT space are the career readiness program (goIT) and the professional development program (Ignite My Future).

Digital Innovation and Career Readiness (goIT)

TCS’ flagship, no-cost digital innovation and career readiness program, Go Innovate Together (goIT), equips K-12 students all over the world with the skills, confidence and mindset to pursue careers in STEM. 

goIT provides resources and training programs for teachers but primarily focuses on opportunities for students to learn about problem solving and design thinking while developing their sense of global citizenship. The program inspires participants to use their new skills to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges because all goIT challenges and program culminations are tied to the U.N.’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. 

WayUp spoke with Kevin Lee, a previous co-op student turned full-time software engineer. Kevin found TCS to be an exciting and innovative environment, especially in the Internet of Things (IoT) field. He heard about goIT through a mentor during his internship and was excited to volunteer to teach elementary, middle, and high school students during a goIT Summer Camp. The three-day camp was integrated with TCS’ Bringing Life to Things IoT lab for the second consecutive year, and students learned where and how IoT can be used to generate positive changes in their communities.

By volunteering with the program, Kevin most enjoyed seeing students increase their understanding of technology’s potential and explore new interests in tech through the program’s culminating projects and presentations. These programs are valuable for students to learn new skills and evaluate different aspects of technology as they explore career possibilities for their future.

The summer camp experience is special to all TCS employee volunteers, but it is especially meaningful to those, like Kevin, who work in the Milford office outside of Cincinnati where the goIT program was born. It began as an innovative idea for a one-time summer camp in 2009 and has since grown into a year-round global program, operating in 42 countries. Over the last year alone, goIT touched the lives of more than 1 million students and 20K educators. Student innovations addressed issues as diverse as water quality, hunger, education, equality, poverty and climate change.

Teacher Professional Development (Ignite My Future)

Launched in 2017, TCS’ Ignite My Future is TCS’ pioneering effort to empower educators around the world though a unique approach that integrates computational thinking into core subjects like math, science, literacy, social studies, and the arts. Computational thinking is a future-ready skill that prepares students to tackle problems by building their confidence to work with big, complex issues.

Ignite My Future’s program content is developed and managed by a team of former educators, so it is a teachers-helping-teachers initiative that adds meaning to K-12 classrooms all over the world. As a teacher professional development program that provides training and resources to teachers looking to expand their capacity for bringing computational thinking into their classrooms, the program provides teachers and their classes with formal training sessions, exciting lesson plans, virtual field trips and Family STEM Night implementations. 

Recently, the program launched “Tech Trends for Teachers” which tackles tech knowledge and awareness from a different perspective. Like many of its in-classroom initiatives, Tech Trends for Teachers is driven by TCS employee volunteers.

WayUp spoke with Software Engineer John Trimble about his experience at TCS. In addition to his role helping lead the IoT and digital engineering lab in Cincinnati, he is also a frequent volunteer for various CSR initiatives. Recently, he contributed both to the experience of students attending the goIT summer camp and to teachers who turn to TCS for their own professional development through Ignite My Future.

Tech Trends for Teachers engages TCS employees in providing K-12 teachers with the opportunity to learn about — and share — tech innovations that will change the way the next generation will live and work. John also mentioned how this type of volunteerism gives a chance to highlight their own leadership, which is fulfilling.

“It’s Part of Our Ethos:” Purpose Matters

The fact that TCS’ culture of purpose is deeply embedded across all geographies, departments and customer service units is clear in conversations with TCSers who can describe the company’s legacy of community purpose in detail. In conversations with TCS employees, they happily declare that contributing to social and environmental good is part of the company’s ethos.

In 2023 alone, TCS employees volunteered across the globe and generously gave more than 5 million hours of service or, as “TCSers” refer to it, of HOPE. In North America, employee activities included supporting programs like goIT and Ignite My Future, as well as sorting, packaging, and delivering sustenance to people facing food insecurity through food banks. Additionally, employees plant trees, mentor refugees, give blood and volunteer for disaster response and recovery activities.

In response to employees’ interest in receiving corporate support for volunteering on their own or in more coordinated efforts, TCS created an app for finding curated opportunities based on employee location. The app, called myPurpose, is one of the ways TCS supports employees looking to live their purpose both at work and after work.

When asked about the company’s culture of purpose, John emphasized the fact that giving back is important to all TCS employees.

Kevin was initially exposed to CSR initiatives during his internship, and his engagement continued after joining the company full-time. In highlighting the variety of opportunities available, he said, “I really appreciate all the creative programs that allow people to make a difference even virtually. It helps us expand our impact and removes a lot of boundaries.”

Opportunities for a Career with Impact

John and Kevin both graduated from the University of Cincinnati (UC), each earning a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering. They were both first drawn to TCS because of UC’s co-op program, which involved several semesters of full-time work. After interning with TCS, they decided to join the company full-time after graduation.

Kevin shared how the internship experience helped make his transition into TCS as a full-time employee more seamless. Upon graduating facing a challenging job market affected by the impacts of Covid-19, he appreciated how TCS was able to hire him and give him opportunities to contribute to others in his community at the time. Even more, he valued the career opportunities he would gain by joining the company.

John was specifically drawn to the company’s IoT lab and the opportunity to work with cutting-edge technology, which made him excited to join one of the biggest tech companies in the world.

The internship program at TCS provides students with real-world experience and meaningful projects, equipping them with the skills to launch their careers in technology, IoT, engineering, and more. Additionally, interns can gain insight into the company culture, the team dynamics and projects, and the day-to-day work itself.

Whether through the internship or as full-time employees, TCS creates opportunities to engage with work that makes an impact. From specific CSR initiatives and programs to an overall culture of philanthropy, TCS provides an educational and purposeful environment to start or build your career.

For more information about career opportunities within TCS, check out their page on WayUp here.

The post Want a Career that Matters? Discover Tata Consultancy Services and its Corporate Social Responsibility Leadership appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Taking a leap and joining an internship can come with many unknowns – Will I meet people and make friends? What is the company culture like? What type of projects will I work on?

At Tata Consultancy Services, a leader in IT services, consulting, and business solutions, the campus recruitment team understands these pre-joining nerves and have created a thoughtful engaging program to ease the transition from school into a professional work environment.

To develop emerging young leaders within the IT industry, TCS created a robust internship program that offers students meaningful work experience in a real-world setting. The ‘TCS Early Careers’ program allows interns the opportunity to contribute to real technology projects handled by industry professionals within various TCS business units and gain hands-on experience through problem solving, and critical thinking skills. Spanning across 10-12 weeks, the program is ideal for students currently enrolled in a computer science and/or other TCS relevant STEM academic program

About ‘TCS Early Careers’ Program

TCS values the student’s experience and learning. The program is structured into 5 distinct phases intended to guide the students seamlessly through the experience and gain the exposure that is intended. With the guidance of the TCS campus team at every step of the process, each student has access to a business mentor and a buddy who are integrally involved in the internship process and interact regularly with the students.

Phase 1
The initial phase, prior to joining, has connect sessions planned at regular intervals with the campus team and the mentors to ensure readiness to get started with TCS. To alleviate some of the nerves before starting the internship, the TCS team hosts virtual sessions to go through any questions upcoming interns might have on onboarding and what to expect on the internship. The week before the internship starts, interns receive a welcome kit full of TCS swag and instructions on what to expect on Day 1!

Phase 2 and 3
To help ease the transition into the corporate world, the second and third phase focuses on ‘getting a fast start’ for the interns. The interns are welcomed with an orientation on their first day where they attend workshops, featuring sessions about TCS and its business, information on how to access their equipment tools, connect with their mentors/buddies and other insightful talks from senior leadership. During the weeklong orientation, TCS interns will also hear from Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) leaders and are encouraged to join these groups to start networking and seamlessly assimilate into the TCS culture.

Phase 4
The fourth phase is about delivering clarity on the role and helping the interns succeed in the project. Interns meet with their assigned teams and start working on projects and some of the interns have the opportunity to directly work with TCS customers. While working on projects, interns are mentored by subject matter experts to gain applicable leadership and technology skills to help jumpstart their careers. All of this happens organically through the collaborative company culture and meaningful project experience.

Phase 5
The last phase is all about ‘Celebrating the success’ of completing the internships. With a formal graduation ceremony, the interns have the opportunity to showcase their experience to the TCS Leadership team and share/hear about success stories from other interns.

Life as an Intern

To gain an insight into the TCS intern experience, WayUp spoke with previous interns Karan Sathiayan and Hrithik Reddy. Karan, a data scientist intern and current full-time employee, shared that as an intern he was given a lot of responsibility which made him feel valued as a part of the team. Karan shared that the highlight of the internship was when he presented a demo in front of a large group of TCS employees at an internal seminar that his manager organized.

To gain another perspective, WayUp spoke with Hrithik Reddy who interned at TCS but his role was quite different from a typical technology internship. He focused on projects supporting the Global Sports Sponsorship team and helped the team with sponsorship research and how to boost TCS marketability through sports. Hrithik supported the team’s efforts working towards TCS sponsorships for the TCS NYC Marathon (title sponsor), Boston Marathon, Chicago Marathon, TCS Jaguar Racing, and other events.

Hrithik spoke highly of the team environment and company culture, especially in his contributions as an intern. He described the engaging atmosphere and how his input was considered by the team, which helped him feel valuable and like he had already been working for the company for years.

Mentorship and Professional Development Opportunities

As a part of the Internship program, interns are assigned a mentor and a buddy to meet with weekly throughout the entire duration of the internship. Interns are also introduced to an internal communication tool to communicate with their peers and receive real-time feedback from their buddies, mentors, and senior leadership. This intentional approach to provide relational support at the company helps to equip interns with networking, interpersonal, and teambuilding skills – all of which are vital to their long-term success.

Karan Sathiayan, a data scientist who very recently joined TCS full-time, praised the company culture and their value of mentorship and continued education. TCS not only offers outside training through Linkedin Learning, but also has their own internal platform called iEvolve where employees can gain training on anything from technical skills to leadership and soft skills.

Karan also elaborated how these TCS trainings are vital to standing out during the interview process.

TCS Micro Internships

In collaboration with The Forage, Tata Consultancy Services and Tata Group have created three virtual Micro Internships which are open to all students and professionals who are looking to grow their skills. TCS and Tata Group have created three Micro Internships which simulates real world projects and allows you to get experience in areas such as Data Visualization, Cybersecurity, and Sustainability. These Micro Internships are self-paced typically taking 3-5 hours to complete and can be conducted fully virtually. These Micro Internships are free and are open to everyone. You can navigate to the three Tata Micro Internships by clicking on the following link here.

An internship with TCS is a valuable experience that can guide you on your career path and prepare you with hands-on experience for a full-time career after graduation. If you’re interested in IT or software engineering, be sure to check out their internship programs and other career opportunities within the company.

For more information about the company, check out TCS’s page on WayUp here. For more specific information about the internship program, view here.

About TCS

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is an IT services, consulting and business solutions organization that has been partnering with many of the world’s largest businesses for the past 50 years. TCS believes innovation and collective knowledge can transform the future with greater purpose.

TCS has over 601,000 of the world’s best trained consultants from 150+ nationalities with operations in 55 countries. Diversity is a value of TCS as evidenced by how the company is one of the world’s largest employers of women – over 160,000 women employees – making up over 36% of the global workforce. Notably, TCS was recently awarded the #1 Top Employer in the U.S. award by Top Employers Institute and was also awarded Top 100 internship program by WayUp in 2022 and 2023.

The post How ‘Early Careers’ at Tata Consultancy Services Prepares You for a Career with Impact appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

If you have not heard of Arup, you have likely seen their firm’s work firsthand without realizing it. As a global collective of designers, consultants, and experts dedicated to sustainable development, they use technology, imagination, and rigour to shape a better world. The firm has a 75-year history of commitment in producing meaningful and socially useful work.

Working for Global Impact

Sustainable development encompasses a variety of aspects, including regeneration, biodiversity, conservation of resources, stable economic growth, and social value. Arup has a collaborative approach where architects, engineers, and consultants come together to work towards the shared goal of shaping a better world.

In line with Arup’s purpose, they work to provide a greater impact on the world around them. Arup has committed to achieving net zero emissions across their entire operation by 2030, covering everything from the energy used in offices to goods and services purchased. From 2019 to 2022, Arup reduced their carbon footprint by 14% to help them get closer to their goal of net zero.

As a global organization, Arup’s members work across a myriad of departments, which they internally call “disciplines.” These disciplines range from engineering departments – such as Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Structural Engineering – to more specialized groups such as Sustainability, Acoustics, Energy, and more. Additionally, Arup has a business services team that includes roles within Marketing and Communications, Finance, Human Resources, Legal, and more.

Launching Early Careers

No matter what career path you’re pursuing, there are countless opportunities to explore at Arup. Their firm provides exposure to various disciplines throughout the internship, which helps to foster curiosity and awareness of the types of career path available to them. As an employer of choice, Arup serves as a launching pad for passionate young professionals who are looking to start their careers with meaningful work.

For those looking to start their careers or gain knowledge as they pursue their early careers, Arup’s internship program offers an impactful experience. The acclaimed summer program offers a paid, 10-week internship for full-time undergraduate and graduate students.

The internship program is divided into three categories in a 70/20/10 framework:

• 70% real work experience
• 20% internship program events
• 10% for ongoing learning opportunities

Providing Meaningful Work Experience

Much of the time, about 70%, is spent working alongside professionals and contributing to the success of real-life projects. The internship program equips interns with hands-on experience across disciplines working on active engineering, design, and consulting projects.

During the internship, interns are immersed in project site visits, team meetings, company meetings, and client meetings. Additionally, interns regularly engage with leadership and develop relationships with colleagues through project meetings and attending social events. The program offers a diverse experience and positions students for success within their desired career path.

Fostering Relationships and Networking Opportunities

During the internship, 20% of the time is spent engaging in internship program events such as regional events, local events, and a project review assignment. Regional events allow interns to engage with peers across 16 offices, attending workshops about sustainability, Employee Resource Groups, leadership, and other topical events.

The local events foster intentional networking opportunities through site visits, connecting with office leadership, and a graduate panel discussion. These events also provide opportunities for interns to meet and engage with colleagues across disciplines at Arup, helping to expand their knowledge about the firm. Additionally, some of the events offer insights from members early in their career to interns about to start their career.

The project review assignment groups interns into multidisciplinary teams where they work together across different office locations. Interns are tasked with completing a knowledge review and creating a value story on a recently completed Arup project, allowing interns to explore how a project was delivered with quality. The final outcome is a presentation that interns give to their teams, peers, and leadership, which provides them with meaningful exposure to the organization.

Offering Continued Education and Development

Finally, the last 10% of the internship is set aside for ongoing education and professional development opportunities. Interns are encouraged to spend time pursuing additional trainings to advance their skills and knowledge, which highlights how Arup invests in early career talent.

The hiring managers identify a mentor, or what Arup calls a “buddy,” that will be partnered with interns. The objective of this mentor system is to assist interns in acclimating to their new environment, learning about the organization, and integrating into the culture and work at Arup.

A Thriving Company Culture

Arup deeply cares about its culture and how it represents the mission and vision of the organization. In addition to their values, Arup strives to champion Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI), and engages with communities across the globe. The firm values how the best creative work draws from a range of human experiences, viewpoints, and ideas. Arup is committed to DEI and its efforts shape the firm’s work and culture.

Interns shared how they were able to get involved in Employee Resource Groups and support work that aligned with their own long-term goals. From exposure to the diverse leadership at Arup to networking with other offices, interns are integrated into the life and culture of the organization. They also spoke about opportunities of attending conferences or other events to support their own professional development and expand their interests outside of project work.

Wondering what a typical day-to-day looked like for Arup interns? For more insight, watch the below videos to see what it was like to intern at Arup from 3 Arup interns at the Houston, TX office, New York City office, and Boston office!

Timothy Dang’s day in the life as a Mechanical Engineering intern at the Houston, TX Office

Sarah Cole’s day in the life as a Software Development rotational intern visiting the New York City office

Kelly Perymon’s day in the life as a Sustainability intern at the Boston, MA office

Pipeline for Future Job Opportunities

It’s no secret that Arup’s internship program provides a funnel of potential candidates. At the end of the internship, interns are evaluated and considered for full-time or return internship opportunities.

Arup employs individuals from all different degrees and backgrounds. They assess candidates holistically and place a focus on their technical skills and experience that align with the position. They look for innovative thinkers with a passion and drive to join an extraordinary collective and create a future with purpose.

Internship Application Process

For those interested in applying for an internship with Arup, you must submit an application. After passing the resume review, candidates will be shortlisted and invited to complete the pre-screen step and assessment. After passing the pre-screen, candidates will be set up for a video interview with the hiring manager for the role.

Arup looks for students who are passionate about their field of study, curious about the professional world, and eager to shape a better world through sustainable development. It is important for candidates to be self-motivated, have strong communication skills, and be willing to be part of a community.

For more information about the internship program and the application process, check out Arup’s page on WayUp here.

The post Help Change the World by Interning at Arup appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

When looking to start your career, you consider the type of work involved, but do you consider the greater impact of the work itself?

The American Heart Association is the nation’s oldest and largest voluntary organization dedicated to fighting heart disease and stroke, and the organization is now in its 100th year. Working with over 35 million volunteers and supporters, the non-profit Association makes a real impact with its focus on cardiovascular and overall health, saving millions of lives.

Heart disease and stroke are the two leading causes of death worldwide, and for survivors, they can diminish the quality of life. The Association’s mission is to be a relentless force for a world of longer, healthier lives, by funding innovative research (more than $5 billion to date), advocating for the public’s health, and sharing lifesaving resources, with a focus on ensuring equitable health in all communities.

The American Heart Association has strong tailored early career programs for people to pursue their goals, such as their internship program, the Scholars program, and HeartCorps, the Association’s public health AmeriCorps program.

Employees at the Association join the organization from varied backgrounds. Some bring experience from major corporations, some recently finished their education, and some are transitioning from the military. No matter your entry point, the Association is a strong and meaningful place to start, build, or grow your career.

The Internship Program

The American Heart Association’s structured internship program offers interns opportunities within many departments. The organization is committed to provide students with real-time, meaningful experiences to learn about and assist with the work done there.

The internships span across different disciplines, such as Operations, Fundraising, Marketing, Health Strategies, and Science and Research. Dion Bart, a Communications Intern who later joined the American Heart Association full-time, talked about his experience as an intern, touching on the structure, supportive environment, opportunities for growth, inclusive company culture and the importance of voicing opinions and asking for help in order to succeed.

Dion’s work as an intern included creating and implementing a communications and social media plan for a major event (Heart Walk). He gained firsthand experience of what a communications director does, which helped position himself for a full-time job at the American Heart Association.

Another intern, Sha’Dasia Reynolds, began as an intern in Community Impact and extended her internship in Human Resources with University Relations. Through her work in two different departments, she gained even more valuable experience and understanding of what it is like to work at the Association. Now, she is taking what she learned as an intern and providing feedback to make the internship experience even better.

Darjé Bennett talked about her experience transitioning from the military and into the American Heart Association. She expressed her gratitude for how the organization –– and especially the mentors –– helped her re-enter the civilian workforce. As she began her internship, she discovered how her military experience translated into real-life work experience.

Darjé was another intern who was able to transition into a full-time position at the Association. She also shared how supportive the Association has been for her as a working mom, providing her with flexibility. For more information about The American Heart Association’s careers, look here.

WayUp also spoke with Christen Lawrence, an HBCU graduate from Miles College, who interned with the American Heart Association following her participation as an HBCU Scholar. As part of its comprehensive work toward building equitable health, the American Heart Association has partnered with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI), and other accredited colleges to help students earn professional degrees in the biomedical and health sciences. These scholar programs at the organization provide an experience over an academic year that focuses on research methodologies as well as the social impact caused by health disparities and inequities.

Being a scholar gave Christen valuable research opportunities, addressed representation in the workplace, and emphasized the value of mental well-being and career development all of which helped her build confidence as a young professional. She spoke highly of that opportunity and how it provided her with valuable networking opportunities and sparked her interest in becoming an intern with the Association.

The exposure to leadership at company events helped increase networking skills, which paid off for Christen as she accepted a full-time role after completing her internship.

HeartCorps Program

Beyond the standard internship program, the Association has the HeartCorps program, launched in partnership with AmeriCorps. HeartCorps is a public health AmeriCorps service program where members gain valuable professional public health experience while advancing more equitable health outcomes for rural communities.

WayUp spoke with Janninah Miller, a current HeartCorps member, about her experience. Janninah serves with a Health Center and works on community health assessment projects and helped address food insecurity and transportation issues. She shared how the HeartCorps program gave her valuable experience toward her long-term career goals.

For students interested in public health, the HeartCorps program is a great one to explore during your early career development. For information about HeartCorps, contact them at HeartCorps@heart.org.

Career Development Opportunities

As shown above, many interns are given opportunities to extend their internship or join the organization full-time, and praised the program for how well it was structured to provide them with a meaningful experience.

Tips for the internship interview process? Former interns noted the interviews are conversational and suggest being true to yourself and asking questions, so candidates show their authentic selves. Many interns also discussed why they wanted to work in the non-profit sector.

The American Heart Association fosters career opportunities for early career professionals who are looking to start or continue their career. Whether you’re looking for a full-time, part-time, or internship role, there are various roles at the American Heart Association that you can explore.

Notably, the American Heart Association was recognized on the Forbes 2023 list of America’s Best Midsize Employers. The AHA also earned a top spot on DiversityInc’s 2023 lists of Top Hospitals and Health Systems, Top Companies for Board of Directors, and Noteworthy Companies. The organization has also been named a Leading Disability Employer for the fourth consecutive year, by the National Organization on Disability (NOD). Working for an established organization has many benefits, including professional opportunities. Employees have access to HeartU, which offers state-of-the-art online training courses to enhance career development.

WayUp is here to help you navigate your career ambitions. If you are interested in applying for an internship or exploring open positions, you can learn more on WayUp’s page here.

The post Want a Career with Impact? Work at the American Heart Association appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

What came first: an efficient hiring process or a positive candidate experience? A positive candidate experience doesn’t waste candidates’ time. In order to do that, your team needs an efficient hiring process. Since candidate experience and efficiency are very much intertwined, you may wonder whether a positive candidate experience was a direct result of an efficient hiring process, or vice versa.

So how can you get a more efficient hiring process—and enjoy the added benefit of a better candidate experience? You need to focus on the following areas. 

Employer Branding Means More High-Intent Applicants

A great employer brand doesn’t just help with candidate experience. It also leads to a more efficient hiring process by creating more high-intent applicants. Applicants that are fully aware of your company culture will be interested in moving through your team’s hiring funnel. They will, ultimately, be more eager to accept your team’s job offer. 

Here’s how your company can improve their employer brand.

A Very Fast Response Time Is Needed

According to the National Association of Colleges and Employees (NACE), the average time from job posting to an interview is 38 days. Couple this with how the average time from interview to offer is 24 days, the average recruiting team’s time-to-hire hovers around 62 days.

That’s not going to work, though, if you want top talent. Do you know how long top talent is available for? Ten days.

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent 

A high-tech and high-touch hiring process helps reduce your team’s time-to-hire. To achieve this, you can leverage technology in your recruiting and hiring process in the following ways:

• Candidate sourcing
• Scheduling and coordinating interviews
• Answering candidates’ questions

Incorporating technology for these aspects will give candidates the fast response time throughout the interview process they want.

Personalized Feedback Is A Top Priority For Candidates

Back in the day, companies had inefficient hiring processes and weren’t aware of how much a negative candidate experience hurt them. In the Age of the Candidate, however, those days are a distant memory, with a tight labor market and the power of social media to spread negative press shifting the power toward candidates. 

Interview feedback is an example of the new power dynamic. Today’s candidates—94 percent of them, in fact—overwhelmingly want personalized feedback after an interview. Companies that don’t provide feedback aren’t going to curry any favor with top talent.

As LinkedIn suggests, your team needs to provide feedback no more than three or four business days after an interview. If your team waits longer, they risk candidates becoming disengaged with your team’s hiring process. Or worse, candidates have a negative candidate experience and no longer support your company, like what happened with Virgin Media.

Educate Candidates Throughout The Process

Gen Z and Millennials want to receive information about the interview process from companies they’re interviewing with. It’s the second most-important aspect of the hiring process for them—right behind quick responses from an employer about their interview outcome.

Your team, therefore, needs to provide a high-touch interview process. They should overcommunicate with candidates about company culture, what the role entails, interview agenda, and any other pertinent information. Articles that describe, in detail, what are the position’s daily tasks are very helpful for potential applicants to fully understand what the job will be like. 

An Efficient Partner That Helps You Create A Positive Candidate Experience

You may think creating an efficient hiring process while also improving your candidate experience may be a monumental task. That’s not the case. Just copy what Nasdaq did to save their team 100 hours per week and cut their time-to-hire by 50 percent, all in one year: They partnered with WayUp.

By partnering with WayUp Source, Screen & Coach, Nasdaq notified all applicants within 24 hours of applying whether they’d be moving on in the process. Qualified candidates were then able to schedule a phone screen with WayUp’s early-career specialists. These specialists then provided personalized soft-skills feedback to all candidates—regardless of the outcome—and followed up with their applicant status in under 24 hours.

An efficient hiring process or a positive candidate experience is a chicken-or-the-egg situation. Your team’s talent pool, regardless, will hatch more high-performing early-career employees if you focus on achieving both.

Fill out the form to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent

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The post Why A Great Candidate Experience Is The Secret To A More Efficient Hiring Process appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Getting better hires isn’t achieved by solely focusing your team’s efforts at top schools. A school might be ranked high, but that doesn’t mean its graduates are the perfect fit for your organization. Your team will need to do more than just recruit at top institutions to ensure they’re hiring quality employees. 

The way to hire more top talent, in fact, is to focus on three hiring metrics. Doing so will benefit your company.      

1. Quality-Of-Hire

Do you think the war for talent is overstated? Think again. The top 5 percent of a company’s workforce can produce 26 percent of a company’s total output. This is why companies are doing all they can in early-career recruitment to hire qualified candidates and nurture top talent.

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent 

Your team, thankfully, can do this by tracking quality-of-hire. Quality-of-hire helps guide recruitment because once your team recognizes traits that high-performing employees have, they can look for other qualified candidates with those qualities.

To calculate quality-of-hire, HR Daily Advisor suggests using the following formula:

(Performance + Productivity + Retention)/Number of Metrics Used

2. Retention Rate

Employees that quickly leave your company after joining are a red flag for your team. An alarming percentage of employees—30 percent—quit within the first 90 days on the job.

One reason that employees leave a job so quickly is company culture. Your team, thankfully, can address this by incorporating this advice.

3. Intern Conversion And Retention Rate 

You need to view conversion and retention rate as they relate to each other because they give you a complete view of your team’s early-career hires. A “recruit once, hire twice” mindset, for instance, leads to better hires. Why? You’re choosing the right candidates for more than just a brief period. These interns are fully exposed to your company culture in hopes they want to be full-time employees, and your team gets to treat their internship as an extended job interview.

This intern-to-full-time employee approach pays off. According to ERE, a strategy like this saves your company almost $40,000 per employee within five years. Your team, therefore, will save money and get better early-career hires if they recruit candidates similar to employees that started as interns and converted to full-time employees.  

Want better hires? Pay attention to these three metrics, and your team will get more top talent to work for your company.

Fill out the form to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent

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The post Want Better Hires? Pay Attention To These 3 Metrics appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Your team’s going on campus, and that’s great! College campuses are an exciting place to meet enthusiastic top early-career talent. 

You’re spending a lot of money by doing it, though. And like any prudent person, you ask yourself, “Is the money well spent?” To answer this, you need to understand the efficacy of your team’s on-campus recruiting efforts.

So how are you measuring your team’s effectiveness? What are you doing to incentivize them to improve and drive efficiency? Focus on these five metrics and you’ll understand their performance.

1. Cost-Per-Hire

According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), companies that recruit on campus have an average cost-per-hire of $6,275. That’s three times higher than companies that don’t recruit on campus. (They spend an average of $2,027.)

To attract and engage top candidates, you’ll need to evaluate which institutions are actually driving qualified candidates for your team. From there you can determine where, when, and how to allocate that funding.

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent 

2. Time-To-Hire

Part of the problem with on-campus recruitment is the developing arms race. Companies are competing for top talent, and this has caused their time-to-hire to continually increase, as they’ve increasingly recruited earlier and earlier.

Currently, the average time-to-hire from job posting to offer is 62 days. This number can, unfortunately, continue to climb if the on-campus recruitment arms race intensifies.

You and your recruiters need to measure your team’s time-to-hire to see how it stacks up against the average time-to-hire. This will reveal a lot about your team’s on-campus hiring efficiency.   

3. On-Campus Candidates’ Conversion Rate

Your team’s conversion rate of on-campus candidates is a great performance indicator that both you and your recruiters need to monitor. If your team is visiting campuses that drive a lot of applicants but not qualified candidates, then it’s time to consider going to different schools. Institutions that don’t drive top talent shouldn’t be part of your core schools.

4. Leveraging Employee Engagement Data To Influence Your On-Campus Strategy

According to Gallup, only 32 percent of US employees are engaged at their job. That’s scary. Even scarier: What if your early-career hires are among those unengaged employees? People starting their careers are buoyed by enthusiasm and drive. If that excitement has already dissipated from your company’s early-career employees, then there may be a systemic problem with your company culture.

Your company’s culture may be causing workers to actively become disengaged. According to the Harvard Business Review, disengaged workers cause organizations to be 18 percent less productive and 16 percent less profitable and have 37 percent lower job growth and 65 percent lower share price over time.

It also matters if you want to take a reverse engineering approach to on-campus recruitment. If, for instance, your team is hiring early-career employees that quickly become disengaged workers, then the problem is two-fold: Your team needs to rethink the talent they’re targeting on campus. The second aspect is, again, evaluating if that school should remain a core institution.  

5. On-Campus ROI

Here’s another great way to evaluate your team’s on-campus efforts: on-campus ROI. This allows you to see if your on-campus recruitment strategy is producing desired results. You can do this by using the following formula:

Amount of Money + Time Invested

Now measure that number against the following:

 Number of Qualified Candidates/Number of Hires

Take this number and compare it to your team’s target cost-per-hire. How does it measure up against what you hoped your cost-per-hire would be? The answer helps you see if you have an efficient early-career recruitment strategy.

If you and your recruiters measure and analyze these five metrics, your company’s on-campus recruiting will be more effective.

Fill out the form to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent

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The post Are Your On-Campus Recruiters Focusing On The 5 Metrics That Actually Matter? appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

What will a day in the life of an on-campus recruiter of the future look like? Once they wake up and fall out of bed, what will they do next? Here’s a closer look at how they will spend their time compared to what current recruiters are doing.

CURRENT—8AM—Meet In The Hotel Lobby And Leave For Campus

You grab a stale pastry, drink pulpy orange juice, and hop in your rental car.

FUTURE—8AM—Eat Breakfast And Leave For The Office

You go to a place that blends fruits and vegetables into liquid form for quick and easy consumption. The store calls the drink a blendie. You suggest to the worker they call the drink a smoothie.

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent 

CURRENT—8:20AM—Arrive On Campus

You make it on campus—with a few minutes to spare—so you can prepare.

FUTURE—8:20AM—Arrive At The Office

You walk into work. You go over to the water cooler to talk about Big Little Lies. You get a cup of coffee, go back to your desk, check social media—the Kardashians are trending again! (yawn)—and read your emails.

CURRENT—8:30AM-12:00PM—Interview Round

You conduct interviews with qualified candidates that you scheduled prior to your arrival. During this time, though, other students who may not be a fit wander over to your booth, so you talk to them. This reduces your time with qualified candidates.

FUTURE—8:30AM-9:30AM—Analyze Source Effectiveness

You do a deep dive at where your past qualified candidates came from. You notice an interesting trend—a lot of your core schools aren’t delivering the top talent you thought they were, especially not at your target cost-per-hire. Your cost-per-hire, in fact, is well above the average $6,275, per the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). You tell your boss. You brainstorm how to be more efficient on campus and drive more qualified candidates.

You plan which upcoming events you’re attending at which institutions. You choose to attend diversity career fairs to hit your diversity hiring goals. You avoid the scattershot approach of the past, where you attended as many career fairs as possible. Only 53 percent of Gen Z attends career fairs, after all, and you’ve found your more strategic approach is much more effective.

FUTURE—9:30AM-12:00PM—First Batch Of Interviews With Qualified Candidates

You interview pre-screened, qualified candidates. These candidates use a high-tech tool to conveniently schedule their interviews at times that work best for you and them, helping create a positive candidate experience.

You get to know the candidates more, and you understand their strengths and weaknesses. You get a better idea of who would excel at your company. 

CURRENT—12:00PM-1:30PM—Information Session

You showcase your company’s employer brand. You speak until your voice is hoarse. A few potential applicants show slight interest.

FUTURE—12:00PM-12:30PM—Lunch

Your company has digitally crafted a strong employer brand, so it consistently gets high-intent applicants. You don’t have to give dozens of company culture presentations, so your voice no longer sounds like Fran Drescher’s.

FUTURE—12:30PM-5:30PM—More Interviews With Qualified Candidates

You have more qualified candidates to interview. You get to spend your day with only qualified candidates: That must be out of The Twilight Zone!    

CURRENT—1:30PM-2:30PM—Meet With Career Services

You meet with Career Services. You discuss timelines, updates, and other happenings at your company. You ask Career Services what students think of your company.

CURRENT—2:30PM-5:30PM—Coffee Chats With Students

For the next three hours, you have coffee chats with students. A few of the students you speak to may be a good fit for your company.   

FUTURE—5:30PM—Answer Emails And Wrap Up For The Day

Make sure there’s nothing urgent you have to deal with. You talk about how you love to hate Meryl Streep’s character in Big Little Lies. You head home for the day.

CURRENT—5:30PM—Answer Emails And Regroup

You get some downtime, but you’re still on the clock. You answer emails and write notes from the morning activities. These can range from recapping interviews to writing notes—that you’ll most likely lose—for next year’s agenda.

FUTURE—6:00PM-Rest Of The Night—Unwind

You eat dinner and relax.   

CURRENT—7:00PM—Prepare For The Evening Session

Now it’s time to rinse and repeat, and get ready for the evening information session.

CURRENT—7:30PM-8:30PM—Evening Information Session

You present to students, just like you did in the afternoon. Not all of them are qualified. Most stare at their phone throughout your presentation.

CURRENT—8:30PM-9:30PM—Individual Q & A

You answer student questions that come up during one-on-one sessions. Most of the questions are about the company perks. You repeatedly answer that your company doesn’t have a beer pong table in the office.  

CURRENT—9:30PM-10:00PM—Leave Campus And Head Back To Your Hotel

CURRENT—10:00PM-11:00PM—Catch Up

When you get back to your hotel, you review emails and tomorrow’s agenda. You get to do this again the next day…and the next…for 10 months of the year.

As you can see, your current on-campus recruiters are forced to be tactical throughout their day. The on-campus recruiter of the future, however, gets to be strategic about how they spend their time on campus, and they spend double the time each day with qualified candidates. But here’s the thing: The on-campus recruiter of the future can be your company’s present recruiter. Look at Nasdaq—they partnered with WayUp and saved their team 100 hours of work per week and cut their time-to-hire in half. So, if you want a more efficient on-campus recruiter who spends more time with qualified candidates, then your company should do the same.

Fill out the form to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent

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The post A Day In The Life Of An On-Campus Recruiter Of The Future appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

What do Nasdaq, GoDaddy, and Thermo Fisher have in common? They’ve used smart strategies to create successful—and efficient—early-career recruitment programs. Though they all had areas they wanted to improve, they committed to making changes. Now they are seeing the benefits.

What did this look like in practice? Here’s an overview of how each organization accomplished that objective.  

Nasdaq

Nasdaq wasn’t universally known as a fintech company, which affected their ability to recruit top early-career STEM positions. They launched a digital campaign that reshaped the narrative and reframed how early-career candidates viewed them.

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent 

The employer branding campaign featured a number of articles, a 360-degree video office tour, and a video with Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman, focusing on how she started as an intern and worked her way to the top position at the company.

The campaign was successful. Nasdaq repositioned itself as a tech company and got more qualified candidates for their STEM positions. How was Nasdaq able to accomplish that? They partnered with WayUp, which screened all qualified applicants and provided feedback and personalized career coaching, regardless of the outcome. This partnership saved Nasdaq’s recruiting team 100 hours per week and cut Nasdaq’s time-to-hire by 50 percent.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy wanted to craft a positive employer brand and drive more early-career employee referrals, so they set out to provide a singular experience for their interns. Unlike other companies that attempt to “out-perk” competitors, GoDaddy focused on human interaction to promote the GoDaddy culture throughout their intern program.

GoDaddy paired full-time employees as mentors with engineering interns. And all of GoDaddy’s events emphasize relationship building, where interns can better get to know their colleagues.

GoDaddy saw this strategy lead to a conversion rate that’s in a class of its own. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), the average conversion rate of interns to full-time employees is 56 percent. GoDaddy’s conversion rate? More than 90 percent. What’s more, 100 percent of GoDaddy’s interns said they would recommend the GoDaddy Internship Program to a friend. Their intern program is successfully helping them attract and hire early-career top talent.

Thermo Fisher

Thermo Fisher wanted to increase their brand recognition among college students, especially among non-science majors. To do that, they emphasized employer branding.

To reshape Thermo Fisher’s narrative, they launched a multi-platform employer branding campaign tailored to Gen Z and Millennials. The result: The campaign drove three times the number of qualified resumes and successfully increased the quality-of-hire and size of the company’s 2018 intern class.

That’s particularly important for Thermo Fisher, which has a “Recruit Once, Hire Twice” strategy (they choose interns they hope will convert to full-time employees), because quality interns tend to lead to quality employees.

In early-career recruitment, imitating Nasdaq, GoDaddy, and Thermo Fisher will help you create a more efficient strategy.

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The post How 3 Top Employers Are Recruiting Early-Career Candidates appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

This Father’s Day, we should honor the holiday as well as the evolution of dads. Because as society changes, fathers are also changing how they view their jobs and familial responsibilities.

Gone are the days of the sitcom dad, the guy who drags himself through the front door and hightails right to his favorite chair to watch a ball game. 

Today’s working dad is much different. And if companies want to get the most out of these employees, they need to understand what working dads today care about.

Working Dads Now Expect To Be More Involved Parents

Today’s fathers want to be involved parents, which means being active in their children’s lives. A majority of Millennial dads—74 percent—indicate they want to spend more time with their children, per the Boston College Center for Work & Family.

And this concern doesn’t just change the way they work, it’s reformed their identity. Today’s dads are just as likely as moms—57 percent of fathers compared to 58 percent of mothers—to say that parenting is an extremely important part of their identity, claims the Pew Research Organization. This ideological shift comes with benefits, as 54 percent of dads believe that parenting is rewarding all the time.

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This has had a positive ripple effect. Now fathers are more involved in daily concerns of parenting like childcare and housework than they previously were. In 1965, fathers spent 2.5 hours per week on childcare and 4 hours per week on housework. Today, they’re contributing more than three times that amount on childcare and almost three times the weekly hours on housework.

One Concern Remains

Unfortunately, one concern remains: the father’s responsibility to monetarily provide for his family. While perception on this issue has changed, overall, 41 percent of Americans still believe it’s extremely important for dads to provide income for their children.

There are also other societal contributors to this issue. While mothers take a median of 11 weeks off from work, fathers only take a median of one week off when a new child is born. A large part of this is current parental leave policies. Because the state with the most generous paternal leave is New York, and the New York Paid Family Leave benefit only offers 10 weeks at 55 percent of a father’s weekly wage. Plus, according to Forbes, 86 percent of men don’t take advantage of paternal leave. 

Working fathers are affected long-term by missing out on this invaluable bonding time early in a child’s life. They learn how to better care for their child, and it becomes habit-forming. A Columbia University study claims that fathers who take two or more weeks for paternal leave are significantly more involved in childcare. These fathers are more active in their child’s lives after the child turns nine-months old than other fathers who didn’t take paternal leave.  

How Companies Can Help

Companies need to rethink their paternity leave policy if they want to help working dads. If organizations destigmatize paternity leave, then it helps alleviate gender workplace issues. Mothers will be able to more fully engage in their career, and it degenders parental leave. Look to Scandinavia for proof: Sweden found that for every month of paternity leave a father takes, the mother’s salary could increase by nearly 7 percent!

This will also help allay the child salary swing. Currently, men are rewarded with a 6 percent average salary increase when they have a child. Women, on the other hand, incur the motherhood penalty, and lose 4 percent of their salary when they give birth.  

Apart from its effect on pay, addressing this disparity also helps with employee retention. Today’s working fathers are very willing—69 percent, according to the Harvard Business Review—to change jobs if it means being more involved in the early stages of a child’s life. That’s 3 percent higher than working moms.

So, just remember that to keep working dads, you need to understand and address this group’s needs.

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The post Today’s Fathers Are Redefining What It Means To Be A Working Dad appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Employer branding is one of the most efficient recruiting tools companies can use. A strong employer brand helps your team create a more efficient hiring process, while a bad one hurts your ability to recruit top talent.

Why? Because employer branding affects every stage of your hiring funnel.

Here’s how employer branding can make—or break—your recruiting efforts, and the metrics you can use to measure its effectiveness. 

Awareness

1. Sourcing Effectiveness

You need to understand your sourcing effectiveness. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), companies attend an average of 41 career fairs per year. Yet only 53 percent of Gen Z use career fairs in their job search. A strategy that’s overly tilted toward on-campus recruitment can hit your team’s productivity, effectively reducing your reach.

Digital recruiting, on the other hand, allows you to share your company’s employer brand with candidates throughout the country. It also gives you more control over when and how candidates engage with your employer brand. So when your team posts your open positions on digital platforms, you can measure which one drives the right candidates for your team. 

Just look at ThermoFisher. They partnered with WayUp to create strategic employer branding campaigns that improved the quality-of-hires of their 2018 intern class. And they did it without pouring more resources into their on-campus recruitment.

Ultimately, telling your company’s story the way you want it told helps your team attract more qualified candidates.

Consideration

2. Website Traffic

Google Analytics (GA) allows you to see how website users interact with your site. Are they leaving your site after seeing dedicated employer branding pages that showcase company culture? If so, there are two possibilities: Your company is effectively showcasing what it’s like to work there, so the site is filtering out candidates who wouldn’t excel. In this case, great. The other possibility is, your site doesn’t paint enough of a picture of what it’s like to work there. Your team can judge which scenario it is by the quality of job candidates.

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Also, are potential applicants exiting from your Careers page without ever applying? This can be a sign that your application process—a big aspect of candidate experience—is too lengthy, onerous, or cumbersome. Remember, a positive candidate experience helps your company build a strong employer brand. Your company’s reputation will improve, and applicants—regardless of whether they were ultimately hired—will have a positive sentiment toward your organization. This helps push candidates through the interview stage of the funnel because they’ll want the opportunity to work for your company.

Offer

3. Acceptance Rate

Be cognizant of your hiring team’s acceptance rate. While alone it’s not the most revealing metric, it does—in conjunction with other indicators—reveal your company’s employer branding health.

According to Gallup, company culture (which is a major aspect of employer branding) is the deciding factor for whether the top 20 percent of candidates accept an offer. That’s why it’s so important to share information about your company culture throughout the hiring process. When candidates accept an interview, your team can send them articles that highlight what it’s actually like to work for your company. This will help drive a better acceptance rate, since qualified candidates will know what life at your company is like.

On the flip side, a strong employer brand can mask inefficient hiring processes. Candidates are more likely to accept a job offer from an organization with a strong employer—or consumer— brand like Google or Netflix compared to businesses that are outside this upper echelon. So even if these organizations aren’t the best at pushing candidates through the funnel (we’re not saying they’re not!), top talent will still accept the job because of the company’s reputation.

Bottom line: Make sure you measure acceptance rate as a piece of the puzzle, and not the whole picture.      

4. Conversion Rate

Does your company’s internship program actually live up to the way you sold it? Your team’s conversion rate of interns to full-time hires helps you evaluate if your employer branding is accurate or not. Similar to acceptance rate, companies with strong employer brands will more likely have interns accept full-time job offers, regardless of how the internship was sold. It’s important, therefore, to understand that this metric is one part of your evaluation criteria.

For the most part, though, an intern won’t want a full-time job at a company that’s dishonest about day-to-day tasks or the culture. Currently, the average conversion rate for turning interns into full-time hires is 56 percent. If your team’s conversion rate is higher, that’s a good sign for your company’s employer brand.

Hire

5. Cost-Per-Hire

According to NACE, the average cost-per-hire for companies that recruit on campus is $6,275 (a figure that includes personnel costs). The cost without on-campus personnel? $2,027 per hire.

A strong employer brand can drive an additional 50 percent reduction in costs, according to the Society of Human Resource Management. When taken together, that’s a lot of money to save!  

Conversely, a weak employer brand can fuel your cost-per-hire by prolonging the hiring process. In fact, 69 percent of job seekers won’t accept a job offer from a company with a bad employer brand. That’s why monitoring your cost-per-hire can shed light on the health of your company’s employer brand.

6. Employee Satisfaction

One of the most often overlooked branding metrics is employee satisfaction, claims Recruiting Daily. It’s true—making sure your employees are happy and engaged at work will lead to a stronger employer brand. But how?

Happy employees become brand advocates and share their experiences, similar to a positive candidate experience. They’re also more likely to drive referrals, which rank among the most effective hiring methods.

If you focus on these six metrics to measure your company’s employer branding, your team will not only hire top talent, they’ll do it more efficiently.

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The post 6 Ways Employer Branding Drives Efficiency Throughout Your Hiring Funnel appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

At this year’s National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) conference, leaders in early-career recruitment met to discuss and learn how the industry is changing. One thing, however, stuck out the most throughout the conference, and it’s an issue that’s been around for quite some time.

The applicant black hole is real—and your company needs to address it ASAP.

What Is The Applicant Black Hole?

As much as it sounds like science fiction—a place where 98 percent of all resumes are sent, never to be seen by your team—the applicant black hole is reality. As a tight labor market and sites like Glassdoor coalesce to give top candidates more power than ever before, a negative candidate experience is no longer an option.

The question then becomes: Why does the applicant black hole exist in the first place? One reason is that each corporate job opening attracts an average of 250 applicants. That means that your team would need to spend at least 13 hours per work week sifting through resumes to find qualified candidates.

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you avoid the applicant black hole

Add that to your team’s lack of resources, and you can understand how the applicant black hole came to be, and why it continues to intensify. Fear not, though, because you can avoid sending applicants there. 

Avoid The Applicant Black Hole And The Temptation To Adopt Too Much Technology

While the temptation may exist to adopt AI and increasingly automate your hiring process, this would be detrimental to your team. Millennial and Gen Z candidates, in fact, don’t want a highly-automated hiring process that doesn’t involve human interaction. Only two percent (!) of them said they’re comfortable with AI being the sole determiner of their job application; only four percent (!) said they are very comfortable with AI being the sole evaluator of whether they passed an interview round.

Instead, you need to create a combination of high tech and high touch recruiting.

This involves using technology to respond to all candidates to acknowledge your team received their application. Prompt responses about their application status are needed too, even if it’s letting the applicant know they’re not qualified for this position.  

If a candidate is qualified, then your team needs to provide as much human interaction as possible. This means giving candidates information about each step of the interview process. Your team also needs to provide interview feedback. According to Forbes, this should be done no later than four business days after an interview, even if your team is informing a candidate they’re no longer in consideration for the position.

Remember, you don’t have to conduct in-person interviews for each round of the hiring process. Doing so costs your company money and hurts productivity. When given the choice between a phone screen with a person or a video interview without any human interaction, 87 percent of Millennial and Gen Z candidates opt for the phone interview with a person. That’s a convenient way for your team to move candidates through the hiring funnel.

You Can Scale Your Recruiting Without Having To Scale Your Team

The applicant black hole came into existence because of a lack of resources. If your team wants to take the steps above to avoid it, that’s going to mean scaling up, right?

Wrong.

Nasdaq saved their team 100 hours per week and cut their time-to-hire by 50 percent, all in one year. How? They partnered with WayUp.

WayUp Source, Screen & Coach ensured Nasdaq responded to all applicants within 24 hours of applying. Qualified candidates were invited to schedule a phone screen with WayUp’s early-career specialists; regardless of the outcome, WayUp’s specialists provided personalized soft skills feedback after each screen and informed all candidates whether they were moving on to the next interview round. This partnership allowed Nasdaq to spend all their time with only qualified candidates.

If your team wants to hire top talent in the Age of the Candidate, it can’t afford to have an applicant black hole. So what are you doing to address it?

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The post The Applicant Black Hole Isn’t Science Fiction: 1 Key Takeaway From NACE 2019 appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Sometimes, competition can be a good thing. As actress Maureen McCormick said, “As soon as I hear the word ‘competition’ I get serious and start doing everything that I can do.” Because those who are successful understand the work it takes to be successful.

In early-career recruiting, similarly, you need to create an efficient hiring process to help your team win qualified candidates. But with top talent’s limited availability—10 days, according to ERE—how do you create a hiring process that pushes applicants through the funnel without exhausting all your team’s resources?

There’s one metric that you may not be paying attention to that can help: competition forecast. And measuring it can help you beat your rivals.

Create A Recruiting Competition Forecast

A competition forecast is when you gather intelligence on your competitor’s recruiting methods (both past and present). With this information, you predict other organizations’ current and future recruitment activities. This metric is especially designed, according to ERE, for companies that have limited resources. 

You can create a recruiting competition forecast by monitoring other businesses’ social media channels and websites, and regularly checking job sourcing sites. For clarity, create a spreadsheet to track the following information:

• How many early-career positions are being listed?
• Where are the job opening locations?
• Which methods are your competitors using to recruit candidates?
  • Are they utilizing social media, job sourcing platforms, or other methods?
• How do these compare to market trends?
  • What is the unemployment rate? 

Consider a competition forecast a cheat code: Because one way to beat the competition is to not have competition. And a competition forecast lets you achieve that while saving valuable resources in the process.  

Keep in mind, we’re not advocating for early-career recruitment to start earlier and earlier. That creates an arms race, something that organizations like JP Morgan Chase & Co. wanted no part of. Not to mention it creates a lengthier—and costlier—hiring process.

Monitor Your Sourcing Effectiveness

Your team’s job sourcing effectiveness is another key element to gaining a competitive advantage. If you have a cost-effective way of attracting qualified candidates, then use it. You may find that some tactics your team uses are more effective than others.  

Consider this: 79 percent of job seekers use social media to find employment. That’s a more effective job sourcing tool than sending your team to career fairs, which only 53 percent of Gen Z attend as part of their job search.

So if your recruiting competition forecast predicts that a lot of other organizations are going on campus, it’s cost-prohibitive for your team to do the same, especially if you have limited resources. In order to stand out to those that do attend career fairs, your team may have to spend too much money on informational packets, swag, and other giveaways to attract potential applicants. Instead, your team can use online tools and other digital methods to recruit qualified candidates more efficiently.     

Don’t Lower Your Quality-Of-Hire Though

Neither of these recommendations matter if your team doesn’t still get good hires. Quality employees are what separates the wheat from the chaff. Because the top 5 percent of a company’s workforce can produce 26 percent of that company’s total output! Those employees are who your team wants.

When your team finds these kinds of employees, they should look for emerging patterns. Does most of your top talent share an entrepreneurial spirit? Then rinse and repeat—look for more qualified candidates with these traits.

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In fact, it’s helpful to cross-reference quality-of-hire, your team’s sourcing, and what the competition forecast predicts. You may notice that top talent isn’t coming from where you think it is. Again, if your recruiting competition forecast says that your competitors are all on campus, yet some of your best employees all came from digital recruitment, then your team has a cost-effective path to stronger hires.    

A Competition Forecast Can Help Lower Your Cost-Per-Hire

A competition forecast, ultimately, should help lower your company’s cost-per-hire. If your company’s doing on-campus recruiting, their cost-per-hire is $6,275 with personnel costs included, claims NACE. One way to reduce this by almost two-thirds— to $2,027—is to stay off campuses.  

That’s not accounting for how a strong employer brand can reduce your team’s cost-per-hire by as much as 50 percent. Now imagine further decreasing an already-reduced cost-per-hire even more by utilizing a competition forecast!

It’s Meant To Reduce Your Time-To-Hire

It’s important that your team doesn’t increase its time-to-hire, considering the limited window your team has to hire qualified candidates. So the best way to effectively use a competition forecast is to find windows where your team can move quickly—and cost-effectively—to get top talent. The average time-to-hire from job posting to offer is 62 days, per NACE, but a competition forecast can help your team get it lower.  

Competition can bring out the best in you. And using your company’s competition forecast can make these hiring metrics better than they’ve ever been.   

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The post Competition Forecast: The Most Important Metric You May Not Be Measuring appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

In How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, Kate Hudson’s character Andie Anderson does all she can to lose Matthew McConaughey’s Ben Barry in, yup, 10 days. If she were in early-career recruiting and he were a qualified candidate, accomplishing that would have been much easier. All she would need is a drawn-out hiring process. 

Because top talent is only on the market for 10 days, reports ERE.

That’s why having a quick hiring process can help your hiring team avoid losing qualified candidates. Here are three quick hire tactics your hiring team can use to do just that.  

Get Candidates From Proven Sourcing

When your hiring team is trying to quickly recruit candidates, follow LinkedIn’s advice and don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Reach out to top talent that follows you on social media and encourage them to apply, since they’re likely already interested in your company. 

Similarly, your hiring team should encourage your company’s followers on job sourcing sites to apply for open positions. Companies that care about employer branding are utilizing websites like WayUp for not only job sourcing, but also to create company profiles. These profiles showcase company culture through culture decks and other engaging content for the site’s users. They act as a great branding vehicle by helping you effectively communicate your employer brand to candidates who likely aren’t familiar with your organization, and they build an engaged, diverse talent network of top candidates outside of your traditional recruiting initiatives.

And, as Business Insider explains, this creates a quicker time-to-hire because candidates that apply on these sites are already interested in joining the company because they know more about it. So, as long as your employee benefits package is competitive, these candidates that make it through the hiring funnel are much more likely to accept your company’s job offer. 

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent 

Your Employee Referral Program Can Deliver Top Talent, And Fast

Your company’s employee referral program can be another sound quick hire tactic. Because, according to the Society of Human Resource Management, referrals lead to a 55 percent reduction in time-to-hire. Since it’s responsible for 30 percent of overall hires, that’s a lot of top talent that can potentially join your company quickly. One caveat: Make sure these candidates still go through the normal interview process. If your team becomes overly reliant on referrals, it can lead to a lack of diversity.

Oh, and as an added bonus—pun intended—employee referrals save companies a minimum of $3,000 in cost-per-hire. Money saved is money earned for you and your hiring team.

Increase Brand Recognition AND Recruit Top Talent All At Once

Imagine a way to increase your company’s brand recognition while getting qualified candidates to become full-time employees. Well a national hiring day achieves this! Your company would announce that on whichever date you choose, it will hire its intern and full-time employee class for early-career talent. Therefore, all of your job applicants are aware that if they’re participating, they’re hopeful to join your company. What a great way to create high intent job applicants that you can push through your hiring funnel quickly.

And you’d be in good company too. Chipotle and McDonald’s both have held national hiring days to much success, and LinkedIn notes it’s a great way to gain free publicity. So your brand recognition increases, while you get qualified candidates chomping at the bit to be a part of your company. Win-win.

If your company doesn’t want to lose qualified candidates in 10 days, a quick hire strategy with these three tactics will help. And your hiring team can find the early-career qualified candidates of your dreams.

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The post Quick Hire Tactics: How NOT To Lose Qualified Candidates appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

With all the focus on analytics, your hiring team can go into a data daze. You know the value of utilizing recruiting metrics during early-career recruitment, but which ones are crucial to measuring your success?

More important, how does your team use data throughout the recruiting process to push qualified candidates through the hiring funnel?

Here’s a straightforward guide that’ll show you how to analyze the efficacy of each stage in your team’s process.

Start With Sourcing Effectiveness

No one wants to waste money. So start by measuring your sourcing effectiveness. What’s the cost of recruiting applicants through each method, and how many qualified candidates does each produce?

For instance, is digitally showcasing your employer brand cheaper and more effective than having recruiters on campus? (Spoiler alert: it is.)

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent 

Regardless, if you’re not evaluating each source’s efficacy, your hiring team’s efforts won’t be excellent.   

Where’s Your Website Traffic Coming From?

To support sourcing effectiveness, use Google Analytics to analyze how users are interacting with your website. GA will tell you where the users come from in the first place. Is the bounce rate on your Careers Page unusually high? (Remember that anything over 60 percent is considered a bad bounce rate.) GA can tell you that. How much time are users spending on your page? Yup, GA lets you know. 

Your Job Application Abandonment Rate Is Revealing

The average job application abandonment rate is 60 percent. So if your company’s is higher than that, then there are major issues to address. They can be quick-fix ones, like decreasing the amount of questions you ask applicants. Or they can be more involved ones, like overhauling your employer branding because applicants aren’t aware that your company hires for roles in fields you’re not known for. That’s a challenge Nasdaq was able to overcome by partnering with WayUp.

Remember, the only way job applicants turn into great candidates is if they actually finish the application.

Now That You’re Ready To Hire, Focus On Your Team’s Time-To-Hire

Your team should keep track of its time-to-hire, but with three different focal points from when they posted the job, according to LinkedIn:

• When you made the offer
• When the candidate accepts the offer
• When the candidate starts the job

Paying attention to all three helps you understand where—and why—candidates drop out of the hiring funnel. Did it take your team several weeks (or months!) to offer qualified candidates the position? If so, candidates likely have moved on.

Candidates, unfortunately, may accept the job, only to change their minds before they start. In this case, it can be because of a lack of employer branding. It’s possible your team needs to sell your company culture even more during the hiring process. Or, in some cases, candidates were offered a job with their dream company.

If candidates start the job, only to quit within a few days, then you have a retention issue—something we discuss later in the article.

Did They Take The Job? Monitor Your Acceptance Rate

Now that your hiring team has made the offer, what’s your acceptance rate? Your acceptance rate gives you an idea where you stack up against the competition. Is your hiring team selling your company culture well enough? Is your employee benefit package competitive? 

Just remember, though, a great consumer brand can mask a lot of inefficiencies in your hiring process. So while acceptance rate is important, take a nuanced approach to this metric. Remember that it’s also important to pay attention to your retention rate. If there is a discrepancy between your acceptance rate and your retention rate, it could indicate your team is overselling a position or not effectively communicating what the role will be like.

Is Your Cost-Per-Hire Too Costly?

Let’s start off with this eye-opening statistic: The National Association of Colleges and Employers reveals the cost-per-hire for companies that do on-campus recruiting is $6,275 per employee (with personnel costs included). That’s three times as much as the cost-per-hire without on-campus recruiting! 

So, yeah, cost-per-hire is a must for recruitment metrics. Because if you’re not keeping track of it, you won’t see how an inefficient process is costing your company money.  

Question The Quality-Of-Hire

Recruitment metrics help your hiring team make smarter decisions to get stronger candidates. But you want stronger candidates to get better employees, so if you’re not evaluating whether your interns and entry-level employees are good hires, you’ll make similar decisions over and over. Do you really want to do the same thing over and over again while expecting different results?

Work smarter, not harder by calculating your quality-of-hire. Once you figure this out, your team can look to emulate the traits that your higher-scoring employees have.

Count Your Conversion Rate

Recruit once, hire twice is a cost-effective way to view your team’s early-career recruitment process. It means that companies should choose interns with the idea that they’re auditioning them for a full-time role. So keeping track of your team’s intern-to-full-time conversion rate is a critical recruitment metric you need to analyze.

Keep in mind, NACE claims the average conversion rate is 46 percent, so if one out of every two interns becomes an entry-level employee, your team is on the right path.

Retention Rate

One part of winning the war for top talent is hiring qualified candidates. The other major aspect, however, is keeping them as employees. No one wants to train tomorrow’s future leaders…of other companies—which is why you need to track your team’s retention rate. Case in point: 43 percent of Millennials plan to quit their job within two years, according to Forbes.

One way to address this is to recruit candidates who live near the job location. They’re less likely to leave, as 23 percent of employees have quit a job because of a bad commute.

A strong employer brand also showcases company culture. An employee, therefore, better understands the work culture and environment they’re joining instead of being surprised. An alarming stat: 30 percent of job seekers left a job within 90 days of starting because company culture was a problem. An accurate representation of culture through employer branding can prevent this.

To retain your new early-career hires, it’s critically important that your team is honest about job responsibilities. An employee whose daily responsibilities are constantly changing will make them unhappy. This is a major contributor to stress, which affects more than 80 percent of workers. Stress, unfortunately, causes demotivated workers, or even employees quitting. 

Avoid the data daze by focusing on these recruitment metrics. They’ll enable you to create a more efficient hiring funnel and help you hire the kinds of candidates who will quickly become your organization’s future leaders.

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The post Your Guide To Creating A More Efficient Hiring Funnel appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

If you’re an on-campus recruiter, you know that your time is precious. From the long hours you spend traveling to setting up and breaking down your booths at each fair, there aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything—especially talking to top talent.

But is there a more efficient way you can recruit on-campus? Actually, yes, and it starts with employer branding.

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent 

Because a great employer brand lets candidates know all about company culture before you even speak to them, potential applicants can more quickly turn into qualified candidates. Here are two employer branding tactics that make you a more efficient on-campus recruiter.

1. Your Company Needs To Care About Online Reviews

Let’s start with the obvious: Your company’s digital presence is paramount for employer branding. Don’t believe us? Well, 70 percent of Gen Zers look at online reviews before making any career decision. Which means that a negative employer brand is tantamount to a bad company. So, if you’re trying to meet with top talent on campus and your company has a lot of negative reviews, your job just got that much harder.   

That means you need to make sure your company asks all job candidates for feedback about the candidate experience. It should be a short survey—four or five questions, plus open-ended ones for additional feedback—so it can get accurate feedback about the interview process. In turn, potential applicants will see an accurate representation of your company’s brand.

Also, make sure someone at your company is responding to all feedback. If there’s a negative review, acknowledging it and working to solve the problem is respected by potential applicants. It shows that their voice will be heard. But don’t assume you don’t have to do any work when you get positive reviews. Again, responding to it is a must, because it reinforces that your company cares about everyone’s opinions.  Doing this could be the difference between hiring top talent—or completely missing out. 

2. Redefine Your Company’s Narrative

What’s as frustrating as turning off top talent because of a negative employer brand? Not having candidates fully understand what your company does and values. Because of this, possible applicants may never turn into candidates, because even though they’re qualified, they’re unaware that you’re recruiting for their field.

Take, for example, Nasdaq. By creating content that redefined their employer brand, they got job hunters to understand they’re a fintech business. This led to more qualified STEM applicants, and it helped Nasdaq’s team save 100 hours or more per week screening unqualified applicants. So redefining your company’s narrative lets your company tell the story it wants to tell potential applicants.    

On-campus recruiting is challenging enough, but using these two employer branding tactics will make top talent want to talk to you—and make your on-campus recruiting so much more efficient.

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The post These 2 Employer Branding Tactics Will Make You More Efficient On Campus appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Memorial Day honors those in the military who gave the ultimate sacrifice for this country. While it’s so important to honor the past, we can’t forget the present and future. One way you can achieve this is have your team focus on attracting and hiring more veterans.

April’s unemployment rate for veterans fell to 2.3 percent, the lowest it’s been in 18 years, and a significant decrease from last year’s rate of 3.5 percent. This can be attributed to programs like Hiring Our Heroes, a nationwide initiative created by the U.S. Chamber Foundation to help veterans and military spouses find meaningful employment. 

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent 

It’s great because military veterans are a great asset for companies. Not only do they possess a multitude of talents, they have acquired diversity. Here’s why they’re such valuable employees, and how your company can attract and hire more of them. 

Veterans Have Strong Soft Skills (AKA Foundational Skills)

Recruiting managers consistently struggle to find candidates with the requisite soft skills—what we call foundational skills because of their immense importance—needed for success. In fact, more than 60 percent of applicants fail to move past the first round of interviews because of their lack of foundational skills.

One group that doesn’t struggle with foundational skills? Veterans.

According to Fast Company, military veterans check so many of the foundational skills’ boxes. Because not only do they possess leadership capabilities, they also understand the value of following.

And they’re great problem-solvers. Preparing for field situations means strong decision-making skills—and in the field this also means doing so under immense pressure. This makes them ideal for the modern workforce, where flexibility and adaptability are critical traits that high-performing employees need.   

Not to mention, as Forbes points out, military veterans are the ultimate team players. They understand what it takes to get the job done, and how every person on a team is needed to achieve the goal. And they have been immersed in military culture and its code of conduct, so they hold themselves accountable for mistakes while also understanding the difference between right and wrong.

Bottom line: Your team should always be looking to attract and hire veterans—the fact that this talent pool comes with great foundational skills is a bonus.  

How You Attract And Hire More Veterans

While veterans do have a lot of skills, companies have to reconsider how they’re hiring top talent if they want to tap into this deep talent pool. If organizations continue to use rigid, old-fashioned hiring practices, they won’t be able to attract veteran candidates, claims Forbes .

And one way to be more forward-thinking is to offer on-the-job training. Remember, these candidates have a base that includes the strong foundational skills needed for success. Highlighting that your company is willing to teach its workers hard skills promotes a culture of professional development.

Another way your team can recruit more veterans is by understanding how a veteran’s skillset translates. For instance, putting a veteran’s skills into language that civilians can understand is a perfect way to do this, according to Military.com. Your team can achieve this by asking for help from any of your current veteran employees and by reaching out to advocacy and resource organizations.

And you can broaden your sourcing and veteran candidate attraction by emphasizing digital recruitment. It’ll help you reach and engage military veterans across the U.S. with varying backgrounds and points-of-view.

Military Veterans Are Dedicated Employees

You want your team to hire top talent, but you also want them to get employees that’ll stay with the company. In 2018, the median number of years that workers stayed with their company was 4.2 years.

That’s not true of veterans, claims Inc.com. As people who served their country, there’s an innate loyalty they possess. This holds true for the companies that hire them. They’ll be very dedicated to your company.

But that comes with a caveat. Veterans want meaningful work. If a company has veterans perform menial tasks or doesn’t afford them the opportunity to apply the skills and abilities they have, they’ll lose that worker within one year or less, according to a Veteran Job Retention Survey.

Give your veteran employees tasks that they can sink their teeth into, and you’ll see that they haven’t bit off more than they can chew.

Military veterans are ready to join your company, and finding the right job for them will serve everyone’s best interests.

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The post Why Military Veterans Can Transform Your Company—And How To Attract, Hire, And Retain Them appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Being on a college campus is a magical feeling. Perhaps it reminds you of a simpler time, when grades were your greatest concern. Maybe it’s a monument to how you overcame adversity to pave your way to a better future. Regardless, it’s hard for many people not to look back at their college experience without rose-colored glasses.

But if you’re in early-career recruiting, it might be time to take off the glasses.

Why? Well, because a recruiting strategy that’s campus-based creates inefficiencies throughout your hiring funnel. More important, it often results in a two-tiered system, one that treats online applicants like second-class applicants.  

Analyzing Sourcing Effectiveness Leads To A More Efficient Hiring Process

The path to a more efficient hiring process may sound counterintuitive because a better campus recruitment strategy doesn’t involve being on-campus. Surprising, right?

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But it makes more sense because of sourcing effectiveness. On-campus recruiting isn’t beneficial from a cost perspective. In fact, it’s almost three times more expensive ($6,275 with personnel costs included) than staying off-campus ($2,027).

Add this to the fact that it causes your team to be less strategic and overly tactical, it’s not an efficient use of your team’s resources.

Not Hitting Your Diversity Hiring Goals? On-Campus Recruiting Could Be The Culprit  

Why can an on-campus recruiting strategy cause your team to treat your online applicants like second-class applicants? Think of how you treat the applicants you meet on campus, with personalized outreach, company culture presentations, Q&A sessions, special receptions, etc.

But what about online applicants? They’re not given the same resources. And that’s not fair, plus it’s actively hurting your company. By focusing on your company’s online recruitment tools and application process, it levels the playing field. All applicants, whichever institute they’re from, receive the same treatment and resources.

Case in point: A lot of top talent doesn’t come from the top 50 schools in the country. In fact, your current recruiting strategy may be overlooking great diversity talent pools such as historically black colleges and universities. Having a more balanced recruitment process and prioritizing job sourcing platforms (like WayUp!) will help you more easily find qualified diverse candidates. 

How Do You Cut Your Team’s Time-To-Hire? Get Off Campus

Currently, the national time-to-hire average is 24 days. Three-and-a-half weeks, though, is nothing compared to how long it takes if you still have your team on campus—which is three times as long.

With a tight labor market, the longer your team takes to hire, the less likely qualified candidates will still be available. ERE claims top talent is off the market within 10 days, which means delays in the hiring process cost your team its preferred candidates.

So if you want to reduce your team’s time-to-hire, getting off-campus and going online helps.

A Better Way To Share Your Employer Branding

Before social media, sharing good news was an arduous task. People had to use a phone to call each person, or they had to get everyone together. These antiquated methods are still being used, with a slight variation, when it comes to promoting an employer brand. Companies make their on-campus recruiting teams showcase their brand to students through either one-on-one conversations at career fairs or in large groups like clubs, organizations, and societies.

Thankfully, companies can use social media to more easily showcase their employer brand. Smart companies are building their brands on these platforms. Those who do it well are being rewarded with a lower cost-per-hire and a more effective use of resources, since it’s significantly cheaper to recruit digitally than other methods. In fact, if your company builds up a strong social media presence, it can post job openings organically on Facebook, LinkedIn, and others. A method that allows you to attract top talent at no charge? Now that’s part of an efficient hiring process!

College will always be a great reminder of one’s salad days, but on-campus recruiting has become soggy. It’s time to get a fresh approach to finding top talent—through digital recruiting.

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The post A More Efficient Hiring Process Begins Off Campus appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

In 1994, the web browser Netscape was released. That product rollout helped spark the digital revolution and made the World Wide Web an integral part of our daily lives.

That, in turn, created entirely new industries and upended the status quo. Take digital marketing, for example, which has grown rapidly thanks to its increased efficiency, scale, targeting capabilities, and ROI.

The same is happening with on-campus recruiting. Because it’s so time- and resource-intensive, on-campus recruiting hurts your ability to attract and hire top talent. In fact, it makes you work harder, not smarter, especially compared to online recruiting, which drives efficiency, helps you reach a broader and more diverse candidate pool, and lets your team spend more time with qualified candidates.

Want To Be More Efficient? It Starts With Candidate Sourcing

While 78 percent of potential hires want to be courted for a job, it’s not only about the chase. It’s about how you’re chasing. Because if you’re spending countless travel hours and a large portion of your budget on ineffective career fairs that only 53 percent if Gen Z attends, then it restricts all your other efforts. Like finding more top talent, for instance. 

That’s why it’s important to measure your sourcing effectiveness so that you don’t get career fair FOMO and try to go to every event. Also, don’t just recruit at colleges based on prestige. Because qualified candidates can come from anywhere, not just the top 50 schools. (And who says they’re the “top” schools anyway?)

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Instead, devote more resources to job sourcing platforms. For starters, it levels the playing field for all candidates, offering them all the same exact candidate experience. Also, it significantly reduces your cost-per-hire, cutting it from $6,275 per employee (including costs for on-campus recruiting personnel) to $2,027. 

Spend More Time With Qualified Candidates Through Initial Screening

Working with outside recruiters to provide initial candidate screenings helps ensure your team is working more efficiently. Because if they’re filtering out unqualified candidates, guess what that means for your team? They get to spend more time with only qualified candidates.

Plus, working with outside recruiters helps your candidates too. Outside recruiters can provide customized feedback that helps candidates hone their soft skills—or, as we like to call them, foundational skills—and prepare for their next-round interviews. That means, by the time you meet those candidates, they’re better prepared and know what to expect.

Doing that can cut your time-to-hire by as much as 50 percent. That’s what Nasdaq found when it partnered with WayUp Source, Screen & Coach to overhaul its early-career recruitment process.

So, if you want to work smarter, not harder, take your cue from the shift from print to digital marketing, and start devoting more resources to digital recruiting. Your team will appreciate a more efficient use of resources, and your company will love the increased top talent it’s hiring.

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The post Is Your Company’s Recruiting Strategy Making You Work Harder, Not Smarter? appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

The road to a more efficient hiring process begins by understanding that your hiring team may need to adjust how it thinks about recruitment metrics. So we’re here to help you address the issue.

Fortunately, utilizing the right recruitment metrics will lead to a more efficient hiring process.

It All Starts With Cost-Per-Hire

If your recruitment metrics don’t start (or include) cost-per-hire, then you’re already starting off on the wrong foot. Because measuring cost-per-hire is crucial to understanding what is—and isn’t—working for your early-career recruiting needs. 

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent 

So how do you calculate that stat? Consider the following:

• How much money is being spent on external recruiting costs?
  • These include elements such as job sourcing, background checks, drug testing, marketing, and more.
• How much money is being spent on internal recruiting costs?
  • Examine how much it costs for your applicant-tracking system, travel, referral rewards, and other aspects of early-career recruitment.

Once you add up all these expenses, your hiring team can figure out how much it takes to add new team members.

Keep in mind, strong employer branding can help companies cut their cost-per-hire by 50 percent, according to the Society of Human Resource Management. When you consider the average cost-per-hire with personnel costs included is $6,275 per employee, you can save a nice chunk of change by having an efficient hiring process.

A Long Time-To-Hire Is Costly

On average, the time it takes to hire a new employee is 24 days. That’s more than three weeks, and if your recruiters are going on campus to hire, it can take up to three times as long!

So, an efficient hiring process can make your time-to-hire go from a metric you want to ignore to one that you brag about. One way to achieve this is to consider only having one or two people perform on-site candidate interviews. It makes your team focus only on qualified candidates, so interviewers’ productivity isn’t lost.  

This way, your hiring team won’t be afraid of losing out on qualified candidates.

Acceptance Rate Is Important, But It Doesn’t Always Tell The Whole Story

Measuring your team’s acceptance rate is important, but it’s necessary to have a nuanced understanding of this metric. While a high acceptance rate may indicate an efficient hiring process, it can also be the product of a strong employer—and often consumer—brand. For instance, companies such as Google and Amazon, two of the most powerful organizations in the world, will more likely have a higher acceptance rate than others, regardless of the efficacy of their hiring process.

Having said that, it’s still important to know where your hiring team stands. In 2018, the average employer acceptance rate was 68.2 percent, a decrease from 71.8 percent from the year before, claims NACE. Anything around that is considered strong.

A low acceptance rate may indicate a weak employer brand or inefficient hiring process. Yes, top talent will more than likely have multiple job offers to consider, but if they’re saying no to yours, then there’s a good chance that your company culture wasn’t clearly explained throughout the hiring process, or it took too long for your team to make a job offer.

Strong Early-Career Recruiting Creates A Strong Conversion Rate

Are you monitoring how often your interns are turning into full-time hires? If not, you should because it’s an important indicator of efficient early-career recruiting. Because a recruit-once, hire-twice strategy is a cost-effective—and efficient—way to handle early-career recruiting needs. 

If your hiring team hasn’t been monitoring this metric, you should start now. The average conversion rate from intern to full-time hire is 46 percent. So use that as your baseline, and look to improve on it.

Also, a strong conversion rate allows you to spend more time with qualified candidates. Because you’ll be able to see the qualities needed for successful early-career employees, you can easily focus on applicants with these traits.

Focusing on these four recruitment metrics will make sure you’re thinking about your team’s hiring process the right way—the more efficient way. 

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The post Are You Thinking About Your Recruitment Metrics Wrong? appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Mother’s Day is May 12, 2019, and, according to the Pew Research Center, 70 percent of all mothers today with children younger than 18 are working. This didn’t just happen overnight, though. Millennials grew up with Baby Boomer parents, with 66 percent of Boomer women being employed. This set the stage for future generations. And with more than 17 million Millennials becoming mothers, the trend is expected to increase.

And that’s good news because moms make excellent employees. And companies would be smart to prioritize hiring and retaining working mothers.  

Mothers Make For Productive Employees

One of the job requirements of being a mom is having strong time management skills. As Inc.com notes, a need for work-life balance means that working moms are adept at prioritizing projects to drive their productivity.    

And it’s backed by science. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that mothers outperformed women without children overall throughout a 30-year career. Interestingly, according to the study, the most productive employees have at least two children. It seems as if moms do know best, even when it comes to how to be productive employees.

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent 

Working Mothers Seems Like A No-Brainer, Right? Not So Fast

Unfortunately, companies aren’t taking advantage of this. In fact, Forbes points out how 69 percent of employed Americans say working moms are more likely to be passed up for a new job than other employees. What’s more, women get a four percent pay cut for each child they have.

Sadly, the prejudice against mothers isn’t just affecting their—and their families’— wallets. It has widespread ramifications, like contributing to a 26 percent increase to the global gross domestic product in 2025. (That’s 28 trillion dollars.)

An Inclusive Company Culture

In order to both attract and retain working mothers, your company needs to create a more inclusive company culture. This doesn’t have to begin with sweeping changes, either. It could be as simple as creating a policy that prohibits meetings after 4PM. This prevents mothers from having to stress about childcare and school pickup.

Another way to ensure that your company values working mothers is to make vacation mandatory. Sounds silly, right? According to the Harvard Business Review, Type A professionals will voluntarily bypass holidays and time off. That’s why it’s important for working moms to have an appropriate work-life balance. If not, burnout, family issues, performance decline, or attrition all are more likely to increase.

So if you really want to honor Mother’s Day this year, rethinking how your company views working mothers is a much more deserving gift for these valuable employees.

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The post Want A High-Performing Employee? Hire A Mom appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released monthly jobs figures on Friday. And according to estimates, the unemployment rate fell to 3.6 percent in April—the lowest it’s been in nearly 50 years. That’s a positive sign for job seekers, but there are underlying factors that are giving employers anxiety.  

Why? For starters, the market for top talent is more competitive than ever before and shows no signs of weakening. That means competition is intense, like Star Wars-attack-on-the-Death-Star intense.

What can companies do to compete? Here are some ways to hire top early-career talent without turning toward the Dark Side.

Increase Pay (But That’s Not The Only Way)

It might sound basic enough, but companies need to do more to incentivize early-career candidates to work for them. And one way to do that is to improve the employee benefits they provide. That seems to be happening: According to government data, compensation increased by 0.7 percent from January through March, with hourly wages up 3.2 percent year-over-year.

Another way organizations can enhance their employee benefits is by providing more flexible work arrangements. Not only does it improve employee satisfaction and reduce stress, it also helps companies recruit top Gen Z talent.  

Rethink Your Job Requirements

Another tactic companies can use to find qualified candidates is simply loosening onerous job qualification restrictions that have little basis in what is actually required to perform a job well.

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For instance, some companies have started to rethink their demands for how many years of experience positions require. Instead, they’re hiring entry-level candidates and providing them with the training and necessary skills to make them successful in these roles.  

A Strong Employer Brand Can Lift Your Company Above The Competition

Another way to ensure your company is getting qualified candidates is to improve employer branding. Remember that strong employer branding makes top talent want to work for you. Highlight your company culture and show it off on social media and your website. Doing that will even help reduce your cost-per-hire.     

So while the Talent Wars will continue, there are strategic ways companies can strike back against a historically low unemployment rate to ensure they’re recruiting and hiring top talent.

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The post Talent Wars: How Companies Can Strike Back Against A Historically Low Unemployment Rate appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

There’s an unaddressed issue that’s been affecting companies and their employees for years: Forbes claims that mental health issues costs companies around 200 million lost work days and between $17-44 billion dollars in lost productivity. Because 43.8 million US adults experience it.

Unfortunately, as Barron’s reports, the mental health of young adults has been affected the most, with depressive symptoms increasing by 39 percent among Gen Z and 24 percent in Millennials. The future majority of the workforce will be affected by it.

Which raises two important questions: What’s driving this uptick, and what can companies do?

Why Gen Z And Millennials Are Most Affected

According to government data, adults between 18-25 have AMI (any mental illness) at a rate of 25.8 percent. That’s the highest of any age group, with adults aged 26-49 at 22.2 percent, and 50+ at 13.8 percent.

But how did we get here?

Well, one cause is increased competition. The current era of low unemployment is a relatively new phenomenon. And these generations, in particular, have dealt with globalization and the influx of talent (in other words, competition) that have come with it. It’s something that the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said needs to be treated as a serious issue.

And let’s not forget about the negative impact that social media has caused. Unfortunately, social media has created a rise in mental health disorders in Gen Z and Millennials. For example, people experiencing major depression symptoms in one year increased as much as 63 percent from 2009 to 2017.

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How Companies Can Help Their Employees

So what can companies do to help their employees? For starters, creating a culture of transparency about mental health will help. Currently, only one in 10 workers said they’ve heard senior leaders talk about how mental health personally affected senior leaders, according to the Harvard Business Review. When employees realize they’re not alone, and that there are others out there who’ve dealt with this, it makes what they’re dealing with less daunting.

And Forbes suggests that companies need to increase awareness of the issue. By providing education and resources, companies can create a culture where workers are aware of what mental health issues are like, and what they can do to help co-workers in emotional distress.

Unfortunately, stress is a contributor to negative mental health. Therefore, it’s crucial that companies emphasize a healthy work-life balance. Consider this: People with commutes of over an hour each way are 33 percent more likely to suffer from depression; they’re also 12 percent more likely to report problems because of work-related stress. Providing flexible hours or work-from-home options can go a long way to help reduce this stress.

While mental health is an issue that won’t be easily resolved, companies will benefit by acknowledging it and working toward a solution rather than ignoring the problem. And the future of the U.S. workforce (Gen Z and Millennials) depends on it.

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The post One Of The Biggest Work Issues Facing Gen Z And Millennials Is Not On Your Radar appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Oscar Wilde said, “Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.” But what are the conditions that lead to successful hires in early-career recruiting?

It boils down to three metrics. Yup, just three.  

So how does your hiring team stack up in your early-career recruitment? Here are the three metrics that’ll help you find out.

1. Calculate Your Quality Of Hire

Measuring your hiring team’s quality of hire gives you an understanding of the level of talent your company’s attracting. Naturally, your hiring team is going to hire the best and brightest of the candidate bunch. But what’s the overall quality of your company’s early-career talent? It’s important to calculate your quality of hire, and you can learn how to do that here.

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent 

2. Track Your Conversion Rate

It’s important to track your conversion rate of interns to full-time employees because it helps measure whether or not your internship program provides meaningful work. A successful internship for an intern is gaining valuable experience that helps them develop both hard and soft skills. A successful internship for an employer is finding future full-time employees.

But there are other areas that affect conversion rate. For instance, your hiring team may be getting top talent to join your team, but these young employees may not be fully supported once they’re employees. One way to ensure this doesn’t happen at your company is to provide your early-career employees with mentors. Positive mentoring relationships lead to higher levels of job satisfaction and organizational commitment (two things that directly affect early-career recruiting), as well as compensation and promotions (two things that directly affect your company’s health).

If your company treats internships like an extended interview process, then your conversion rate should increase. After all, you have several weeks to examine whether or not the intern has the qualities a successful employee at your company needs. So you’ll be extending offers only to interns you think are a good fit. At the same time, they’ve had a long time to take a good, hard look at what it’s like working at your company. Ultimately, all the guesswork is taken out of the equation, and—hopefully—this leads to your intern becoming a full-time hire.

Your conversion rate supports that your hiring team is choosing the right candidates to audition for starring roles as your company’s newest full-time team members.  

3. Monitor Your Referral Rate

Employee referrals are the top way that companies get new employees, with 30 percent of overall hires coming from them, claims the Society of Human Resource Management. Also, they make your team 55 percent faster and save companies a minimum of $3,000 in cost-per-hire.

You should monitor your referral rate as a way to measure your early-career recruiting efforts. Because an engaged intern or full-time employee is more likely to recommend a friend than one who’s unhappy. And unhappy interns and employees affect your company’s brand.

So if you want to track your early-career recruiting success, monitor these three metrics.

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The post How To Get Better Hires By Tracking These 3 Hiring Metrics appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

WayUp’s second-annual HireUp conference took place on Monday, April 29. As changemakers from organizations all over the country gathered to discuss what’s happening in early-career recruiting, there were four key takeaways from the event that stood out.

The Key To A Positive Candidate Experience Is High Tech And High Touch

Before sites like Glassdoor existed, companies held all the power. They were free to provide a negative candidate experience, with little perceived repercussions. Not anymore.

There’s parity now between employers and candidates, which has prompted a shift in accountability. And it has proven how costly a negative candidate experience is for companies, as Virgin Media discovered when it found that it was losing at least $5 million annually because of its negative candidate experience.

Which is why companies are going to such great lengths—and rightfully so—to ensure candidates are treated well throughout all aspects of the interview process. But because of this newfound prioritization, people in HR may be tempted to incorporate too much AI and automation throughout the interview process.

That would be a big mistake.

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent 

Although Gen Z is comfortable with technology, they’re not as comfortable as you think. WayUp recently conducted a survey of 363 students currently enrolled at U.S. universities between the ages of 18 and 25. Out of this group, only two percent—TWO PERCENT!—said they were very comfortable with AI being the sole determiner of their job application. And it’d be impossible to ignore that 87 percent of them would prefer a phone interview over a pre-recorded video interview with no human interaction.  

Ultimately, if you want to have a candidate experience that’s fast yet full of human interaction, it’s important to create a process that’s high tech and high touch. Fortunately, we wrote an article that tells you how to do that.

Diversity Is More Important Than Ever Before

Obviously, revenue propels companies into the future, but it’s only earned because of your company’s biggest asset: your workforce. And guess what? Gen Z doesn’t want to work for companies that don’t have diverse teams.

And here’s something that you may not have thought about: There are a lot of untapped diverse talent groups. Considering how tight the U.S. labor market is, with unemployment at 3.8%, the war for top talent is fiercer than ever before.

So don’t just look at inherent diversity to fulfill hiring needs, though that should be a priority too. Among other groups, people with disabilities and veterans are both untapped talent pools for qualified candidates, and extremely loyal workers.  

One Of The Best Recruiting Tools Is Employer Branding

Employer branding is the secret tool that not every company knows it needs. It helps you with so many aspects of early-career recruiting besides driving applications and reducing cost-per-hire, as if that’s not enough. For instance, not wasting a candidate’s time is such a vital part of a positive candidate experience. And strong employer branding lets candidates know before they apply for a job whether or not they want to work for your company.

Also, it helps attract diverse candidates. By highlighting company culture, employer branding shows that your company cares about diversity and inclusiveness. But remember: Applicants only become future employees if they can see their growth opportunities. This means highlighting diverse mid- and senior-level executives is critical.

Getting Organizational Buy-In Requires Being A Personality Whisperer

Unfortunately, people in HR aren’t always given the respect they deserve. Often your suggestions are met with reticence and reluctance. So it’s important to understand how you can best institute organizational change.

The biggest key to enacting major changes within your company is understanding personality. You need to be able to know how to address each person’s idiosyncrasies while also speaking to their job’s concerns.

Once you do that, you can begin to work with the rest of your company to include them on buying in to the change. Fortunately, we also have an article that helps you learn how to do that.      

The good news is, you don’t have to wait until next year’s HireUp to become a changemaker within early-career recruiting. You can do it by addressing these four takeaways at your company today.

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The post Recruiting For The Future—4 Takeaways From HireUp 2019 appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

When it comes to hiring top talent, creating an efficient early-career recruiting process helps your hiring team run circles around your competition. Why? Because qualified candidates want to work for an organized organization, for starters.

What lets companies know if their early-career recruiting process is efficient and effective? Recruitment metrics. Here are four recruitment metrics that your hiring team can start tracking immediately:   

1. Cost-Per-Hire

Calculating your company’s cost-per-hire (CPH) is a surefire way to make sure you’re off to a good start. And it’s not hard to do. In fact, Glassdoor provides a simple formula for companies:

Cost-Per-Hire= (External Costs + Internal Costs)/Total Number of Hires in a Time Period  

Once you figure out your CPH, you can compare it to the national average—NACE pegs it at $6,275 per employee (with personnel costs included). Also, you can reevaluate your recruiting practices, because adding up all the costs, you’re bound to see certain places where you’re spending a lot of money—cough cough, on-campus recruiting, cough cough—that aren’t necessarily delivering ROI.

2. Time-To-Hire

Figuring out your company’s time-to-hire is more straightforward. You start measuring once you post the job. After that, you’ll want to note the following, according to LinkedIn:

• • When you made the offer

• • When the candidate accepts the offer

• When the employer starts the job

If you pay attention to all three, you can start to see where the breakdown happens. If your candidates are dropping out of the hiring process, then it’s indicative of your team’s time-to-hire being too long.

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent 

3. Quality Of Hire

Understanding quality of hire will help your hiring team determine where the baton’s being dropped. Is your hiring process inefficient, causing your team to lose out on top talent and hire unqualified candidates to fill open positions? Or maybe the majority of your applicants that come from one (or multiple) source(s) are leading to less-than-stellar employees. Either way, measuring quality of hire can fix this.  

In order to calculate quality of hire, you must choose what criteria is used to determine the quality. What does a successful employer do that an unsuccessful doesn’t? How long does it take for employees to contribute to the company? Are they engaged with their position and the company? What do they contribute to your company culture?     

Here’s a formula you can use to measure quality of hire:

Quality of Hire = (Job Performance score + Ramp-up Time score + Engagement score + Cultural Add score)/ Total Number of Criteria

Analyzing quality of hire helps your hiring team be more efficient in terms of the types of candidates you need to recruit. Because good employees start off as good candidates.   

4. Conversion Rate

Is your company’s internship program creating a strong pipeline of future hires? Monitoring your conversion rate will give you the answer. The average conversion rate for turning interns into to full-time hires is 46 percent, so if it’s less than that, your company’s not maximizing its potential return on investment for its early-career programs. Why? Because it’s helping top talent reach their potential…for other companies.

Calculating your conversion rate is easy:

Conversion Rate = (Accepted Offers/Number of Interns) * 100

Focusing on these four recruitment metrics will help your hiring team learn how it can speed up and optimize your early-career recruiting, so your candidates feel like it’s a sprint.

Fill out the form to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent

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The post 4 Recruitment Metrics You Need To Track Now appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

The National Association of Colleges and Employers recently revised their hiring projections in their Job Outlook 2019 Spring Update. Now, employers are projected to hire 16.6 percent of graduates from the Class of 2019, which is nearly 11 percent more than the Class of 2018.

Not so fast. There’s one thing that stands in the way of early-career candidates being a part of that 16.6 percent: soft skills. Companies are suffering because more than 60 percent of early-career candidates aren’t moving past the first round of interviews because of a lack of soft skills. And 91 percent of talent professionals think soft skills are the most important aspect of the future of recruiting and HR.

On top of this, 89 percent of bad hires don’t possess these highly-desirable traits, while 92 percent of talent professionals believe soft skills matter as much or more than hard skills.

You can see how all of this conflicting data paints a troubling picture for the future of the workforce and companies.

So how do companies rectify this? It’s easier than you think.

Why Soft Skills Are More Important Now Than Ever Before

With the rise of automation and AI, hard skills are no longer the end-all, be-all for candidates’ potential success and their job performance. Because more and more jobs combine the speed and precision of tech with the creativity, adaptability, and collaboration skills of humans, soft skills have never been more important. In fact, 80 percent of talent professionals think that soft skills are increasingly important to a company’s success.

And at the top of the list of valued soft skills is creativity. Because being able to solve a problem in a unique way is a skill that’s very human. This will cause the demand for creative workers to increase dramatically by 2030.

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent 

How Soft Skills Will Reshape The Hiring Process

Therefore, companies are going to have to re-evaluate how they assess candidates’ soft skills. More than half of companies claim they struggle to assess soft skills accurately, which makes sense because less than half have a formal process to evaluate them. And technology can’t necessarily bridge this gap, since 68 percent of talent professionals claim they pick up on social cues in interviews.

WayUp Paves The Way

One way companies can solve this problem is by utilizing co-sourcing recruiting firms such as WayUp. WayUp provides personal soft skills feedback within 24 hours of a candidate’s’ phone screen. Also, the feedback consists of interview tips for those moving onto the next round, so companies are getting more prepared candidates. This, in turn, enables hiring managers to focus on achievements and potential during on-site interviews, knowing that these candidates are prepared and have the requisite soft skills needed for success.   

So if your company wants to get top talent with the proven soft skills necessary for the job responsibilities of today and the needs of tomorrow, learn more about partnering with WayUp to achieve this.

Fill out the form to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent

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The post The Most Valuable Skillset An Employee Can Have Is Not What You Think appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

A good spelling lesson for companies is to remember that “CE” is needed to spell “success.” Because candidate experience is now such a vital part of a company’s health, companies are investing a lot of resources to make sure it’s positive.   

But what good is dedicating resources to your CE if you can’t see the progress? Thankfully, you can measure candidate experience by using these methods.

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you provide a positive candidate experience 

‘Ghosted’

This may seem like a “well, duh” aspect of the candidate experience. Unfortunately, it’s no longer a given that scheduling an interview with a candidate means that it takes place. So, if you weren’t ‘ghosted’ by your candidate, that’s a good first sign that your company provides a positive candidate experience.

Interview Surveys

Interview surveys are a great way to measure your company’s candidate experience. You can do this by asking all of your candidates to fill out a survey at each step of the hiring process. Request that candidates share their experiences, but don’t just limit the survey to one or two questions. SHRM suggests asking four or five questions, including an open-ended one. This encourages candidates to offer insights on aspects you may not have thought of.

And to truly show that your company takes feedback seriously, you can even encourage candidates to leave feedback on your company’s Glassdoor Feedback page. This assures candidates that their opinion matters (and is anonymous). Also, it reminds your interviewers about the importance of a positive candidate experience.  

Acceptance Rate

While other factors affect acceptance rate (such as employee benefits), your company’s acceptance rate helps measure candidate experience. A high acceptance rate means your company has a positive candidate experience. A low one reveals your company needs to reevaluate the hiring process.

Companies that are devoted to the ABCs of candidate experience will see the results in how they measure a positive one. Once you do that, you’re well on your way to spelling “success.”

Fill out the form to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent

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The post Companies Can’t Spell ‘Success’ Without ‘CE’: How To Measure If Your Candidate Experience Is Positive appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

If you ever go through all the stuff you have tucked away in your attic or basement, you’re sure to find some antiques, like a landline phone. As great as they were growing up (I still miss my hamburger phone), imagine trying to communicate today using it. You can’t. It’s inefficient.

The same holds true with your hiring team’s early-career recruiting process. What worked then doesn’t necessarily work now.

Early-career recruiting has drastically changed from the days when landline phones were prevalent. So if your team is stuck in the past like Marty McFly, here’s how you can lead your team’s early-career recruiting process back to the future.

Old On-Campus Recruiting Efforts Cost More Money—A Lot More

Then: We spend thousands of dollars on on-campus recruiting—$6,275, in fact, on average—because we pay someone to be on-campus. We travel constantly. We create resume books. We give out swag. We have hoarse voices from giving the same presentation hundreds of times. We go to the same 25 schools, if that, to meet with and recruit candidates.

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you attract and hire top talent 

Now: We spend much, much less—zero, to be exact—on on-campus recruiting. We have a cost-per-hire of $2,027, which the National Association of Colleges and Employers found companies save without the cost of personnel and travel. We use a fraction of that on online job sourcing to create a deep pool of top talent from all across the country. We see our family and friends throughout the week. We don’t have to give the same presentation ad nauseum, constantly traveling just to hit a handful of campuses, until the end of time. We don’t have stacks and stacks of resume books cluttering up a storage cabinet. We no longer have thousands of leftover branded hacky-sacks collecting dust.

Reviewing Unqualified Applicants’ Resumes Is A Time Suck That Prevents Strategic Thinking

Then: We spend 13 hours per week painstakingly reviewing resume after resume after resume after resume. We’re lightheaded from all the blood we’ve lost because of papercuts. We barely have time to enjoy our lunch break, let alone think about how we can hire top talent more strategically.  

Now: We use technology to quickly filter out unqualified candidates. We can select which candidates we want to move forward with in a fraction of the time. We treat ourselves to a cookie. We spend time brainstorming how we can better recruit early-career candidates. We develop assimilation programs. Because of this, we hit our diversity hiring initiatives and create welcoming environments for all kinds of candidates.

Screening Unqualified Candidates Is Wasting Everyone’s Time

Then: We have a recruiter talk to job applicants at a chaotic career fair. People accidentally bump into us, and someone walks by with a boombox blaring. We can’t remember which candidates we liked or didn’t. We’re so exhausted we can’t remember which state we’re in. We don’t have time to devote resources to underrepresented minority candidates. After career fairs, we have to try to review resumes and screen hundreds (or even thousands) of applicants. We can’t get to all applicants, so we send 98 percent of applicants to the resume black hole.

Now: We have a recruiter talk to job applicants over the phone, since only 53 percent of Gen Z college students attend career fairs to search for a job. Both are in quiet environments. We only spend time screening qualified candidates—no matter where they’re sourced from. We’re focused on whether or not the candidate has the traits we’re looking for. We can provide a quality—and consistent—candidate experience to all applicants. We have eliminated unfair advantages that candidates from the “top” 25 schools received. We offer the same resources to underrepresented minorities as well as all candidates, all across the country.    

Bringing In Everyone For An In-Person Interview Is Insanely Inefficient

Then: We bring candidates in multiple times to interview with several people. We lose productivity as multiple people are pulled away from their work. We pay travel expenses for all the candidates we interview. We debate whether or not another round of interviews is necessary.

Now: We bring candidates in once to interview with a select group of people. We have candidates interview with only the people who are responsible for their success at the company. We use technology for efficiency, and we save both time and money. We hire qualified candidates more quickly because of all this.   

The Old Way Is Clogging Your Hiring Funnel

Then: We don’t push candidates quickly through our hiring funnel. We want to be absolutely, positively, no doubt, 100 percent sure that…oh, they took a job somewhere else.

Now: We move candidates through our hiring funnel efficiently, making sure our hiring team is working smarter to more thoroughly evaluate a candidate in a shorter amount of time. We make offers to top talent who have the same characteristics as our most successful and productive employees.

If your early-career recruiting process has the efficiency of back then, you’re going to lose out on top talent now.

Fill out the form to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent

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The post Get Your Efficient Early-Recruiting Process Back To The Future appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Employers are looking for any leg up when it comes to hiring top talent. And for good reason: Top Gen Z candidates only stay available for an average of 10 days! Yet companies looking to fill STEM jobs face an even more daunting challenge: More than half of STEM roles projected to go unfilled through 2025.

So, how do you attract top STEM talent with so much competition? Your company’s candidate experience can be—and often is—the deciding factor. That was Nasdaq’s experience. The company was struggling to fill its STEM positions, yet a shift in its early-career recruiting strategy changed everything, enabling Nasdaq’s recruiting team to attract and hire top STEM candidates.

Attracting The Right Candidates

For Nasdaq, attracting STEM candidates had been difficult because they were primarily known as a Wall Street firm, and not as a technology business. “We’re really well known as a Wall Street company, but we’re actually a tech company, and we want to be seen in that light,” says Simon Coombe, the North America Head of Talent Acquisition for Nasdaq. “We knew we had to do a better job of telling the story. Last year, for example, we had thousands of applicants, and many of them didn’t necessarily understand Nasdaq’s key businesses.”

Nasdaq partnered with WayUp to rebrand itself as a technology-first firm, creating branded content that helped communicate that messaging to early-career candidates. One component of that branding campaign was a video featuring Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman that focused on her journey from intern to head of the company.

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you attract and hire top STEM talent 

Improving The Candidate Experience

The candidate experience starts once a person begins the application process, so it’s important to make sure every step is as seamless as possible. As Coombe stresses, that wasn’t always the case. “Before WayUp, our candidate experience was fairly inefficient in terms of getting our applicant flow going and ensuring our positions were on sites that were specifically targeted for our audience,” he says.

“We only have so many people, and campus recruiting is often under-resourced, so we can’t be on all the campuses and at all the events we’d like to attend,” he adds.

By working with WayUp, Nasdaq was able to completely overhaul that formerly dysfunctional process. Now, everything from their internship listings and company information to their branded content and 360-degree virtual office tour video lived on a WayUp company profile. When candidates applied for a position, moreover, they received a guaranteed phone screen within 24 hours.

WayUp also created a culture deck all candidates were able to review prior to their initial call, along with helpful tips and tricks to ace their screen. Afterwards, they received personalized feedback, regardless of the outcome. These improvements created a better experience for candidates because they were prepared for their job interviews; that, in turn, made the interviews a better experience for recruiters.  

In addition, WayUp offered candidates flexibility when scheduling phone screens, a great attraction for both nontraditional students and companies looking to recruit a diverse team. Instead of limiting phone screenings to the 9:00AM-5:00PM, Monday-Friday timeframe, candidates were able to schedule their initial phone interview at their convenience.

Seeing The Results

Through its partnership with WayUp, Nasdaq saw increased results and efficiency in moving candidates through the hiring process. “WayUp Source, Screen & Coach has freed my team up from having to spend a lot of time screening and finding qualified applicants. And now we move the candidates quickly—which is completely different from the experience we had before,” Coombe says. “This made partnering with WayUp a no-brainer.”

Ultimately, the new interview process saved Nasdaq’s recruiting team 100 hours per week, all while providing candidates with a positive experience. Combe and his team used those additional working hours to focus only on qualified candidates and to strategize how to build an even more successful internship program moving forward.

Nasdaq’s candidate experience is more efficient than ever before, enabling them to hire more early-career STEM applicants than they ever could.  

If you’re keeping track, that’s a win-win-win.  

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The post How Nasdaq Saved 1,000 Hours Of Work & Cut Time-To-Hire By 50%—In 1 Year appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

The war for top talent requires changemakers to help their companies win and get the qualified candidates they need. Unfortunately, early-career recruiting is rapidly changing, and staying ahead of the curve is harder than it seems.

Correction: It was hard.

Now you can learn the secret sauce of creating a high-tech and high-touch recruiting process from industry experts.

And all it takes is attending HireUp.

What’s HireUp?

HireUp is WayUp’s second annual half-day early-career recruitment conference. This year, it takes place on Monday, April 29, at the innovative Lightbox venue, which provides an immersive conference experience you’ll never forget.

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you attract and hire top talent 

At the event, industry experts will discuss a range of topics, from unique ways businesses have achieved their diversity hiring goals to advice on how to sell a vendor internally to your management.

The goal of HireUp is to help you effect real change not only in your role, but also at your organization.

Who Should Attend?

We know that changemakers start at the top. That’s why we’re bringing together an exclusive group of vice presidents, directors, leads, and heads of Campus Recruiting, TA, and Diversity.

Oh, and did we mention it’s no cost at all to attend?

Are you interested in attending? If so, you can RSVP at www.wayuphireup.com. There are only 85 seats available for the conference, so act quickly! We can’t wait to see you there, changemaker.  

Fill out the form to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent

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The post The Secret To High Tech & High Touch Recruiting? Attend HireUp 2019 To Find Out! appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Maybe you’ve been interviewing people for so long that you forget what it’s like to be interviewed. For candidates, it’s a high stakes game of poker, because a good job wins them the pot. Oh, and the pot just happens to be a life-changing job with your company.

Naturally, when people have so much on the line, they’re nervous. So it helps candidates if the interviewer makes them feel comfortable.  

But there’s another empathetic aspect that affects the candidate experience: Interviewers should think of themselves as the ones being interviewed. Why? Because they are.  

In this tight labor market, candidates have more options than ever before. A negative experience costs companies top candidates and revenue. So companies should remember the following tips to avoid creating one.

Don’t Be Late

Just like candidates are told to be punctual, interviewers need to be too. No one wants to be kept waiting. So if you’re late to the interview, you’re wasting the candidate’s time. And wasting a candidate’s time is a big factor in a negative candidate experience.

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you attract and hire top talent 

Be Prepared

Hiring managers dismiss candidates who aren’t prepared. But turnabout is fair play. Interviewers need to be prepared, or they risk having candidates drop out of their company’s hiring funnel. Candidates can sense when they’re not being seriously considered as a potential hire, which is another time-waster.

To prepare, anyone who’s involved in the interview process should meet with the hiring manager to discuss what the role entails. This dictates which qualities interviewers want the candidate to have.

And you should research any candidate you’re interviewing. Review their resume to avoid spending a majority of the interview only learning about the candidate’s work history and likes. Instead, you’ll be able to focus on whether they’re a cultural add or can perform the tasks needed for success.

Finally, being prepared prevents interviewers from repeating questions, which gives candidates a bad impression of your company. If everyone is asking them the same question, candidates think that your team isn’t organized. This creates a negative candidate experience and hurts your employer brand.

Consider Your Body Language

Good posture is the sign of a confident candidate. The same goes for interviewers. In fact, expansive posture demonstrates power, so be mindful of what your body language is conveying.

While you want to showcase some authority as an interviewer, you don’t want to remind the candidate of this disparity. Often, sitting across a table from someone inherently does this. Instead, consider sitting to the side of a candidate. You can ease the candidate’s nerves while still staying in control.

Practice Active Listening

According to Monster, one of the biggest mistakes an interviewer makes is not actively listening to candidates. Interviewers need to be engaged in the conversation. It benefits the interviewer because they can ask follow-up questions to interesting statements.

The main takeaway? Think of yourself as the one being interviewed, and you’ll create a more positive candidate experience. That, in turn, makes three people happy: you, the candidate, and your manager!

Three cheers for candidate experience!

Fill out the form to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent

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The post To Be A Great Interviewer, Flip The Script appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

When it comes to applying for jobs, women and men exhibit different behaviors. That’s according to LinkedIn’s Gender Insights Report, which found women apply to 20 percent fewer jobs than men—yet are 16 percent more likely to get hired for ones they do apply for.

Which prompts the question, what are female candidates noticing that their male counterparts are missing (or ignoring)?

The candidate experience.

So if your company wants to attract more qualified female candidates, it needs to take the following actions to improve its candidate experience.    

Your Company Needs To Care About The Growth Of Female Employees

Company culture is such an important aspect of job recruiting and employee retention. For starters, Fortune reveals that early-career candidates will forego a higher salary for a favorable company culture. And having employees feel engaged at their job and within an organization is the key to keeping them.  

A great way to showcase your company culture is to highlight the personal and professional development that female—as well as all—employees are offered. Mentorship programs are a great way to show that you value a person’s potential.  

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you attract and hire top female talent 

Your Job Description Is Turning Off Female Candidates In More Ways Than One

A clear job description is so important because it sets up an applicant’s expectations for what the job would be like. Unfortunately, your hiring team’s job description may inadvertently be turning female applicants off. Media Bistro claims that words like “ninja,” “rockstar,” or “guru” make women believe your company is male-dominated.

Apart from being more likely than men to get hired once they apply to a job, women are 18 percent more likely than men to get hired after applying for more senior roles as well. The point is, your early-career female applicants are statistically more likely to become not only full-time employees, but also your company’s future leaders.

Also, women self-screen more than men. Research suggests that women are 16 percent less likely than men to apply for a job after viewing it. Why? Because they read a job description that essentially asks for those pesky purple squirrel candidates. Once they start to see they don’t fit some of these requirements, they take themselves out of consideration before even applying. So your hiring team should rethink job requirements compared to what’s essential in job descriptions.

For Females, Employee Benefits Matter The Most

Two aspects of employee benefits stand out most to female candidates. First, the most important aspect is salary range, though it’s not for the reason you might think. Because if a company shares the salary range in the job description, females may interpret this as a sign of transparency and equal pay. Obviously, this is a very important issue for females, who are still fighting to reconcile the pay gap.

The second is benefits themselves, which include work arrangements. Not only is it a priority for female candidates, but it’s the key to getting a more diverse talent pool, claims Forbes. People have different circumstances in their lives that may prevent the traditional 9-5, in-the-office experience.

Sixty-eight percent of women want to work for companies that provide strong employee benefits. So if you want to ensure your hiring team gets more qualified female candidates, your company needs to have good employee benefits. And be upfront about these perks, so you’re not wasting candidates’ time.

Monitor Your Online Reputation, And Work To Fix The Issues

Candidates are researching your company’s online presence. Women are more likely to use their findings to inform their decision before even applying to a job. Again, this is why it’s so important to showcase your company culture. But their research doesn’t stop there.

Glassdoor claims candidates are more likely to apply for jobs at companies with positive online reviews. Once they apply, they’re also more likely to accept a position and recommend it to friends if it has positive online reviews. So if your company has a negative online reputation, you need to work to address it.

One way you can start fixing a corporate reputation is by responding to your online reviews. According to Inc., companies that address negative reviews can see the perception of their business improve by 62 percent.

But don’t just respond to the review and think that fixes the problem. You need to take action about what your company discovers are its issues. Address the issues so your company can get more positive online reviews in the future.

If your company is looking to turn female job hunters into applicants, you need to address your candidate experience. You’ll be rewarded with applicants more likely to get the job, creating a more diverse staff.

Fill out the form to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent

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The post What Women Want: How Your Company’s Candidate Experience Impacts Women appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

The Big Data boon created a metrics madness for companies. Suddenly, every company was concerned with analyzing and understanding their hiring numbers. Why? Because companies realized those other numbers ultimately affect the one that they’re always concerned about: the bottom line.

This increased focus on the candidate experience meant that the metrics used to track it became increasingly important. That quickly led teams to recognize how a negative candidate experience affects hiring stats and KPIs that matter to HR teams. (Take the impact on company revenue, for example.)

What do these metrics look like in reality? Here’s an overview of some of the most important ones.

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you attract and hire top talent 

Job Application Abandonment Rate

The candidate experience starts once a job seeker begins to fill out an application. So it’s not a good sign that 60 percent of job seekers quit in the middle of filling out online job applications. Why? According to the Society of Human Resource Management, if the application is too complex or long, job seekers will give up. Fun fact: Completion rates drop by almost 50 percent when an online application process asks 25 or more questions.  

Fortunately, companies can fix this quite easily and improve the candidate experience by simplifying the application process. In fact, if the completion process takes under five minutes, this increases conversion rates (meaning the share of job seekers who complete the application) by up to 365 percent.

Time-To-Hire

The time it takes to hire a new employee, on average, is 24 days, according to Glassdoor. And if your company is going on-campus to hire, it can take up to three times as long.

However, a negative candidate experience can increase this timeframe. For starters, an extended hiring period will make your company less competitive, since top talent is only on the market for 10 days. If your time-to-hire is longer than that, you won’t be able to compete for this important group of candidates. That’s why reducing a long hiring process can go such a long way toward improving your candidate experience.

Cost-Per-Hire

A strong employer brand can cut a company’s cost-per-hire by 50 percent, argues the Society of Human Resource Management. But a bad employer brand? You guessed it: It drives up a business’s cost-per-hire.

Also, there are other aspects that cause the cost-per-hire to rise. If a candidate has to meet with several people at your company, that’s productivity lost. Remember, multiple interviewers means more money and more problems for your company.    

Acceptance Rate

Your company’s acceptance rate is a great indicator of how effective your team is at attracting top talent. If the acceptance rate is high, then people likely want to work there.

The good news is, you can drive your acceptance rate higher. And to do that, you should again look to your employer brand. Are you communicating what your company culture is like during the interview process? Do you create content that shines a light on what benefits you offer? If you’re promoting your business throughout the recruitment process, candidates will be more excited to receive that offer when you deliver it to them.

The candidate experience affects all aspects of your company’s recruiting efforts. A positive will help fuel your hiring stats to reach new heights, but a negative one will have the opposite effect. How does yours stack up?

Fill out the form to find out how WayUp can help you find top talent

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The post Metrics Madness: Why You Should Focus On These 4 Hiring Stats (And How To Improve Them) appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Just for the record: Having a ‘lit’ candidate experience does not mean that Gen Z will want to set it on fire. It rather means that they’ll respond positively to the process you’ve put together. And now that we have that out of the way, we can move on to the subject at hand.

In order for your company to successfully recruit top early-career talent, you need to have a strong (and positive) candidate experience at the core of everything you do.

But don’t fret if your candidate experience isn’t exactly what applicant dreams are made of. Like a phoenix, your company’s candidate experience can rise up to become one that Gen Z loves—as long as you focus on the following areas.

Showcase Company Culture

It starts by showcasing your company culture, whether on social media and your company’s website or in partnership with third-party vendors and publishers. This acts as a powerful recruiting tool by letting potential candidates understand what their work involves. And it gives job seekers an insider’s look into your culture, so they can determine if they would be a good fit and should join.

One way to accomplish this is by creating a culture deck that highlights critical aspects of your company that you can share with prospective candidates. Highlight your business’s vision, mission, and value statements, and include recent press clippings and other events.

Ideally, your company will share its culture deck the same place it does its job listings. Fortunately, WayUp allows companies to both create profiles (where they can showcase company culture) and list job openings that they can promote to our more than 5 million users.

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you attract and hire top Gen Z talent 

Think Strategically When Writing Job Descriptions

Your job descriptions are a part of the candidate experience. When writing them, think of how you can engage prospective applicants while still accurately reflecting the job’s responsibilities. One last point: Make sure you don’t include subliminally sexist language.

Create A Seamless Application Process

Once your company has attracted candidates, it’s important that your application is user-friendly. Be mindful of Millennials and Gen Z by making the application mobile-friendly. This means keeping screener questions to a minimum, unless you don’t mind losing up to 40 percent of job seekers.

Review Resumes Fast  

Unfortunately, hiring managers spend 13 hours per work week reviewing resumes. But say goodbye to the days of slowly working your way through a seemingly never-ending pile of resumes in order to find top talent. Thanks to new technology, that process can be reduced to mere minutes.

Contact Every Applicant

Once an application is submitted, it should be routed quickly for review. The last thing you want is for applications to end up in the dreaded resume black hole (the place where 98 percent of resumes are banished, never to be heard from again). An easy—and necessary—way to prevent a negative candidate experience caused by this is to acknowledge an applicant’s resume submission.

From there, let your candidates know sooner rather than later whether or not they’re still in contention for the job. But even if the candidate isn’t the right fit for a specific job, you should still keep them warm by letting them know there may be roles in the future they’re better qualified for. This helps companies create a deep talent pool for future recruiting.    

Have An Interview Agenda

Providing an interview agenda creates a positive candidate experience. So send the candidate:

1. 1. The names and titles of the people they’ll meet (or talk to on the phone)
   2. Information on how long the interview is expected to last
   3. An overview of the topics they’re going to discuss

They’ll then be able to properly prepare for the interview by researching the company, prepping answers to interview questions, and understanding the interviewers’ roles. This should happen at any point in the hiring process where a candidate will interact with your company.

Make Use Of Phone Screens

Another way to prevent wasting a candidate’s (and an employer’s) time is to conduct an initial phone screen with potential qualified candidates. For starters, it’s convenient for the candidate, since it doesn’t require them to commute for an interview. And it allows companies to find out quickly whether or not a candidate is qualified. This mitigates productivity loss.

Consider Sending Interview Surveys

How can you know whether or not candidates are having a positive candidate experience? By finding out from them directly.

Ask candidates to fill out a survey on which parts of the interview process they liked (or didn’t). Ideally, the survey will contain four or five questions, including some open-ended ones that’ll allow them to freely provide feedback.

Provide Interview Feedback

Also, after any interview—whether it was the initial phone screen or an in-person meeting—companies should provide interview feedback. This should include whether or not the candidate is moving onto the next phase of the hiring process (and if they’re not, explain why in a constructive manner). If the candidate is, explain what those next steps involve, and do so shortly after the interview.  

Prepare For In-Person Interviews

At this point, your company wants to bring in several candidates for in-person interviews. Remember, it needs to provide an efficient interview process. Instead of having eight interviews for qualified candidates, consider holding two rounds. This prevents candidates from “ghosting,” and helps provide a positive candidate experience.    

Close The Loop

At the end of the hiring process, your company is either ready to offer a candidate the position or it knows that the candidate is no longer in consideration. Regardless, you need to close the loop and communicate with the candidate.  

If your company follows these steps, it’ll turn its candidate experience from an “F” to an “A,” and maybe even one that Gen Z thinks is so lit that it uses those two letters to form a certain popular acronym.  

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The post Build A Candidate Experience That Gen Z Will Think Is ‘Lit’ appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

The recent college recruitment scandal involving Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin left some universities with fewer full houses, as some students who were allegedly admitted with doctored credentials (apparently paid for by their parents) are now at risk of having their admissions rescinded.   

And while unfortunate, if these students’ parents did indeed give them an unfair advantage that helped them gain acceptance to prestigious universities over deserving students—a crime federal prosecutors have thus far charged 50 people with—it seems a logical next step to revisit their status.

But how does this affect early-career recruiting? Will schools that were unwittingly involved and that have been heavily prioritized in the past as a resource for top talent be affected? Though the U.S. government has not implicated any schools in the alleged scheme, there are individuals (including athletic coaches) who were reportedly directly involved in this graft.  

Click here to find out how WayUp can help you attract and hire top Gen Z talent 

Regardless of the fundamental questions this story raises, it should prompt recruitment teams to think more carefully about how, where, and whom they recruit. Here are some ways they can do that.

Forget Names And Focus On Accomplishments

If this scandal has taught us anything, it’s that the cachet of a name is powerful. These parents were allegedly willing to go to unlawful lengths (reportedly paying millions of dollars in some instances) to get their children into well-known colleges.

But as Shakespeare famously asked, “What’s in a name?”

Because what really matters are accomplishments, rather than the institution where a student attended. Look for candidates who were actively involved in clubs and organizations, and can speak to their contributions during their tenure. Did they work at a part-time job to pay their way through school? That demonstrates a strong work ethic.

Evaluate The Candidate’s Potential

A lot of innovative companies no longer have a traditional interview process. For example, Tesla doesn’t require candidates to submit resumes to be considered a qualified candidate. So how are they getting top talent?

You can start by testing your candidates. Yes, standardized tests have inherent biases. However, you can create job knowledge tests that measure a candidate’s expertise in a field. But don’t use these tests as the be-all and end-all, because technical knowledge can be taught. Instead, use the tests as a baseline.

Another way to assess potential employees is a cognitive ability test. This may be more helpful for hiring teams because they show a candidate’s general mental capacity. In fact, the American Psychological Association claims that there are links between cognitive ability and personality traits when it comes to success in the workplace.           

Ultimately, it’s important for hiring teams to remember that the secret sauce for recognizing top talent is combining accomplishments with potential. If your hiring team focuses on this, you’ll be sure to get the best and brightest, and not just because a diploma implies that they are.

Expand Your Candidate Pool And Place All Universities On Equal Footing

Brilliant, gifted students come from across the U.S. and attend all kinds of universities and colleges. Of course, prestigious institutions like Harvard and Stanford have produced many successful graduates, but that doesn’t mean you should overlook graduates of smaller, regional schools.

At the end of the day, you should develop a system for evaluating students that relies on a set of objective data—and not simply the school they graduated from. Remember top talent can come from anywhere. And to quote the Bard again, this recent scandal has shown that it appears there is something rotten in the state of Denmark (or at least the state of higher education).  

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The post Rethink How Your Company Recruits Early-Career Talent Thanks To Aunt Becky appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

So you’ve successfully navigated the emotional rollercoaster of your company’s transition. You moved beyond the status quo with a strong pitch that got the C-suite to buy in. And you illustrated to your co-workers that the organizational change won’t be as much of a disruption to their professional lives as they originally feared.

Now as your company continues to change early-career recruitment processes and strategies, you’re ready to get your company through the final two stages of the Change Curve.

As a refresher, the Change Curve is the four-stage model created by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross that was originally conceived as a way to process grief. Since its creation, it’s also been adopted to describe how companies deal with organizational change.

And now that you’ve read Part I of this series and have moved past the initial stages of driving organizational change, you need to continue on with your eyes on the final prize.

Here are two tips to help you sell—and close—an idea within your company.

Ready to change your organization’s early-career recruiting? Request your demo to see how WayUp can help.

Encourage Employee Exploration

Once your company reaches the exploration stage, employees stop focusing on what they’ve lost. Instead, they’re testing and learning the reality of what these changes mean.

The key is to genuinely listen to any concerns and be open-minded to them, even if it means your hypothesis is wrong. Why? Because research shows that you gain credibility if you ask for advice, but only if you actually want it. If you’re just asking others under the guise of valuing their opinions and ignore their valid objections, people will see through the charade and view you as simply pushing your own agenda.

So, how can you do this effectively?

• Be a facilitator: Host focus groups and discussions on the idea of change and guide the conversation.
• Listen to alternative ideas: Other employees may have ideas that are complementary or maybe even better than what you’re proposing. Be open-minded to everything.
• Be transparent: Explain what the point of these meetings will be and how the information will be used to drive decisions about the proposed changes.

One way to encourage employee exploration is to label the change as a draft form, Forbes suggests. In other words, commit to a trial period. Use an extended period of time to test your hypothesis. During this time, communicate the message of change using as many mediums as possible. Discuss it in meetings, emails, newsletters, etc.

Another important element of exploration is to divide tasks among your company. This helps people feel like they are genuinely part of the change. And it allows you to personalize responsibilities to people’s strengths, as Entrepreneur encourages. Remember to follow up regularly to see how everyone’s doing with the changes. Be empathetic to challenges that arise, and everyone will know they’re in this together.

The goal is to get company-wide acceptance. The change is happening. And by the end of this stage, all of your employees understand it—and start to see it, since you’re continually sharing data that illustrates your progress. It helps them prepare for the final stage of the Change Curve.

Rebuilding Is The Right Decision, And It’s Backed By Data

The last phase is the rebuilding stage, so it’s vital that you keep employees committed to the change you’re ushering in. Here, the onus falls on management. According to Gallup, only 22 percent of U.S. employees strongly agree that their company’s leaders have a clear direction for their organization. So if the C-Suite has bought in and can continue to sell how the changes are affecting the company in a positive way—and align with the ultimate vision of the organization—you’re almost done with the Change Curve.

Which is why it’s so crucial that employees see the results of the change. If you’re transparent throughout the process, your employees will see that legitimate data confirmed your hypothesis. Now your company’s like a phoenix, rising out of the ashes of an old, inefficient process, to a new, optimized way of doing things.

If you’ve convinced people to trust the process (by making them a part of it), then everyone should be on board. So instead of having a monumental task, you used the Change Curve—and the help of your fellow employees—to push that boulder of change up and over the hill.   

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The post To Sell Change To Management, Follow These Easy Tips: Part 2 appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Change can be good, but trying to get an enterprise company to do it can seem like a monumental task, especially if you’re the one proposing the change. Because if your company doesn’t evolve, from increasing your digital recruiting efforts to improving your employer branding, it’ll fall behind the competition.     

So how can you prepare your organization for the future—and ultimately have everyone accept it? By basing the process on research.   

Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross created the Change Curve during her work in personal transition in grief and bereavement. She proposed that there are four stages of change:

• Status Quo
• Disruption
• Exploration
• Rebuilding

While this model was originally designed to describe an individual’s experience, it’s been applied to organizational changes. And companies can use this to understand that, while overhauling a process, each stage will elicit a different response from employees.   

Unfortunately, the first two stages can create a negative response, which makes them the hardest to navigate. But just remember these stages are temporary. So if you’re ready to create a more efficient process for your organization, you need to understand how to handle different perspectives and reactions during the transition.

Interested in the Change Curve? Get your free demo to see how WayUp can change your early-career recruiting.

Don’t Succumb To The Status Quo

When your company decides it’s time for change, people may not be immediately open to the idea. Fittingly, the first stage of the Change Curve is status quo.

In order to maintain the status quo, people respond with shock or denial. They may not be ready to accept that the change is happening. Instead, they dismiss it.

If you want to get company buy-in, it all starts with a strong pitch, argues Inc.com. A strong pitch focuses on:

• What the current pain points are.
• How the change impacts the business.
• Which key performance indicators will determine whether or not the change is successful.  

Keep in mind, you need to tailor your message to different audiences. The Head of HR cares about different things than the CFO. You want to emphasize or even rearrange your talking points based on the audience.

At its core, a pitch should include:

• A problem statement: What are we looking to solve?
• Anecdotal evidence: Support why the change is needed.
• Return on Investment (ROI): This does not always have to come in the form of savings, but the investment should yield measurable results and increased productivity.
• A rational argument: How does the solution support organizational goals and do you have clear Key Performance Indicators that measure its effectiveness?
• Leverage existing data and numbers: Support your argument by showing how the proposed solution will improve figures your organization is already tracking.
• A high-level execution plan: How will these changes be communicated and implemented?

While delivering your pitch, bring passion for your ideas, but be willing to negotiate internally. It is, after all, a give and take.

How Do You Get The C-Suite’s Buy-In?

This might seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. At the end of the day, you can win over the C-Suite in a familiar way: Get allies.

Discuss your plan with mid-level leaders early in the process, so they’re on-board. The more people that support the change, the better your odds will be to get approval from the C-suite.

Keep in mind, communication is critical at this stage. It’s important to use inspiring language, as HubSpot points out. You want to use a positive and hopeful tone that includes the whole organization. Remember, it affects everyone.

Also, you need to be as transparent as possible about what the changes mean. This includes providing a realistic timeline on when these changes will yield results. Plus, employees can track the progress, which helps people further understand why this will ultimately benefit the company.

Don’t Let Disruption Sidetrack Your Company

The next stage of the Change Curve is disruption. People worry about how the change affects them. They may feel like they’re backed into a corner. And sometimes people can act out if they feel under attack, even when (in reality) they’re not. This usually drives one of two responses.

The first is the unknown. People may not understand what the change does, or why it’s necessary. The second is the emotional. This will vary from people’s uneasiness with change overall, from the fear of an increased workload, to people hating the messenger and not caring about the message.

Speaking to the fear of the unknown is easier: Focus on what pain points this change addresses, and how it solves them. Use research informed by data, of course, to drive your narrative and argue your hypothesis. As Harvard Business Review explains, describing the problem as it is—and not how you view it—allows people to more easily see the solution.

Keep Key Performance Indicators in mind to measure whether or not the change is successful. Focus on what is best for the organization and what will move the needle on company performance. People may be worried about their own self-interests, but it’s hard to argue against an idea that’s in the best interest of the company, especially if they don’t have a better suggestion.   

Again, be transparent about the data (in every stage). Seeing the progress helps move the company to the third stage.

Moving beyond emotion is one of the hardest parts of creating change in your company. However, once you do that, the transition gets easier. But there’s still more work to be done.

Want to tackle the remaining changes? Check out part two of our guide to organizational change here!

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The post Science-Backed Tips To Help You Drive Real Change At Your Company: Part 1 appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

By 2022, women will represent 47 percent of the US workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By that time, Gen Z will comprise roughly one-fifth of it. But that doesn’t mean recruiting strategies need to adapt, right?  

Unfortunately, one size no longer fits all when it comes to recruiting top talent.  

If your hiring team wants to build its female early-career talent pool, it needs to adjust its recruitment strategies. Here’s how you can accomplish that goal.

Use Inclusive Recruiting Methods

Emma Nicholls, the founder of Your Red Dress Ltd, a company that helps organizations attract, develop, and retain female talent, suggests that companies need more inclusive attraction and selection processes to create a diverse talent pool. Hiring managers and recruiters need to learn about what being inclusive means, discover their own potential biases, and use inclusive language to attract more female applicants.

But where do you start? You should examine your company’s candidate experience at every stage to see where there are any breakdowns. For instance, does your company’s careers page feature pictures only of men? If so, women might worry that it’s a brompany (aka a company with a male-dominated culture).

This is also true when it comes to word choice. Hiring teams can repel female candidates by using sexist language, and they can deter Gen Z candidates from wanting to join their company if they rely too heavily on clichés.     

Provide Flexible Working Arrangements

Flexible working arrangements are what’s trending in terms of what female early-career candidates want from a company. And it helps your hiring team get a more diverse talent pool, as Forbes notes. Because top talent comes in all forms—and with different backgrounds and circumstances—companies need to provide different options.

Just remember that if you offer flexibility to your employees, you’ll increase the likelihood that top female candidates will want to work for your company.

Learn how you can transform your early-career recruiting process here.

Look For Talent With Unique Backgrounds

Similarly, hiring teams should prioritize candidates with unique backgrounds. Forbes argues that these diverse candidates can bring more to the company, like diversity of thought. So instead of emphasizing a level of experience, hiring teams should focus on agreed-upon characteristics and evidence of accomplishments. Instead of demanding that candidates have held several internships, ask that they’ve demonstrated creative problem-solving.

Businesses that do this will be rewarded. Not only will your company be more diverse, it’ll see a better bottom line. Companies with diverse teams are 45 percent more likely to report market share growth, and 70 percent more likely to have captured a new market.   

Emphasize Relationships

As Fortune points out, early-career candidates are willing to take a job with a lower salary if the company is a good culture fit. And a big aspect of this is professional and personal growth opportunities. So it’s in your company’s best interest to emphasize this as part of your company culture. Provide your early-career employees with a mentor outside of their managers.

Ideally, you should connect female employees with a female mentor in a senior role who can offer support for challenging projects and other issues. This helps a young employee feel engaged at work, because they feel they’re a valued part of the company. And it’s especially important for female candidates, because they want to see first-hand examples that the company offers growth possibilities for them.     

The future (of almosts half the workforce) is female, so hiring teams need to utilize different tactics to recruit for it.

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The post The Future Is Female: How To Attract More Female Early-Career Candidates appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Interns have been the unsung heroes of companies for years. They do a lot of work, sometimes without even being paid. (For the record: We believe ALL interns should be paid.)

That’s changing.

In 2017, WayUp started National Intern Day to recognize the hard work of interns across the country. Last year, over 500 companies across America participated. Plus, if paper bags can get their own day, then interns definitely deserve a holiday.

Interns do a lot more than bring energy and a fresh perspective to your company (though that’s no small feat). According to Entrepreneur, since interns haven’t been told yet (or convinced themselves) what they cannot do, they’re ready to solve any challenge a company may have.

So, don’t you think it’s about time you celebrated them? We do, which is why we created National Intern Day. Here’s why your company should pledge to participate in National Intern Day this year.

It’s Free

Let’s get this out of the way: There’s no cost to your company whatsoever to pledge to participate in National Intern Day. The cost of not participating, however, could be great.

Do you think your company can recruit and retain the most qualified interns if it doesn’t provide a positive intern experience? Think again. Employee appreciation is, after all, one of the key traits of any successful company.

Interns with negative experiences don’t live in a vacuum or disappear. They tell their friends, family members, fellow students, and professors, and they share their perspective on social media and sites like Glassdoor. This is how companies begin to lose out on qualified candidates, according to Forbes. Providing a positive experience, assigning meaningful work, and showing your appreciation are just a few simple ways you can ensure your company’s talent pool won’t dry up.  

So, don’t miss out on providing your interns with a summer they won’t forget. Here are a few ideas that can help make your celebration special.

Earn A Spot On WayUp’s Top 100 Internship Programs List

Apart from honoring your interns, you can nominate your company so that it’s eligible to be one of WayUp’s Top 100 Internship Programs. If selected, you’ll join a prestigious group that’s recognized for having one of the top college internship programs.

Why does this matter? Getting placed on this list is kind of a big deal.

In 2017 and 2018, the list generated media coverage from sites like CNBC, Forbes, and Yahoo! Finance. It’s also referenced by countless college students when they’re looking for roles.

What a great way to help attract top talent to your intern program and share what makes your program special.

Be Part Of The Social Media Conversation

Each year, National Intern Day continues to grow. In fact, for the past two National Intern Day celebrations, #NationalInternDay was the top trending hashtag on Twitter! Last year, National Intern Day also generated more than 1 billion impressions across social media—that’s nearly one-seventh of the global population!

Remember that social media is a great (and free!) way to attract qualified candidates. Millennials and Gen-Z reflexively follow companies on social media and routinely research potential employers on social networks. A great way to showcase your company culture is to share how you celebrate National Intern Day. Trust us, students will respond positively.

Participating In National Intern Day Is So Easy (Really)

Here’s how to participate in National Intern Day:

• Pledge: Sign up to join thousands of companies who have pledged to celebrate hard-working interns on July 25, 2019.  

• Nominate: Nominate your company to be eligible for WayUp’s Top 100 Internship Programs list.
• Share: Use #NationalInternDay and tag WayUp to signal your participation and share the fun on social media!

If you’re looking for more reasons why your company should participate in National Intern Day, visit the National Intern Day site. And don’t forget to sign your company up at www.nationalinternday.com!

The post National Intern Day: Here’s Why Your Company Should Participate appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

A strong employer brand is the ultimate recruitment tool. Why? Because it allows companies to slash their cost-per-hire by 50 percent, according to the Society of Human Resource Management. And the benefits don’t end there. It reduces company turnover by 28 percent. In addition, companies with a positive employer brand have more than 2X the revenue growth and almost double the profit margins.

A weak employer brand, on the other hand, causes companies to take a hit in more ways than one.

Negative Reviews Cost More Than You Might Realize

Negative reviews are the bane of any brand’s existence. And your brand may be unknowingly inspiring bad ones through its candidate experience.

There are a few simple steps you can take to improve your candidate experience. For starters, it’s important that you contact all job applicants and let them know about their application status. As Brazen notes, 72 percent of job seekers said being ‘ghosted’ by companies they applied to left them with a negative impression of that employer. Candidates share their negative experiences on social media 34 percent of the time, according to LinkedIn, but don’t assume it stops there—they’re telling their friends and family offline too. That’s what Virgin discovered when they conducted a study on the impact their candidate experience was having on their business. Their verdict? It cost them $5 million annually in revenue.   

Keep in mind, negative reviews affect the candidate experience because they prime top applicants to have an unflattering opinion about the company. For instance, 38 percent of fired or laid-off employees post negative reviews of their erstwhile employers. Well, that’s not so bad, right? Wrong! The amount of Millennials that shared less-than-flattering sentiments after being in a similar situation is almost double (73 percent) that, and they used multiple channels–social media, review sites, etc.

Add all of this to the fact that 70 percent of Gen Zers look at online reviews before making any career decision, and you can see the problem. People who’ve never interacted with your employer brand will now walk away thinking it’s a negative one.   

Learn how you can transform your early-career recruiting process here.

How To Improve

There are a number of concrete steps your company can take to rebuild its employer brand.

For starters, job seekers’ opinion of your employer brand begins with a company’s website and social media channels. Ninety-one percent will have a lesser opinion of a company’s employer brand if it has an outdated website and subpar social media channels. So simply updating your social media with recent news, upcoming events, and company culture will put you on the road to recovery. Obviously, your company should make those updates on its website as well, on top of considering additional improvements.    

Providing a positive candidate experience will also have a profound impact on your employer brand (not to mention that it helps drive revenue). Turning a negative candidate experience into a positive one starts with promptly responding to all applicants, regardless of whether they’re moving on to the next hiring round. Simply letting candidates know one way or the other gives the kind of clarity everyone is searching for while job hunting.

Finally, your company needs to address its branding issues head-on. That includes replying to negative reviews, which Inc. says improves your company’s negative perception by 62 percent. But don’t just respond—react. Address those issues and make the necessary changes to your company culture proactively.

Boxers can take a hit, but if they take too many they get knocked out. Treat your employer brand the same way. And remember that your candidate experience is your secret weapon.

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The post Employer Brand Knockout: How Candidate Experience Affects Employer Brand appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

College students aren’t the only ones with a bad case of “FOMO,” or fear of missing out. Hiring managers are always fearful of missing out on top talent in early-career recruitment. It has prompted many companies to incorporate processes that are thought to provide the best talent pipeline, only to discover that they are missing out on qualified candidates.

So, how do companies cure their FOMO? It’s simple: You just need to provide a personalized candidate experience. And you can start by following these four simple tips.

1. Focus Only On Targeted Events

Companies think that if they don’t attend every college event and job fair, they won’t be able to get qualified candidates. Fortunately for them (and their P&L) this isn’t the case. Only 53 percent of Gen Z attend career fairs as part of their job search.

Many businesses have an ‘If it’s not broke, then don’t fix it’ view when it comes to on-campus recruitment. But the failure to embrace technology as a means of driving diverse, qualified candidates through your funnel—all at a much lower cost—is becoming increasingly burdensome. From newspapers to travel agents, technology has completely upended countless industries that were slow to embrace it. To drive revenue and propel your company into the future, you need to think outside of the box; and creating a digital strategy for early-career recruitment directly helps realize those goals.

But that doesn’t mean you need to completely abandon all campus events. Companies should instead be more targeted with their approach to career fairs. They can focus on certain events that allow them to hit hiring initiatives around areas like diversity and STEM. Just make sure to emphasize digital outreach to streamline costs, expand your candidate pool, and increase diversity.

2. Spend Time Exclusively With Qualified Candidates (It’s Possible!)

One of the major issues recruiters deal with is resume overload. Since they’re inundated with applicants, choosing whom they want to move forward with in the interview process is laborious and onerous. This delay can be the difference between landing a qualified candidate and having one bite the dust by “ghosting” your company.

Thankfully, your company can take action. Job sourcing sites allow you to utilize resume filters that ensure candidates meet certain requirements. So if your company only wants candidates who majored in computer science, then sites like WayUp will prevent unqualified candidates from applying to your open roles.

That lets your recruiting team focus all its attention on the candidates you think would be a good fit.   

3. Attract Only Interested Candidates

While fishermen like to cast a wide net to catch as many fish as possible, this is counterproductive for early-career recruitment. Yes, your company wants to attract many qualified candidates to fill its open positions (and build a talent pool), but it doesn’t want to attract candidates who aren’t interested in joining it.

To prevent this, companies should showcase their culture through decks, social media, and their website. Building an employer brand allows candidates to determine whether or not they want to work for a company before they even apply. If they like what they see, they’ll have “FOMO” from not working at your company.

4. In-Person Interviews Should Be For Qualified Candidates Only

An inefficient hiring process can cause top talent to drop out of the hiring funnel. So, how does your company fix this? Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!

Instead of having multiple rounds of in-person interviews, consider only having one or two. Also, when you do have candidates on-site, have them interviewed by only the people who are essential to the process. This prevents the company from losing out on productivity and revenue. And it’s less likely to lose out on qualified candidates.

So there you have it. Just follow these four tips and early-career recruitment “FOMO” will be a thing of the past.

Learn how you can transform your early-career recruiting process. Fill out the form below to get a demo.

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The post Avoid Early-Career Recruitment ‘FOMO’ With These 4 Tips appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

One of the challenges of recruitment is how to reduce the $2,027 price tag and 24 days needed to hire a candidate, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ 2017 Recruiting Benchmarks Survey Report. And if your company goes on campus to hire? It can take up to three times as long and cost $6,275 per employee!

But while this problem is something HR departments should definitely look into, it’s not the most costly aspect of the hiring process.

That distinction goes to having unfilled jobs.

ADP notes that unfilled positions weigh down US GDP by an average of $13 billion every month. That’s around $160 billion per year. And with the annual turnover rate near 19 percent (and involuntary turnover at eight percent), that has a huge effect on the labor force.

But how else does a long hiring process affect companies? In several ways, actually.

Your Company Loses Revenue With Unfilled Jobs

Employees are your company’s greatest asset. But, as Fortune notes, 40 percent of companies have unfilled entry-level jobs. And the US retail industry loses more than $9 billion due to voluntary entry-level turnover.

In fact, the loss of an employee can cost a company tens of thousands of dollars. And according to LinkedIn, that’s just the low end of the range. The high end? As much as two times the salary of the position. Ouch.

Your Team Members Feel The Pain—And Their Productivity Plummets

Unfortunately, having open jobs affects the rest of your company. For starters, it causes other workers to pick up the slack. And with more work comes more stress. Business Insider points out that employees under high-stress levels cost companies 40 percent more than the average worker.

What’s more, there’s an immeasurable cost of not bringing early-career candidates onto your team: the loss of innovation. Because early-career workers aren’t bound by restrictive industry walls, they tend to look at problems in unique and untested ways. As Inc. points out, bringing on these workers helps your company devise better solutions.  

Your Candidate Experience Suffers

Another way that a long hiring process affects your company? The candidate experience. And that starts with overly long online job applications. If they’re too lengthy, you’re in trouble: Sixty percent of candidates abandon the process if an application takes too long.  

If it’s longer than 24 days, candidates are much more likely to have a negative experience, and they’ll drop out of the hiring funnel.

And there needs to be a huge sense of urgency for hiring managers to promptly communicate with candidates. Top talent is only on the market for 10 days, so a long hiring process won’t attract these qualified candidates.

A long and winding hiring road doesn’t benefit anyone. To combat that, companies should constantly look for opportunities to optimize at each stage of the hiring funnel.  

Learn how you can transform your early-career recruiting process. Fill out the form below to get a demo.

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The post Companies Get The Short End Of The Stick With Long Hiring Processes appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

The workforce is changing. Millennials now comprise one-third of the labor force; by 2025, Gen Z will make up one-fifth of it.

Which means the times they-are-a-changin’ for early-career recruiting.

Hiring managers face new challenges to secure top talent, whether it’s creating the right mix of high tech and high touch, or focusing on different skill sets than before.

Here are five ways early-career recruiting is changing at a breakneck pace.

1. A Positive Candidate Experience Means Everything  

We’re in the age of the candidate experience. Never before has such an emphasis been placed on making sure that—whether a candidate gets the job or not—every applicant has a positive experience.

And for good reason. Negative candidate experiences cost companies revenue.

Fortunately, companies can reap the rewards of providing a positive candidate experience. Sixty-four percent of candidates with a ‘five-star experience’ plan on increasing their relationship with a company, regardless of whether they receive a job offer. If candidates have a positive interview process, they share that information more than 80 percent of the time; they also post on social media about it 50 percent of the time.

Nice people (in this case companies) no longer finish last.

2. Incorporating Tech To Engage Candidates Is A Must

As part of the candidate experience, companies are communicating with applicants more frequently. Thankfully, technology is helping companies do this easily.  

Plus, innovation is important in early-career recruitment. Gen Z wants to work for innovative companies, so incorporating it into your early-career recruitment process improves the candidate experience and connects with Gen Z candidates at the same time. 

3. Companies Are Wooing Candidates

In this tight labor market, candidates have become the belle of the ball. To attract top candidates, companies need a strong employer branding strategy. Luckily, having a great employer brand reduces hiring costs by 43 percent, according to LinkedIn.

If companies need to brush up on their wooing skills, they can learn how to showcase their employer brand here.

Just remember: If candidates don’t believe in your company’s mission, they’ll continue to look for one they do identify with. And that company will get top talent.

4. Soft Skills Are Front And Center

Foundational skills—commonly known as soft skills—are the focal point of what companies are looking for in candidates. Why? Sixty percent of applicants don’t move past the first round because they lack the necessary foundational skills required for success.

Unfortunately, early-career candidates are sometimes lacking communication skills, which are a big part of interviewing. In fact, 38 percent of recruiters are looking for candidates who are strong communicators. So how can this be rectified?    

Well, early-career candidates want feedback after an interview, as LinkedIn notes. And companies can get candidates to improve foundational skills through interview coaching.

5. There Are New Ways To Do Old Practices

While early-career recruitment evolves and streamlines parts of the hiring process, one thing remains constant: the need for human interaction. Candidates want to be able to interact with companies to learn more information—about the interview, interviewers, and the company itself. Companies that offer a high-touch hiring process are going to attract more qualified candidates.

As much as some things change, others stay the same. And at the heart of early-career recruitment still lies the need for people to identify and create relationships with qualified candidates.  

Learn how you can transform your early-career recruiting process. Fill out the form below to get a demo.

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The post 5 Things That Show Early-Career Recruiting Is Changing—Fast appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Mark Twain said, “The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.” This couldn’t be more true for a company’s early-career recruitment strategy.

According to the Harvard Business Review, happy and engaged candidates perform better in interviews. But the success of an interview doesn’t lie solely on the candidates: Having strong interviewers is one of the first steps to hiring great new team members.

Here are some tips on how your recruiting team and hiring managers can become better interviewers.

1. Think Emily Post And Focus On Etiquette

Just as candidates will be on their best behavior, the interviewer must remember etiquette. For starters, interviewers should be prepared to greet each candidate with a smile and a handshake. Also, make sure your interviewers look candidates in the eye and have an open and inviting posture. Always treat every candidate with respect, even ones they learn during the interview aren’t a good fit. Again, just like your candidates are doing their best to make a strong first impression, interviewers should too.

This, in turn, means interviewers have to use active listening skills, something that’s important for both candidates and interviewers. Obviously, this will help them continue to keep the interview flowing. More important, they can learn whether or not the candidate’s skill set suits the job’s needs.

2. Do Research On The Candidate

According to Inc.com, the onus of major research should fall on the interviewer, not the candidate. Interviewers are expected to find out more about the candidate than the candidate needs to learn about the company. Why? So interviewers can ask questions about the candidate’s work history if they don’t know it.  

But it’s not just reviewing the candidate’s resume.

Interviewers should research qualified candidates on social media and conduct internet searches to find out if they are a good fit. Does this candidate bring added value to your company culture? Think about this: If the candidate has controversial social media posts, it may cause your company to rethink a candidate’s application. A company’s employees represent a company both inside and outside of work.

That said, this would still create a positive candidate experience: Candidates want closure and don’t want their time wasted.

3. Ask Questions That Relate To The Job’s Responsibilities

Yes, interviewers want the candidate to be engaged in the conversation, but it should be centered around the position. According to Monster.com., that’s why it’s important to ask questions that relate to the job’s responsibilities. In order to do this, the interviewer must have a clear understanding of what the job entails.

It’s important that interviewers meet with hiring managers beforehand. This gives hiring managers a chance to fully explain the role, and to let interviewers know what they’re looking for in a candidate. The last thing companies want to do is to bring in a candidate for an interview, only to have the applicant meet with several different interviewers who all ask the same questions. So it’s important to have a strong plan of action.

During or after the meeting, an interviewer should create questions based on these responsibilities. Because if an interviewer can’t create questions about the job, how are they supposed to choose candidates with skills needed to perform the role?  

Your interviewers should be judging your candidates for different skills. And if they each know which skills they’re focusing on, the questions they ask should reflect that. One interviewer can concentrate on past work experience, while another can examine the candidate’s foundational skills.  

4. Stay Relaxed

It’s important that your interviewers stay relaxed while they’re interviewing candidates. The human brain doesn’t distinguish the difference between a high-stakes job interview and the threat of attack, as Forbes explains. So if companies want top talent to be able to show why they’re the best and brightest, it’s important that qualified candidates are put in positions to succeed by their interviewers.

And interviewers need to know how to keep the candidates relaxed too.

Plus, if both parties are calm, this allows them to easily go off-script during the interview. And going off-script gives your interviewer the freedom to ask questions that are personalized to each candidate, prompting candidates to think quickly.

The interview process creates a ripple effect: Well-prepared interviewers create a calm candidate, who’ll perform better during the interview, leading to your hiring manager choosing the right candidate to join your team.  

Just remember: A happy interviewer translates into a happy candidate.  

Learn how you can transform your early-career recruiting process. Fill out the form below to get a demo.

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The post 4 Tips To Help You Interview Candidates Better appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Pizza aficionados have drawn their lines in the sand. It’s either New York or Chicago-style. The two cannot co-exist.

Unfortunately, some HR departments view the hiring process similarly. Your company is either high tech or high touch. Because the advent of automation and artificial intelligence ease overburdened HR departments, companies are having technology take over evaluating candidates (since each corporate job opening attracts 250 resumes).

But is this helping—or hurting—your ability to hire top talent?

Can companies utilize the speed and efficiency of high tech, while providing the high touch experience that involves heavy human interaction? How can your company balance the two to provide the ultimate candidate experience?

High Tech

Without high tech tools, hiring managers would spend 13 hours per work week reviewing resumes. Instead—as predicted by Forbes—this, along with 16 percent of hiring manager’s tasks that will be freed up within the next 10 years due to AI, is reduced to mere minutes.

But AI’s impact won’t end there. Companies can use it to search the Internet for a candidate’s online presence, highlighting whether the candidate is a cultural fit or not. And its ability to handle interview scheduling moves candidates quicker through the hiring funnel.

Advanced analytics’ adoption in human resources (also known as people or talent analytics) can be leveraged to allow companies to make smarter hiring decisions. Hiring managers have the capability to analyze which traits their most productive employees possess, and they can look for those traits in candidates. In fact, human resources can use this data to understand how all of the employees work, and what the company can do to increase productivity.

High Touch

While technology is useful, the most valuable tool throughout the hiring process is human interaction. It’s why high touch is so necessary for a positive candidate experience, which has been proven to be the difference-maker in hiring today’s top talent.

It’s important to avoid sending candidates to the resume black hole—the place where 98 percent of candidates never hear from a company about a job opening. So send an email acknowledgment that you received a candidate’s resume. If your company is interested in moving forward with the candidate, move quickly to schedule the initial interview.  

Remember, 94 percent of candidates want feedback after an interview. But speed matters too. Companies should contact candidates no more than three or four business days after an interview to provide feedback. Even if the answer is no, hiring managers need to keep candidates informed about the hiring process.

And it’s important to make a connection with candidates. While you should keep the hiring process the same for each candidate (to avoid any interview bias), you should personalize communication. If you know the candidate is seeking a good work/life balance, emphasize that when you’re discussing company culture. You can also talk about past experiences or interests that relate to the position.

Balancing The Two

Fortunately, companies are perfectly pairing the two to create the ultimate candidate experience.  By automating job sourcing and the initial resume review—not the initial candidate screening—HR departments have optimized the hiring process. Hiring managers are able to choose from more qualified candidates, while providing job seekers with a positive candidate experience with an innovative company.

In fact, many companies are adopting machine-learning chatbots and other AI applications early in the hiring process, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. These chatbots allow companies to give candidates answers to initial questions, at any time. And since the chatbots can understand the questions, it means they can answer with individualized responses. It helps move candidates through the top of the hiring funnel faster.

Others are working with outside recruiters to provide initial phone screen interviews. This saves companies and candidates hours of wasted time on unqualified candidates. Companies don’t have to disrupt their team’s workflow while candidates have the convenience of discussing the position from anywhere (that’s quiet!).

Another high touch element that aids in the candidate experience is customized feedback. By utilizing co-sourcing recruiting firms, employers are able to provide personal feedback within 24 hours of the interview. The feedback should consist of interview tips for candidates moving onto the next round. And this allows hiring managers to focus on accomplishments, potential, and performance during on-site interviews, not soft skills.   

Yes, it’s possible for high tech and high touch to co-exist. Like most things in life, it’s all about finding the right balance between the two.

Learn how you can transform your early-career recruiting process. Fill out the form below to get a demo.

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The post High Tech And High Touch? Can They Co-Exist And How Do You Balance The 2? appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

The death of the hiring manager at the hands of technology has been greatly exaggerated.

Yes, automation, AI, and digital marketing are now seen as must-have components of many recruiting strategies. But when overused, they can create a disingenuous and cold candidate experience. Depending on how you leverage technology in your recruiting funnel, it could be your biggest asset—or downfall.

The truth is, technology isn’t meant to replace hiring managers. Rather, it’s supposed to refocus recruiting priorities to enable teams to provide a positive candidate experience and hire the right—and most qualified—applicants. And the best hiring managers are marrying technology and human interaction to achieve this.

Think Long And Hard About Automation

Gen Z grew up with technology. They expect everything to move quickly. If something is too slow, they get bored and move on. So don’t expect top talent to stick through a slow hiring process.

But how can hiring managers prevent this from happening? They’re already working with limited resources, and, on average, each corporate job opening attracts 250 resumes. It’s like using a bucket to remove all of the water from a flooded basement. Thankfully, automation allows hiring managers to clear the resume flood in seconds by sorting through candidates who meet certain job requirements.   

Instead of spending 13 hours per work week reviewing resumes, hiring managers can expedite the process. Quicker response times for applicants ensure a positive candidate experience, and prevent your company from losing out on top talent.

But companies need to resist the temptation to use technology for everything. Just because Gen Z loves tech, that doesn’t mean they trust it to make every decision. Seventy-three percent of candidates don’t want AI deciding if they go on to the next hiring round for a job. So, if your company is considering using AI or video interviews without human evaluation, you may lose out on top Gen Z talent.

Also, there’s an unfortunate bias inherent in AI. As WayUp CEO and co-founder Liz Wessel points out, an algorithm reflects its creators. For example, companies looking to hire a more diverse team may find themselves struggling to find quality candidates. That’s what happened at Amazon, a company with arguably the world’s most sophisticated team of computer scientists.

Amazon created an algorithm to help with hiring that was inadvertently biased against female candidates. The cause? It was based on historical resume data, which was overwhelmingly skewed toward men, who comprised the majority of the company’s applicants.

So, what’s the alternative? Well, personal phone screens combine the efficiency of technology—candidates don’t have to waste time commuting while companies don’t lose productivity—with a human touch point. But how can companies do this at scale?  

Hiring managers, you’re in luck: You can use outside recruiters. They’re adept at sourcing and handling initial screenings and help drive more human interaction and ensure diverse candidates are passed through to later rounds of the hiring process.

Think Even More About Authentic Branding

Authentic branding is a great opportunity for companies to sell their employer brand, a critical element of a recruitment strategy. And it’s made easy through social media management platforms like Hootsuite and Sprout, which allow you to schedule your posts. Start sharing and give your company a human voice using the efficiency of machines. Eighty percent of businesses already are.

You can begin by showcasing your company culture. Let potential employees see what it’s like working for you. This can be done by posting pictures of team outings, videos of your team working on projects (to highlight collaboration and creativity), and blogs that demonstrate thought leadership (which establishes your company’s status within the industry). Update your website with these assets too.

Your job’s not done, though. Don’t forget about your online reputation, which is a crucial element of your employer brand. But why should it matter what a former employee thinks about a company? Simple: Because 70 percent of Gen Zers look at online reviews before making any career decision.  

Again, it all comes back to human interaction. Actively maintaining your employer brand means responding to positive—and negative—feedback. Both are opportunities to better learn what your company culture is and how you can improve it. And Gen Z loves that.

In this tight labor market, qualified candidates have a lot of leverage. The interview process is now equal parts your company wooing them and them wowing your hiring manager. If your employer brand is strong, the interview process won’t be a waste of time for either the candidate or your hiring team. And this is a big factor in a positive candidate experience.

It’s important to understand how technology affects the candidate experience. Remember, marriages work when responsibilities are shared. And if early-career recruitment is equal parts technology and human interaction, it’s a match made in (digital) heaven.    

Learn how you can transform your early-career recruiting process. Fill out the form below to get a demo.

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The post Why Tech Can Make—Or Break—Your Candidate Experience appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

One of the defining traits of empathy is putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. But, when it comes to your company’s hiring process, have you put yourself in your candidates’ shoes? If you haven’t, you don’t know what their candidate experience is.

How is your company supposed to improve candidate experience if it doesn’t know what’s involved?

Here are four things you never knew are part of candidate experience.

1. Communication

Here’s a shocking statistic: Only two percent of job applicants get an interview. Even more shocking? Ninety-eight percent never even hear back from the company! Communication is a critical part of the candidate experience.

Your company should communicate with its candidates throughout every step of the hiring process. From follow-up emails through interview agendas and job offers, it’s important to keep in touch.  

2. Online Reviews

Is your company actively engaging with positive—and negative—online reviews? If not, it’s hurting your candidate experience. Seventy percent of Gen Zers look at online reviews before making any career decision. And if your company isn’t publicly responding to feedback, it’s most likely not reading the feedback. That’s not encouraging for candidates.

And it prompts another serious question: How can your company solve candidate experience problems that it doesn’t know exist?    

3. Interview Training

Your company’s team is one of its greatest assets and selling tools. But if they don’t know how to properly conduct an interview, they become a liability. Imagine if you’re a candidate, and the interviewer is asking questions that don’t have any connection to the job or your previous experience.

Here are three important aspects of interview training:

• Make sure all employees involved have read the job description and understand the position and your company’s needs.
• Provide your employees with a guide for interview questions.
• Give a list of interview basics to follow such as being punctual and friendly.

4. Branding

Company culture is a big attraction for candidates. If candidates don’t feel like they’re a good fit for your culture, they won’t want to work at your business. So if your branding isn’t effectively showcasing your company culture, your ability to attract quality candidates will suffer.

And it all starts with the job description. Remember that word choices in your job descriptions can impact candidate experience. Using words like “ninja,” “rockstar,” or “guru” can give candidates the impression that your company is a boys-club, according to Media Bistro.

It’s not the only area where branding matters, though. Social media is an effective branding tool to showcase your company culture to job seekers. Candidates can follow you on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks to get a glimpse of how your company promotes creativity, innovation, and teamwork. And it can keep them informed of any new developments at your company.

Once your company chooses candidates it’d like to interview, it needs to communicate in a timely manner (as we mentioned above) with branded messaging. To keep everything consistent, make sure your emails include your logo and follow brand standards (like its colors, font, etc.).

If any of these four things haven’t been addressed by your company, you need to rethink your approach immediately. At the end of the day, your candidate experience is too important to not know what affects it.

Learn how you can transform your early-career recruiting process. Fill out the form below to get a demo.

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The post Do You Know What Your CE Is? The 4 Things You Never Knew Were Hurting Your Candidate Experience appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Everyone knows the phrase, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.” But what you don’t know about your company’s candidate experience can hurt your company.

That’s why it’s so important that companies are paying attention to candidate experience. After all, the candidate experience can positively—or negatively—affect revenue. But what can your company do to learn more about what candidates are experiencing?

Manage Your Online Reputation

One of the most crucial elements of employer branding is your company’s online reputation. It’s critical that you’re responding to both good and bad reviews. According to Inc., companies that address negative reviews can see the perception of their business improve by 62 percent.

And that’s not all. Glassdoor notes that (unsurprisingly) candidates are more eager to apply for jobs at companies with positive online reviews. Candidates are also more likely to accept a position and recommend a company to friends if it has positive online reviews.

But you need to do more than just manage your online reputation. You need to apply what your company discovers about its candidate experience (and company culture) to your business. Because getting more positive online reviews means having a positive company culture.

Ask For Interview Surveys

Sadly, your online reputation doesn’t tell the full story. If your company doesn’t have any negative reviews about its candidate experience, this means it’s a positive one, right?

Wrong.

In order to ensure your company is providing a positive candidate experience, ask all of your candidates to fill out a survey. Request that candidates share what they liked—and didn’t like—about the experience with your company. However, don’t just limit the survey to two questions. SHRM suggests that interview surveys contain four or five questions. On top of that, you should survey candidates during each step of the hiring process. This will give you invaluable feedback about your interview process by helping you pinpoint where your company can improve.

If there’s a golden candidate experience rule, it’s this: What you don’t know can—and often does—hurt you. So, learn all you can and work on providing a positive one to all your job candidates. In this case, information (not ignorance) is bliss.

Learn how you can transform your early-career recruiting process. Fill out the form below to get a demo.

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The post Candidate Experience: What You Don’t Know Does Hurt You appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Recently, I was invited to speak at the Women in Sales event Developing Your Leadership Compass. During the panel, I was asked what are the key traits of a great sales leader.

Here are the five pieces of advice I shared during the amazing discussion.

1. It’s Not About You

Look, I know it’s hard not to worry about your performance, your job, and your career. When you’re a leader, however, you cannot focus on that. Your priority must be the success of your team. You have to thrive knowing that your team is winning. And guess what? Ultimately, if your team is successful, then you will be too.

2. Be Hard On The Numbers

My dad was in sales, and thank god because it put me on this career path. He used to say, “Be hard on the numbers and kind to the people.” And it’s 100 percent true.

You need to be disciplined when it comes to the numbers. Your team needs to have a concrete understanding of their goals and expectations. To lead effectively, you have to get to the root of why your team is hitting—or missing—their numbers. If it works, figure out how to replicate it. If it doesn’t, understand how you can fix it.

But don’t forget the other part of what makes an effective leader—caring about your team. These are people, after all, and you need to understand that there will be highs and lows. You need to show them you’re there for both.  

3. Be A Thermostat

A thermostat sets the room’s temperature. A thermometer reacts to what’s happening in the room. A good leader is a thermostat. A bad one is a thermometer.

Good leaders set the environment for the team. They know when to turn up the heat and when to cool things down for their team.

Bad ones react to what’s going on. They let what’s happening around them dictate their behavior. Those are the kinds of leaders with boiling tempers, and fear isn’t a sustainable motivation tool.   

4. Feedback Is Critical

There are two aspects of feedback that are vital to your success: You need to be able to give and take feedback. If you can’t do both, you won’t be an effective leader.

I’m a firm believer in publicly praising and privately punishing. If someone on my team does well, I will sing it from the mountaintops. If a team member does something wrong, however, I set up a one-on-one to completely understand what happened. These situations are critical teaching opportunities, so you have to explain the right way to do things to prevent mistakes from happening again.

But getting feedback is just as important.

Earlier in my career, I received negative feedback from an exit interview. The CEO told me to read everything carefully, then focus on the element of truth in it. I learned that you need to take that one piece and grow from it.    

There are always two sides to every story, but, as a worker and a leader, you have to understand your shortcomings and work on improving them.

5. Confidence Is Key

The phrase “fake it until you make it” holds elements of truth to it. Be confident and decisive with your team.

But there may be times when you have more experienced salespeople on your team. You can meet with those individuals for a one-on-one. Don’t be afraid to ask them to be honest with you about their expectations. But it’s up to you to also be strict: Tell them what goals you have for them, and then find a way to work together so everyone benefits.

Even if there’s a skillset you may lack, you need to project that you’re comfortable performing it. Only you can define your story—both positively and negatively. So if you want to turn your weakness into a strength, spend the extra time studying and working on it. And be ready to discuss it. That way your team and your co-workers will eventually consider you an expert instead of a liability.   

Here’s the main takeaway: Good leaders point their team in the right direction of their goals—and guide them to get there.

Learn how you can transform your early-career recruiting process. Fill out the form below to get a demo.

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The post To Be A Leader, You Need To Be A Thermostat appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Yup. It’s all been wrong.

Most employers have been focusing on the wrong things when it comes to the candidate experience.

Maybe it feels the bigger the booth at a career fair, the bigger the recruiting numbers that will follow. (Not if candidates care more about making a connection than status.) Or maybe the conventional wisdom says having the coolest swag at a career fair is enough to win over top talent. (Not if candidates don’t feel good about the work they’re doing, argues LinkedIn.)  

In reality, the candidate experience involves just two things: Showcasing your company culture and being respectful of a candidate’s time.

That’s it.

Think About Company Culture

Only 59 percent of recruiting leaders are investing more in their employer brand, even though it’s such a critical component of the candidate experience. Translation: Your company can gain a competitive edge by focusing on employer branding, starting with company culture.  

To build your employer brand, showcase your company culture. This can be done by posting pictures of team outings, videos of your team working on projects (to highlight collaboration and creativity), and articles that demonstrate thought-leadership. That, in turn, establishes your company’s status within the industry. And don’t forget to add these assets to your company website. Shout it from the (digital) rooftops!

But it doesn’t stop there. Job descriptions are another opportunity to demonstrate company culture. When it comes to writing job descriptions, you need to sell the work that candidates will be doing, but make sure you don’t fall prey to the cliché trap. SmartRecruiters warns that using phrases like “fast-paced environment” or “competitive compensation” can turn off top candidates. After all, 79 percent of Millennials and Gen Z want to work at an innovative company, and innovation involves doing things differently.

Sharing your company culture deck empowers candidates to understand critical aspects of the company. To create an effective one, highlight your company’s mission statement and values. If you need inspiration, you can copy what Nasdaq did: Nasdaq created a video featuring its CEO—whose career began as an intern at the company—describing what it’s like to work there. What better way to highlight company culture (which includes growth opportunities) than a real-life testimonial from someone who joined a company through early-career recruitment.

A strong culture deck should include the latest press about your company. Doing so saves candidates time—the second component of providing a positive candidate experience.

Don’t Waste Their Time

When it comes to the hiring process, time isn’t on a company’s side. Companies that don’t act quickly in all stages of the interview process risk losing qualified candidates. After all, top talent is only on the market for 10 days.

And desktops and tablets are so last century. Gen Z is always connected, and they’re adept at doing anything instantly using mobile. So don’t expect them to view a job posting and save it for when they get home to use their desktop (or tablet). If you want to get Gen Z’s top talent, you have to create an application that’s designed specifically for mobile. Without mobile optimization—from the length of the job descriptions to the application itself—candidates will move on.

Your company is on the clock once a candidate decides to apply for an open position. And the first part of it is the application process. According to Indeed, applications with 20 screener questions lose two-fifths of candidates. That’s a lot of potentially qualified—and diverse—candidates to miss out on.

But, speed doesn’t stop there. 94 percent of candidates want feedback after an interview, and you know that Gen Z wants everything fast. If something is too slow—remember they have an attention span of eight seconds—they get bored and move on.

According to Forbes, a good rule of thumb for companies is to contact candidates no more than three or four business days after an interview to provide feedback and next steps. Employers that recognize the power of an efficient hiring process use WayUp Source, Screen & Coach to guarantee candidates receive a response within 24 hours of submitting an application. It keeps candidates engaged and helps them move talent through the hiring funnel 2x faster.

Companies that focus on these two things can expect one result: a positive candidate experience.

Learn how you can transform your early-career recruiting process. Fill out the form below to get a demo.

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The post Employers Are Thinking About CE Entirely Wrong: The Candidate Experience Involves Just 2 Things appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Abraham Lincoln said about preparation: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” For interview preparation, we expect candidates to have done it. So, hiring managers are surprised when candidates don’t seem like they did.

Instead, maybe the problem is this–candidates are preparing for interviews the wrong way.

Candidates are taught to practice relating their past experience to the requirements of the new position. However, there are more skills needed to have a successful interview. Foundational skills need to be practiced, so a candidate can perform well during the interview. But, does every candidate know the importance of them?

Companies that share what they’re looking for throughout the interview process are being rewarded with a deeper talent pool of qualified candidates, and providing a more positive candidate experience. Therefore, it’s important for a company to know how to prepare candidates for interviews.

1. Culture Deck

Candidates should begin their part of the interview process by researching the company. It’s critical for them to understand what a company sells before they can discuss how their skills will help the company sell it. However, that’s not the only aspect candidates need to know about potential employers.

Sharing your company culture deck lets candidates understand critical aspects of the company.

Your company culture deck should include your company’s mission statement and values. For instance, Nasdaq used a video featuring its CEO discussing how she went from an intern to her current position. This video demonstrated growth opportunities that early-career candidates have, as well as its company values and culture.

This is a good opportunity to share any recent press about your company. Reading these articles can help candidates create their own interview questions. Besides, it increases top-of-mind awareness–if candidates better understand what your company does, a positive candidate experience may turn them into a customer (even if they don’t get the position).  

2. Foundational Skills

Also, your company should offer foundational skills tips for its interviewees. These are helpful reminders for candidates that focus on the proper way to answer the phone, or how to dress for the interview. A quick refresher never hurt anyone.

For some candidates, this may be the first time they’ve ever been told about these aspects of an interview. Unfortunately, the lack of foundational skills prevents 60 percent of candidates from getting a job. So, offering some foundational skills guidance ensures more qualified candidates.

3. Question Guide

Your candidate has done the research, and they know how to act professionally. But, what about the interview itself? How can companies ensure that qualified candidates are performing to their potential throughout the interview process?

Sending candidates several of the questions in advance helps.

If your company provides its candidates with a handful of interview questions, the candidate can prepare their answers. They’ll be comfortable, so they can focus on answering the question instead of trying to figure out which experience paints them in the best light.

4. Who’s Interviewing The Candidate?

No one likes to worry about forgetting someone’s name. Provide your candidate with the names of the interviewers before-hand. It’ll ease your candidate’s nerves, so they can focus on making a good first impression.

On top of that, the candidate can research who they’re meeting. Remember, the best recruiting tool is your staff. This gives candidates the opportunity to see the top talent on your team. An important part of early-career recruitment is illustrating how your company gives its employees professional growth opportunities. One way to provide this is having someone at a company who can teach an employee more about their profession and industry.

Instead of complaining that your candidates weren’t ready for the interview, follow these tips how to prepare candidates for the interview. Remember, it takes a long time to sharpen an axe if you don’t know the right way to do it.

Learn how you can transform your early-career recruiting process. Fill out the form below to get a demo.

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The post Want Prepared Candidates? Follow These 4 Tips appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Which do you think people get more nervous for: a job interview or a first date? According to a WayUp survey, college students get more nervous for a first date, while recent grads are more worried about nailing that interview. And we know that nerves can affect a candidate’s performance.

So, if you want to provide your candidates with a positive experience, how do you make them feel at ease during the interview? Here are six ways to make your job candidates feel less nervous:    

1. Make Yourself Vulnerable

According to the Society for Human Resource Management, icebreakers are a great way to put your candidates at ease. You can achieve this if you make yourself vulnerable to the candidate.

Now, a few caveats: First, don’t get too comfortable and complain about how busy your day is, because that may make candidates feel guilty about taking up your time. Also, you don’t want to gripe about the company to someone who wants to join. That’s comparable to the chef at a restaurant complaining about the food. Why would anyone want to eat there after that?

Focus on something small. You can talk about what projects you’re working on, especially the details or interesting elements of them. That’ll help serve as a recruitment tool because candidates will have a better perspective about what they could work on there. (That’s particularly true if the project overlaps with the position’s job requirements.)

2. Start With A Joke

Humor is humanizing, but it also has workplace benefits. Forbes notes how 91 percent of executives believe that humor is important for career advancement. Not only that, but 84 percent of executives feel that employees with a good sense of humor do a better job.

For an interviewer, cracking a joke is a great way to calm a candidate’s nerves. According to the Mayo Clinic, laughter stimulates circulation and aids muscle relaxation, which eases tension.

The best kind of joke in this setting? Something innocuous and goofy. Here’s a good example: When candidates hand you their resumes, you can reply with, “Sorry, I forgot mine.” 

3. Have A Conversation

Don’t dive into the tough, probing questions right away. Slowly work your way to them. One way to accomplish this? Have a quick conversation. Ask the candidate about her commute, which is actually an important part of the interview. Employees with a short commute—between 0 and 5 miles—will stay at their job 20 percent longer.

Also, you can talk about something topical. If it’s getting close to summer, you can ask the candidate about her summer plans. If the Super Bowl is around the corner, ask them whom they’re rooting for. Or, if you’re not into sports, you can ask candidates if they’re excited for the final season of Game of Thrones or Big Little Lies. (Who isn’t?!)  

4. Collaborate

At this point, everyone is familiar with the STAR method of interviewing. But if you present those same scenarios in a hypothetical situation, it can be more effective. Better still? Collaborate with them on an actual situation.

Ask candidates to work on one element of a project that involves their skillset. You’ll need to be careful that you don’t use their ideas if you don’t hire them. To avoid this, you can use a past project.

Here’s an example: Your company is looking for a new graphic designer. Show them a project that was done several years ago, and ask the candidate what they like about the ad, and what they’d do differently.

Obviously, this is a good way to vet their technical skills. But it also works as a way to see their foundational skills (also known as soft skills) in action. Is their criticism constructive, or just destructive?

Also, it’s a good time to push back on their suggestions. This way, you can see how they handle criticism. (Just make sure they know you want them to be opinionated!)

5. Remember Body Language

Body language is a great way to get people to relax. Simple gestures like smiling and having confidence help people feel more at ease around you.

Another great tip is to subtly mimic the body language of the candidate, which is known as the mirroring technique. According to Forbes, it’s an effective way to build a rapport in relationships.   

If possible, you should also avoid sitting across the desk from candidates. This is very formal, and reminds candidates that it’s a job interview. So, sit to their side. This will make the conversation seem less formal, so your candidates will feel more relaxed.   

6. Actively Engage The Candidate

As the hiring manager, you need to be genuinely curious about the person in front of you. In order to achieve this, you should actively engage the candidate. This requires listening attentively and asking follow-up questions.  

Also, it means being mindful of how quickly you’re asking questions. There’s nothing worse than when a candidate feels like you’re simply asking questions in rapid-fire succession just to check the interview off your to-do list. So, take your time between questions. It gives the candidate an opportunity to go off script, too.

So, there you have it. Just follow these six simple rules and watch as your candidates not only perform better on interviews, but also feel better about the whole process—effectively improving your candidate experience.

Learn how you can transform your early-career recruiting process. Fill out the form below to get a demo.

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The post 6 Ways To Make Your Job Candidates Feel Less Nervous appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Gen Z is entering the workforce, and by 2021 they’ll comprise one-fifth of it. Just like Millennials created the need for a whole new recruitment strategy, Gen Z has its own idea of what the ideal employer offers.

Scratching your head about where to begin? Start with these three things Gen Z actually wants from employers. And remember that unless you’re offering them, Gen Z will pay as much attention to your recruiting efforts as they do to a boring Instagram post.

1. Emphasize A Nurturing, Diverse Culture

Gen Z is the most diverse generation to date, so diversity is a necessity at any company they join. Fortunately, a diverse team benefits companies by providing more creative, innovative, and effective results. In fact, the Harvard Business Review found that companies with a diverse team are 45 percent more likely to report market share growth in the past year, and 70 percent more likely to report their company captured a new market. That’s a win-win.

While this does include inherent diversity, Gen Z has a two-dimensional understanding of diversity. For them, diversity is also acquired, which individuals only gain through unique experiences like growing up in a single-parent household or living in another country and learning a foreign language. Combined, both forms create diversity of thought, which is important for Gen Z.

Additionally, quality of life is important to them. To address this, companies need to be less stringent than before. They’re looking for, among other things, a vibrant work atmosphere that fosters employee creativity. Another must to improve quality of life for employees is a flexible work station.

Remember that professional growth plays a part in quality of life, and Gen Z workers are seeking growth and professional development opportunities. Like diversity, professional development benefits companies, too. It helps businesses recruit new talent—cough, Gen Z, cough—and retain employees. Interestingly, Gen Z is less likely to job-hop than previous generations such as Millennials: Sixty-two percent of them say they’d like to stay at their first job for three years or more.

2. Provide Flexible Work Arrangements

We all know how hectic life gets. Gen Z wants to work for companies that not only know this, but also take action. Some of the ways you can do this are by providing flexible work hours for appointments, commutes, and family care. After all, this is a generation that grew up with technology. They’re always on, and they know how to use this as a way to teach themselves, communicate, and complete tasks, making them genuinely independent workers.

Fortunately, worker autonomy benefits companies, increasing both employee well-being and company efficiency. Autonomous workers take on more tasks without worrying about whether or not they’re in their job description.

Targeting candidates with entrepreneurial characteristics allows for increased worker autonomy. Intrapreneurs—or employees within a company who are entrepreneurial—are problem-solvers who are able to come up with innovative solutions for your company’s biggest challenges. By nature, they like to execute, not discuss ideas for hours on end. Therefore, they’re driven to take action instead of sitting in long meetings.    

3. Utilize Social Media      

Social media is a great opportunity to showcase your company culture. More than that, Gen Z believes it’s a place to connect with others in a meaningful way. Here are some statistics of the value they place on social media:

• 82 percent use social media to talk about issues they’re passionate about.
• 44 percent check their social media at least hourly.
• 71 percent use it to research employers.   

So, if you want to reach Gen Z where they’re spending their time, you need to utilize social media. In fact, posting a job on social media can increase candidate applications by 30-50 percent. Keep in mind, Gen Z prefers video content, with 50 percent of them saying they can’t live without it. If you’re new to video, how-to and behind-the-scenes videos are a good place to start.

If your company has these three things Gen Z actually wants from employers, then get ready to welcome excited new workers to your team (and to watch as they benefit your company’s bottom line in the process)!

Learn how you can transform your early-career recruiting process. Fill out the form below to get a demo.

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The post Why The 3 Things Gen Z Wants From Employers Also Benefit Your Company appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Chances are, you’ve probably heard the term “ghosting” used in the context of dating. If not, here’s a quick primer: It’s used to describe those instances when, after having gone on a few dates and talking regularly, a dating partner just stops communicating. No “goodbye.” No “I want to see other people.” Just…nothing.

Well, we have some news: This phenomenon has officially hit the world of recruiting.

According to the Society for Human Resource Management, job candidates are more frequently not responding to calls, texts, and emails throughout the hiring process. It’s not only relegated to candidates, either: The most recent Beige Book from the Fed, released in December, notes that a growing number of employers are reporting their employees are quitting without notice. It’s become so rampant that employers are increasingly—and publicly—talking about their “ghosting” problem.

While you can never fully predict a candidate’s (or a date’s) behavior, there are some measures your company can take throughout the hiring process to make sure you avoid this unfortunate outcome. Here are five tips to help prevent candidates from ghosting you.

1. Stay In Touch Throughout The Process

When it comes to dating, you don’t want to text too often because it can make you seem like you’re coming on too strong. However, checking in with a job candidate throughout the interview process keeps them engaged. Everyone wants to feel wanted, and contacting your candidates is a great way to accomplish this. Remember, a simple gesture can go a long way.    

2. Simplify Your Hiring Process

As the Washington Post notes, the labor market is tight, with total job openings continuing to outpace the number of candidates looking for work. Additionally, unemployment currently sits at a 49-year low at 3.7 percent. While this environment has been a boon for job candidates, it makes the competition for top talent that much tighter. And to land that top talent, you need to have a simplified hiring process.

A simple way to do that is to rethink how often you interview candidates. That’s what Nasdaq did, explains Josh Bellis, their Global Head of Early Careers and Diversity Recruiting. “Do we really need eight interviews for an intern? Probably not. Once you get a candidate, [we decided] you can only do two rounds of interviews,” he says. Reducing your company’s interview process (the current average is 23.8 days) helps keep candidates engaged and ensures they move through your funnel faster.

3. Be Transparent About The Job Responsibilities

This is a vital part of providing a good candidate experience, but it’s important to keep in mind for your employees too. If you continually hire people with shifting job responsibilities, this will create worker unhappiness. In fact, one of the two major factors cited by people who are unhappy with their jobs is stress. So, remember to be transparent about what a person’s roles and responsibilities will be from your first interaction. It’ll benefit you in the short- and long-term.  

4. Provide Meaningful Work, Especially For Interns

Providing meaningful work is important for all your employees. But it’s particularly critical to provide meaningful work to your interns. Think of your internship program as an extended job interview. Assign them actual projects, provide mentorship, and invest in them the same way you do for full-time employees. If your company emphasizes how it does that for its interns, you’re much more likely to attract and maintain their interest throughout the interview process.  

5. Show You Care

Finally—and this is a no brainer—if you don’t show you care about your employees, then you’re going to have an incredibly difficult time retaining them and attracting new recruits. Your company culture is a reflection of that sentiment, so think about what kinds of benefits and perks you offer, and keep their happiness and well-being as a top priority.

Learn how you can transform your early-career recruiting process. Fill out the form below to get a demo.

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The post ‘Ghosting’ Has Officially Become A Thing In Recruiting—Here Are 5 Tips To Prevent It appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Job candidates hope their resume and cover letter separate them from other applicants you’re considering to hire. However, they aren’t the only ones who have to prove themselves throughout the interview process. Nowadays, companies also do.

This is the Age of the Consumer: People can access vast amounts of information in real-time, and it applies to careers, too. Increased transparency because of sites like Glassdoor allows potential employees to learn more about companies, from median salary range to company reviews.

Businesses have had to adjust by reevaluating the candidate experience they’re providing potential employees. Why? Largely because a poor candidate experience affects your company where it hurts the most—revenue.

What Is A Poor Candidate Experience?

Since your company isn’t the only one being courted during the interview process, you need to make sure you’re as ready as your candidates. That means you need to:

• Be prepared.
• Show up on time.
• Speak honestly.

Poor candidate experiences happen when people involved in talent acquisition miss the mark on these tips. You may be late to the interview because you were pulled into a meeting. A poor candidate experience does more than turn off candidates—it also costs your company.

How A Poor Candidate Experience Affects Revenue

For starters, 41 percent of applicants who had a poor candidate experience with a company eschew brand loyalty and avoid buying that company’s products. Additionally, candidates share their negative experiences on social media 34 percent of the time. No one wants their company to lose customers or go viral for the wrong reasons.

Take, for example, Virgin Media, which set out to quantify how much candidate experience affected their bottom line. They found that 6 percent of candidates canceled their Virgin subscription as a direct result of the interview process, costing the company $5 million annually. The true number is likely larger, moreover, as it doesn’t take into account candidates’ family and friends following suit.

The Benefits Of A Positive Candidate Experience

Fortunately, there are several benefits of a positive candidate experience. Sixty-four percent of candidates with a five-star experience plan on increasing their relationship with a company, whether they get the job or not. Also, candidates tell their friends about a positive interview process more than 80 percent of the time, and post on social media about it 50 percent of the time. That means increased revenue and free advertising.   

How To Provide A Positive Candidate Experience

The good news is, delivering a positive candidate experience is simple. Just follow these two steps:

1. Respect The Candidate’s Time

Time is money, for both parties. Companies lose money on lost manpower because of a lengthy interview process, while potential employees miss out on paychecks. Keep in mind that the longer the process takes, the more likely a candidate will lose interest in the job.

2. Showcase Your Company’s Culture

You should treat interviews as an opportunity to increase brand awareness. Demonstrate to candidates that you value potential and current employees by showing respect throughout the process. While some candidates may not be a good fit, they can turn into a positive brand advocate because of a good experience.

Remember, before you post your company’s next job opening, know how you’ll make your company stand out so you can find cover letters and resumes that do the same.

Learn how you can transform your early-career recruiting process. Fill out the form below to get a demo.

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The post How A Positive Candidate Experience Affects Company Revenue appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

According to ERE, top talent is off the job market in 10 days.

Yes, 10 days.

In early-career recruitment, however, the average time from job posting to interview is more than three weeks.

That’s a huge disparity, and it can significantly affect your company’s chances of hiring qualified candidates. But the delay affects more than just recruiting. It can also hurt your company’s productivity: Employees in the top 5 percent of a company’s workforce can produce 26 percent of that company’s total output, driving profitability and fueling innovation.

That makes hiring top talent the utmost priority, as these candidates can turn into superstar employees who usher companies to new heights. So, what can you do to ensure you’re not missing out on top talent? Here’s how to avoid losing qualified candidates.  

Write Clear Job Descriptions

A clear job description lets a candidate know what they can expect from a job. First and foremost, it should explain what the daily and weekly tasks are. When you create your job description, you should be mindful of your word choices. According to Media Bistro, words such as “ninja,” “rockstar,” or “guru” may imply your company is a boys-club, which could, in turn, dissuade female candidates from applying.

Another trick is to include compensation in the job description. Forbes points out that in a tight labor market, this can be a big point of differentiation for companies looking to attract top talent. And, with only 10 percent of job listings including explicit salary information, there’s an opportunity for your company to stand out. Keep in mind, though, that your company’s comp plans need to be attractive to candidates. If your starting salaries are lower than other companies in your industry and location, candidates will look for work elsewhere.

You should also avoid falling into the cliché trap. As SmartRecruiters notes, talking about your “fast-paced environment” or “competitive compensation” is not going to win you many points. This is especially true among Gen Z and Millennials, 79 percent of whom say working at an innovative company is important to them. And you know what innovative companies do? They avoid clichés.

Focus On Accomplishments

Having years of experience as a job requirement is counter-intuitive to recruiting top talent. Why? Because what really matters are results. The secret is to instead focus on accomplishments. Remember that most early-career candidates lack experience, so you can use accomplishments as a way to attract enthusiastic and driven employees.

Besides, you can train qualified candidates in the hard skills necessary to perform the job. It’s much easier to train employees in Photoshop than it is to teach them emotional intelligence. Prior accomplishments—like founding a college club—are just as valuable as Microsoft Office proficiency for an early-career candidate. In fact, innovative companies including Tesla have abandoned resumes as the main criteria for qualified candidates.                

This applies to all levels of experience, too. Why? Because limiting the search to only years of experience removes wunderkind workers from the hiring process. The potential to be great, combined with tangible achievements, is very attractive to hiring managers. This demonstrates that candidates not only are driven, but also can accomplish their goals.

Showcase Your Company’s Values

Companies lose qualified candidates because they don’t know how to sell themselves. A strong employer brand is a critical part of a recruitment plan. And to create a strong employer brand that’ll resonate with candidates, you need to think about your company culture, compensation/benefits, and your work environment.

There are several ways you can sell your employer brand.

For starters, social media is a cost-effective way to highlight a positive work environment. In 2018, 80 percent of businesses used social media as a recruiting tool. Your company can do this by posting pictures of events such as birthdays and team outings. It’s an organic—aka free!—way to show that your company cares about its employees and what the work environment is like. It also gives your customers a better understanding of your company. By highlighting some of the processes that go into your company’s work, you can demonstrate how you value creativity and collaboration.  

Your company website is another great tool for selling your employer brand. Apart from leveraging it to inform potential customers about your product(s), it’s a great way to highlight your company’s culture, values, and work environment. Your website can (and should) include videos and pictures that show off what it’s like to work for your company, as well as articles and other content that give an insider’s perspective.       

Make Sure You Have An Efficient Hiring Process

Successful companies are efficient. This applies to the hiring process as well.

So, how can you improve the efficiency of your company’s hiring process? One innovative solution is incorporating a hire-by date for qualified candidates. Essentially, it forces hiring managers to identify top talent quickly and act even quicker by assigning them a date in which a job offer needs to be made. If the date passes, that candidate is likely to be off the market.

Leveraging technology throughout the recruiting and interview process helps make this possible. No longer do companies have to spend countless hours and thousands of dollars visiting college career fairs across the country to recruit qualified candidates. In fact, only 53 percent of Gen Z attend career fairs as part of their job search.

Besides saving you money, going digital is far more efficient. Since talent acquisition professionals spend 13 hours per work week sourcing candidates for a single role, job listing platforms allow them to find top talent within seconds by setting parameters or specific qualifications that are necessary for candidates to be considered.

Also, using outside recruiting firms can expedite the hiring process. With each corporate job opening attracting 250 resumes, it’s a herculean task to sift through every application you receive, especially when you have limited resources. WayUp Source, Screen & Coach helps companies review resumes quickly and screen qualified candidates within 24 hours, saving hours of work each day and enabling recruiting teams to focus solely on top talent—so they can hire the best candidates before their competitors do. Using WayUp Source, Screen & Coach, companies like Nasdaq have even saved more than 100 hours of work per week throughout their recruitment process.  

Top talent is a company’s greatest resource. If you follow these steps on how to avoid losing qualified candidates, your company will benefit with better workers. And better workers leads to better work.      

Learn how you can transform your early-career recruiting process. Fill out the form below to get a demo.

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The post How To Avoid Losing Qualified Candidates appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.

Recently, I was asked to be a part of The Washington Post’s The Future of Work event. I spoke about how technology can help workers acquire new skills, the adoption of technology in human resources, and job-hunting tips for college students.

Here are four of the topics we discussed at the awesome event. If you’d like to watch it yourself, just go here.

1. Soft skills are so important that they should be called foundational skills

Companies are continually placing an emphasis on soft skills (or communication and interpersonal skills). Though their name might not suggest it, soft skills are so important we like to think of them as foundational skills. Unfortunately, this is where a lot of early-career candidates are losing out, with more than 60% of applicants failing to move past the first round of interviews. Why? They’re soft on soft skills.

At the event, I spoke about WayUp’s new offering (which recently came out of beta after its first year of being live). In short, WayUp takes on the first round screening process (so recruiters don’t have to spend hundreds of hours screening unqualified candidates), and candidates get feedback on their soft skills so that they can improve on them, instead of getting rejected for them. It’s led to many clients seeing 2-3X the number of underrepresented minority candidates NOT getting rejected for soft skills reasons. Now that’s huge.

2. Colleges and universities need to adjust how, and what, they’re teaching students 

Universities boast about post-grad job placement rates, yet they haven’t innovated in educating their students on foundational skills that are more likely to get the students hired than whether the student took “Oceanography” (which, to be fair, was one of my favorite classes in college).

With the ratio of career service professionals to students typically around 1:1272, universities should find other opportunities to help students prep more for interviews and the workplace itself (outside of only relying on Career Services), especially when it comes to foundational / soft skills. I was excited by what my fellow panelist, Philip Lippel, shared about MIT — they are purposefully incorporating these skills into its curriculum, both in the classroom and within their extra-curricular activities.

Meanwhile, we also discussed that there is an opportunity for online offerings to serve as a more democratic solution to this common problem. There are great online classes for everything from coding (Codecademy) to Microsoft Word (Lynda), but I’ve yet to hear of a great program for developing foundational skills.

3. Companies need a new approach to recruiting to level the playing field for all candidates — regardless of their backgrounds

Unfortunately, a lack of soft/foundational skills are also costing a lot of underrepresented minorities jobs. At WayUp, our user base is more than 33% Hispanic or Black, and 63% female. Helping all kinds of students and recent grads is something we’re incredibly passionate about, and evening the playing field for all candidates is one of the reasons we founded WayUp in the first place.

With Source, Screen & Coach, we’re helping address this hiring disparity. Before candidates interview, they receive tips they may not have ever learned about the interview process—especially if they didn’t meet the employer in person yet (like at a career fair). Think about it: a candidate who knows an insider or who met someone at a career fair has a HUGE advantage in the interview process over a digital applicant, a) because they received potentially unique information about the company, and b) because the recruiter may prioritize that candidate’s resume over others, who he/she hadn’t met yet.

In addition to the above, we provide the first round of phone screening—during which we never fail candidates for soft skills—because we give each candidate custom feedback (specific to their soft skills) based on his/her/their performance. Personalized coaching helps them improve their soft/foundational skills, so they’re better prepared when they speak with their potential employer for the second round of interviews. Sometimes all you need to do is hear someone tell you just once to elaborate on your “tell me about yourself” or to fix your background noise — and that fixes it forever.

4. Companies need to be careful about how much AI they’re using to assess applicants.

Beyond the concept of having a robot be the first interaction a candidate has with a company, we discussed having a healthy level of skepticism around AI tools that are the sole make-or-break between whether a candidate passes on to the next round. That’s because an algorithm typically reflects the people who create it and the information they feed it. Just look at what happened at Amazon a few months ago. They have some of the best engineers in the world, yet they still couldn’t create an algorithm that didn’t discriminate against women or underrepresented candidates. (Note, however, that there are some excellent assessment tools out there that I believe can serve as great data points for a recruitment process, especially if you treat it as more of a data point than a make or break.)

My main takeaway? The future of work will be here tomorrow, so be prepared today for the new challenges it will bring!

Learn how you can transform your early-career recruiting process. Fill out the form below to get a demo.

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The post The Washington Post Asked Me To Speak About The Future Of Work — Here Are 4 Takeaways appeared first on Job and Internship Advice, Companies to Work for and More | WayUp Blog.