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Addressing Job Search Burnout as a Hiring Manager

Job search burnout is a real and pervasive challenge, not just for many job seekers but also for business leaders trying to find and hire staff. This unpleasant phenomenon occurs when a person becomes mentally drained from the prolonged effort of seeking suitable employment. Everyone experiences burnout differently, but common symptoms include frustration, hopelessness, and irritability, along with a reduction in enthusiasm and self-confidence.

The process of repeatedly looking for jobs, filling out applications, managing the interview process, and eventually learning the ropes at a new company, can be emotionally and sometimes even physically exhausting, especially in fast-paced and highly digitized employment marketplaces.

As a hiring manager or recruiting professional, it’s crucial to recognize this challenge and take it seriously. After all, your ideal candidate might be out there grappling with job search burnout themselves. In fact, a 2023 survey by Global saw more than half of all job seekers self-reporting as “completely burned out,” with Gen Z’s would-be workers feeling particularly dejected.

For many people, the journey from job-seeker to employee will entail repeated rejections, unfounded hopes, and long periods of uncertainty, sometimes exacerbated by financial precarity. Sometimes, you might encounter a good candidate who is having a difficult time and struggling to present themselves effectively due to the stress of long-term job search cycles.

Empathy Is Key

Things can be hard for candidates who have begun a job search or are feeling demoralized after months without a suitable offer. Endeavor to meet your candidates where they’re at and do so without asking inappropriately personal interview questions about the things they’re dealing with in their lives.

You can achieve this by focusing on a candidate’s skill set and previous work history, and not your own subjective perception of their attitude during a job interview or other interaction. If a candidate does open up about a frustrating or overwhelming job search process during the course of an interview, show understanding and try to gently guide the conversation back to work-related topics.

Signs of Burnout

Be aware of possible signs of burnout, but also don’t wrongly project assumptions onto applicants who may just be awkward interviewers. This can be a tricky line to walk at times, so be easy on yourself as well as on your candidates.

Some potential indicators of burnout in an interview setting can include low energy, irritability, or a withdrawn, aloof manner. These are traditionally seen as a lack of interest in the job or as indicative of an attitude problem, so you may need to start checking some of your biases as an interviewer to account for job search burnout.

Candidate-Centric Hiring Policies

Efficiency is necessary at every level of operations, so it’s natural that many recruiting and onboarding policies are designed to make life easier for company recruiters and HR representatives. However, this may not always yield the best long-term results when you consider the value of finding and connecting with the right candidates for key job roles. Consider what a more candidate-centered hiring process might look like.

The key to candidate-focused hiring is to be mindful and respectful of the time and energy required for someone to submit a job application. This means clear communication, whether it’s an automated email or a personal text message. Long periods of silence after giving a job application your best effort contribute to the frustration and hopelessness associated with job search burnout.

Let your applicants know their status and the estimated timeframe at each stage of the hiring process. This includes a courteous and prompt “thanks but no thanks” email for the candidates you don’t move forward with. Automated emails are fine, especially if there is a large volume of applicants, but sparing a moment to offer a sentence or two of personalized feedback can be useful in a candidate’s future job search activities and lessen the sting of rejection.

The Application Process

Also, consider streamlining your application process. Simplify your application process so that you get exactly what you need from each candidate to start the evaluation process. If you need other information later in the process, deal with it as needed on a candidate-by-candidate basis, rather than baking it into a tedious application process.

Job search burnout is a significant challenge for everyone involved in the process, but hiring managers have the power to mitigate some of its effects by reimagining some of their hiring and onboarding policies through the lens of candidates’ emotional health and mental wellbeing. For more great insights into modern hiring, be sure to bookmark our blog.

By |2024-10-30T12:44:15-04:00November 1st, 2024|Research|0 Comments

Measuring and Maximizing New Hire Productivity: 3 Key Concepts

As a hiring professional, you already understand how critical the employee onboarding process is to an organization’s overall success. Sometimes, it is unclear how to measure how well that onboarding process is working to position your new hires for success. This issue has only become more pronounced in a modern world of dynamic job duties and fast-changing technology.

Measuring new hire productivity can be challenging, so it goes without saying that tailoring your onboarding process to improve these measurements can also be a daunting task. With the correct tools in place, however, you can help your new team members hit the ground running and measure their performance effectively to ensure your changes are working. This will rely on your understanding of three critical concepts.

Understanding Time-to-Proficiency (TTP)

Time-to-proficiency, or TTP, is one key term you’ll want to wrap your head around before refining your onboarding and training processes to support new hires better. Setting good goals and performance indicators is crucial, but the more important metric is time-to-proficiency. This is a metric that shows how much time is required for each new hire to get up to speed in their role.

Begin by Defining Your Performance Indicators (PIs)

Before you can actually measure productivity, you need to define exactly what that means for your operation. Performance indicators, or PIs, are specific job metrics that can be monitored and quantified for best results. Effectively implemented PIs will give you raw data showing how much work your employees are doing and how well they’re doing.

Depending on your industry and each individual team member’s duties, performance indicators can look quite different from job to job. For example, if you’re hiring salespeople, you would focus on how many sales each employee makes when evaluating their productivity. A customer support agent, meanwhile, can be judged by how many support tickets they close and how satisfied their customers are.

Once your PIs are well defined, make sure to set a regular schedule for reviewing and updating your PIs. As technology, markets, and workplaces continue to evolve, so must your policies and priorities.

Set Goals and Communicate Clear Expectations

Once your performance indicators are in place, you need to decide what levels you’d like to see employees performing at. When it comes to setting effective goals for new hires, many of today’s leading organizations are leaning into the “SMART” framework. This acronym stands for:

  • Specific – There should be no room for confusion or misinterpretation when you’re telling new employees what you expect of them over their first few weeks or months at the company.
  • Measurable – Performance indicators don’t work well when they are open to subjective interpretation. Performance indicators that can be readily and definitively measured are the key to ensuring your employee evaluations aren’t subject to internal bias and other vectors for human error.
  • Achievable – It’s only natural to expect excellence from your team, but you want reasonable goals that your whole team can share and buy into.
  • Relevant –  Make sure the goals you set are things that will have a direct and positive impact on your workflows.
  • Time-Bound – Ensure your new hires understand where you want to see their productivity, how it will be measured, and how long they have to get there.

The challenge provided by your PI goals should inspire and invigorate your hires rather than make them anxious from day one on the job. When your employees exceed their goals, take time to recognize their achievements and use them to build camaraderie and morale.

Putting It All Together With a Comprehensive Onboarding Program

Once equipped with a good understanding of these three key concepts, you can begin to refine your onboarding process to help your new employees meet these goals. We encourage you to check out Stang Decision Systems’ fully featured SkillBuilder Gap Analysis tool and consider implementing it as part of a robust onboarding protocol.

By |2024-09-30T17:09:43-04:00October 1st, 2024|Research|0 Comments

Office Design to Improve Hiring Outcomes

Often, job seekers are interviewing for multiple companies at the same time during their job search. Not only are they trying to impress you during the interview process, but if you want them to accept your offer, you should also be trying to impress them. To obtain top talent for your open positions, there are several things to consider when trying to impress your current and prospective employees.

One way to impress prospective employees is to create a physical space that people want to see themselves working in. Similar to a candidate dressing well for their interview, business owners should consider the aesthetics of their workplace, and how it impacts current and potential employees. Working in a bland office versus a tastefully designed office within your brand aesthetic could be the deciding factor for a potential candidate.

Why Does It Work?

A pleasing workplace design can benefit you and your employees in many ways. Being in an organized, well-designed space make you feel good while you work, leading to increased productivity and job satisfaction.

  • Increased Productivity: A nonfunctional, cluttered, boring, or outdated workplace can be distracting to employees, leading to decreased productivity. An organized space especially leads to increased productivity, as less time is spent shuffling through mess to find what you need to complete a task.
  • Happier Employees: Morale can be boosted simply by improving the design of your workplace to make it a more desirable place to be. This includes a color scheme and décor. Certain colors tend to have different effects on people, so choose colors that make employees feel the way you want them to.
  • Improved Retention Rates: Happier employees who enjoy spending time in the place they work at are more likely to stay. By improving your office design to make it a place employees enjoy being, they’re less likely to want to leave.
  • Customer Impression: The focus here is on your employees but making improvements to your office’s design doesn’t stop there. A clean and inviting office space also gives a good impression to customers visiting your business.

How to Improve Your Office’s Design

You know the importance of a well thought out office design, so what elements can you incorporate to make it happen? There are many components your business can consider when trying to spruce up your space to impress potential and current employees.

  • Open concept office designs and shared workspaces continue to be popular, and work well when it is time to collaborate. Within these spaces, however, it is important for there to be places where employees can work independently and focus on their individual tasks without distraction when they choose to. When it is possible, designating permanent personal workspaces and allowing employees to add photos and other personal décor can also lead to increased job satisfaction.
  • Create spaces to embrace mindfulness and wellbeing. Studies have shown that overall wellbeing of employees increases when workspaces include natural features. Consider adding greenery throughout the workplace, spaces designed specifically for relaxation, and outdoor spaces. If outdoor space isn’t an option, find ways to feature natural light whenever possible.
  • More organization, less clutter. In addition to an organized space being a more productive space, it also leads to a cleaner space. Clutter can impact anxiety levels and ability to focus, which leads to unhappy and less productive employees.

Contact Stang Decision Systems

Before you can impress potential hires with your office design, you need to get the top talent for your business. Contact Stang Decision Systems to make smarter hiring choices.

By |2022-08-22T14:03:43-04:00September 2nd, 2022|Research|0 Comments

Job Creation and Hiring Continues to Increase Into the Fall of 2021

As we continue to navigate how the coronavirus pandemic has affected the economy, working status, and personal lives, members of our modern society are seeing different options for how to function in the world. With more people working and attending classes either partially or fully remote, hiring and retention in the workplace are looking more and more different. 

In the early phases of the pandemic, we saw unemployment rise to staggering levels that have essentially not been witnessed by the majority of our society ever before. However, as we push on and adapt to this ever-changing social and professional environment, the development of new jobs and hiring numbers are soaring. In the last few months, over a million jobs have been added — with 850,000 of those being developed by America’s employers in June alone, and these numbers are still growing.

Springing Back From Peak Unemployment

The job market itself is looking quite different than it has before as well. The market is saturated with well-qualified individuals who are looking for work either in their fields or taking this time to transition into new fields. In the early phases of the pandemic, there were not nearly enough open positions to fill with these professionals. As employers are creating new job openings each month in 2021, folks are beginning to find their place in the professional world again.

Why Are More Jobs Becoming Available?

Although the Delta variant has forced many communities, especially those that are highly traveled and have strong tourism industries, to reevaluate their restrictions, many places across the country are starting to see a powerful rebound back from the pandemic’s economic recession. Capacity restrictions in many indoor settings have been restored to nearly pre-pandemic levels, allowing for more hiring within restaurants, retail, sporting events, and concerts. With restrictions in many places loosening, travel by airplane each day is sitting at around 80% of its pre-pandemic traffic levels. 

Many companies found the silver lining in the pandemic and took the opportunity with lower business to renovate and remodel. This has been a benefit to construction workers and other infrastructure assessment companies, and with newly refurbished spaces, productivity has increased alongside the ability to bring on more individuals to work for the company. This is a huge benefit to many of the companies that were initially threatened by restrictions associated with the pandemic. 

The Strength of Our Recovery

Our transition into a stronger economy is clear in the recovery from our recent pandemic-associated recession. As President Joe Biden is quoted, “The strength of our recovery is helping us flip the script… instead of workers competing with each other for jobs that are scarce, employers are competing with each other to attract workers.” In reality, this is how a capitalist corporate structure should indeed operate, and in its ideal operation, employers should have the need and ability to hire up the entire pool of those applying to work. This is a sign of a strong industrial system and booming economy. Numbers for this fall are also showing favor for hourly rates to rise faster than the pre-pandemic annual pace. New hires are gaining full-time work, and the number of those who have to settle for part-time work has reduced as well. 

Overall, the current administration and operation of corporations seem to be bringing the economy to a satisfactory and safe level from the pandemic and associated recession. We have positive growth in the future as we continue to adapt to working and living in a society recovering from and still in many ways dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.

By |2021-10-01T10:13:54-04:00October 1st, 2021|News, Research|0 Comments

Four Turnover Triggers That Could Be Hurting Your Bottom Line

It’s normal to have employees leave your business on occasion. People often need to leave due to relocation, familial responsibilities, and other life events that may be completely unrelated to your business. However, if your employee turnover rate (calculated as the percentage of employees who leave in a given time frame) has begun to skyrocket, you likely have a problem.

The financial cost of a high turnover rate can be substantial, with some estimates exceeding $4,100 per hourly employee or as many as 9 months of a salaried employee’s pay. Worse, you’ll need to spend additional time focused on hiring and your employees often wind up shouldering the additional responsibilities and stress of fewer employees. To combat high turnover, however, you’ll need to find out why so many of your employees are leaving.

Why Do Employees Leave?

A high turnover rate can be indicative of a number of issues within your organization. Though these issues can – and do – vary by industry, there are multiple common factors most businesses with high turnover rates share. We’ve compiled a list of the top major causes of employee loss and what you can do to remedy them:

  1. Employees feel burned out. A recent survey by Asana found 82% of employees felt overworked and burned out. Even if these employees don’t choose to leave your organization, overwork can lead to increased absenteeism and declining productivity. To fix it, pinpoint the cause of overwork, whether it’s understaffing, poor training, or volume; then, determine if you need to increase hiring efforts or simply offer help to struggling employees.
  2. Employees feel unengaged or unchallenged. Sometimes, employees experience the opposite effect – a lack of challenging work or even a disconnect with the purpose behind their work. If your employees don’t feel their work has meaning for your organization or feel their skill set is underused, they may seek employment somewhere that engages and appreciates them more. Check-in with employees frequently to assess their level of engagement with their current duties and recognize achievements as they occur.
  3. Negative workplace culture. While culture can be a difficult aspect to nail down, it’s at its most apparent when it’s driving your employees away. If your culture doesn’t fit your employees, morale will dip, current talent will leave, and new hires won’t last. Actively address signs that your workplace culture is veering toward the negative, re-evaluate the way you and other managers engage with staff, and endeavor to truly listen to each and every employee and their concerns.
  4. Hiring ill-fitting employees. Poorly matched employees can come in many forms – sometimes they just don’t mesh with your existing culture. Sometimes, employees don’t have the skills, drive, or personality fit necessary to be successful on the job. If your employee selection process doesn’t include fully validated measurement tools customized for each job, you are missing an opportunity to maximize employee fit for each role.

Turnover rates don’t have to damage your bottom line. Making changes to the way you handle your current employees as well as search for and screen for qualified hires can help you find and retain employees who will do their best work for your business. On many occasions we have seen motivated clients reduce turnover by 75% or more in a matter of months. It’s not easy, but it’s well worth the effort.

Resources:
https://www.shrm.org/about-shrm/press-room/press-releases/pages/human-capital-benchmarking-report.aspx
https://www.dailypay.com/business-resources/employee-retention-rate/
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/how-to-guides/pages/determineturnoverrate.aspx
https://smallbiztrends.com/2019/08/small-business-burnout.html

By |2020-07-13T11:04:28-04:00July 13th, 2020|Careers, Research|0 Comments

Five Unique Ways to Widen Your Candidate Pool

Finding qualified candidates can be a challenge, especially when it seems like the same types of people are throwing their hat in the ring. The following tips can help you approach the hiring process from a new direction, realize new opportunities to widen your candidate pool, and ultimately streamline your hiring process.

A more diverse candidate pool means more options, and that means higher chances of finding an experienced and dedicated long-term employee.

Attract more candidates to your open positions while increasing the chances of filling those positions with the most qualified applicants by leveraging these tips:

Highlight Your Company Culture

One of the most important ways an organization can widen their candidate pool is to simply be transparent. Job seekers in today’s business world are looking for much more than just competitive compensation and benefits packages. They want to be part of a company that resonates with them on a personal level. Company culture plays a vital role in the hiring process.

According to a Deloitte study, 94% of executives and 88% of employees believe strongly that a distinct company culture is vital to a business’s success.

Think of the aspects of your company culture, your workplace, and your team that make your brand unique, then leverage these as selling points when you post job listings and interview potential candidates.

Expand Your Hiring Criteria

Hiring can be difficult, and that’s why many companies are simply turning to recruiting services to handle it for them. In fact, about 40% of U.S. companies have turned to recruitment process outsourcers to find new candidates.

Consider the positions you’re trying to fill and think carefully about whether your posted criteria are too stringent. By lowering your hiring requirements a bit, you could be opening up your potential candidate pool by a wide margin.

Launch a Social Media Recruitment Campaign

The business world has a firm foothold in social media. Regardless of legalities, about 70% of employers use social media to screen potential employees.

Virtually everyone has some kind of online profile, so why not try to forge some meaningful connections with potential applicants?

Work with your marketing team or with your outsourced hiring specialists to come up with an effective social media strategy that targets people who resonate strongly with your company’s mission and values.

Get Creative With Job Postings

The average corporate job posting will attract about 250 applicants, but the company will likely only call a handful of those applicants for an interview.

Review the job postings you currently have open and try to read them from a job seeker’s perspective.

Does it read as a standard job posting, or does it offer potential candidates something unique? What type of language does it use? Are compensation and benefits details thorough and enticing?

Experimenting with new forms of job postings can have excellent results.

Work With a Talent Analytics Firm

After widening the pool, you need a process for finding the best applicant among a sea similar candidates. Investing in a new hire is both time consuming and expensive, so doing it right the first time can boost your efficiency and your bottom line. One way to make your hiring processes better is by using a talent analytics firm.

Find candidates who are suited to the position, fit in with company culture, and are in it for the long haul.

These tips can help your company rethink your hiring strategy and not only attract more candidates, but also increase the number of applications you receive from candidates who align with your company’s values, mission, and culture.

Sources:
https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/About-Deloitte/gx-core-beliefs-and-culture.pdf
https://hbr.org/2019/05/recruiting#your-approach-to-hiring-is-all-wrong
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/323189
https://www.inc.com/peter-economy/19-interesting-hiring-statistics-you-should-know.html

By |2021-10-27T22:28:54-04:00December 16th, 2019|Research, Updates|0 Comments

Five Recruiting Metrics You Should Know About

Recruitment metrics – the data behind your hiring lessons – outline which hiring methods are working for you and which aren’t.

Without assessing the value of your recruitment tactics as well as the performance of your new hire, you could be destined to repeat past mistakes – and that’s a price you pay from your bottom line.

The actual costs of hiring an employee vary depending on the industry and the employee level, but, on average, companies pay about $2,000 per new hire. And that’s just the onboarding process–interviewing and hiring costs add even more.

The point here is simple: the wrong hire can cost your business a lot of time and cash.

Which Recruitment Metrics Should Earn Your Attention?

Countless recruitment metrics are available to recruiters. You could get dizzy just trying to narrow them down from a Google search. However, leveraging these metrics can help ensure you make the best decision during the hiring process so that you don’t have to go through the process again. We’ve gathered a list of the most important metrics to consider and some information on how to measure each.

1. Quality of Your Hires

If you want to know the future, look to the past. Your business has a treasure trove of past data when it comes to hiring – your current and previous employees.

With a Quality of Hires metric, you’re not aiming at determining the general ability of your hire to do their job; instead, you’ll learn how effective your recruiting practices are at finding candidates who accept your job offer and are loyal to your company.

There are many ways to calculate Quality of Hire data. As an example, when using HireScore, we will send an email survey to the hiring manager or appropriate supervisor one year after an employee was hired. In about two minutes, we will collect ratings on the person’s overall performance, technical performance, team orientation and safety.

We summarize our survey with a simple question asking whether you would hire the person again. If yes, then we code the person as a successful hire. If no, then something went wrong and we use the data to learn from past mistakes.

2. Source of Your Hires

Most companies recruit in multiple arenas and use a number of search methods to find candidates. With today’s recruitment sources running the gamut from physical job boards and newspapers to social media and current employee referrals, it is more important than ever to know which sources are providing you with quality hires who are loyal to your company.

Whether tracking in HireScore or simply using a spreadsheet, you should be recording the sources of each hire as well as which candidates were rejected or shortlisted.

Analysis of each will tell you which resources are delivering and which are underperforming. This information can help you make better decisions regarding where to invest your time and money the next time you’re recruiting.

3. Time to Fill the Position

Time to fill is, simply, the amount of time elapsed between the listing of the position and the date of hire. While this metric is fairly straightforward, it can reveal a great deal about the efficacy of your recruitment resources as well as your productivity and efficiency.

Which sources tend to quickly produce good candidates? Which factors produce a bottleneck effect on your process? Time to fill can help you answer these questions and more.

4. Turnover

For some positions, the key metric to determine the success of your selection process is simply whether new hires stay in the job for a given period of time. If you are hiring summer help at an amusement park, you want to know if the person is going to last the full summer.

In some cases, you might even prefer to hire a person who may not perform the job as well but who is more likely to stay in the job.

To calculate turnover, take the percentage of employees who leave (for any reason) in a specified period of time and divide it by the total number of employees that you had in that role during the same period of time.

While turnover is a valuable metric, it is important to understand the context as well. If you lose 5% of your employees, but they are the bottom 5%, then turnover is actually a good thing.

In jobs with a high burnout rate, such as pro football coaching, some turnover is inevitable and is not necessarily a sign of failure. If, on the other hand, you are hiring sandwich makers at a fast food franchise and less than half of them stay for a month, then turnover should be your primary focus.

5. Cost Per Hire

While hiring better tends to have an extreme ROI, often in the hundreds or even thousands of percent, it is still useful to track up front investments. Determining which recruitment tactics are successful and which aren’t from a cost perspective is a key performance indicator.

At a minimum, any assessment or interview should have a significant positive ROI or it’s not worth doing. Tracking cost per hire allows you to determine where your recruiting budget is best spent and justifies your hiring related investments over time.

Calculate cost per hire by adding your total external and internal costs – including advertising, SaaS subscription fees, and cost to sustain recruitment staff – then divide by the number of hires the process produced.

Hire Better With These Metrics

While these five recruitment metrics are certainly not the only metrics you should be tracking to assess your performance, they are among the most important. Whether you’re most recent hiring decisions have proven successful, mediocre, or ill-fated, deeper insight into the many factors that led to each hire should be a key component in your next recruitment endeavor.

Sources:
https://www.jobsoid.com/recruitment-metrics/
https://www.analyticsinhr.com/blog/recruiting-metrics/
https://www.jibe.com/ddr/recruitment-metrics-formulas/

By |2019-12-02T10:31:10-05:00December 9th, 2019|Research, Updates|1 Comment

Why You Should Ignore the Resume

The digital age has disrupted virtually every industry. HR and hiring has been similarly vulnerable – the industry has, in recent years, experienced a seismic shift.

Research shows that resumes, traditionally the first-line approach to “getting your foot in the door,” are no longer the most popular form of currency in the hiring process.

In their place are a combination of online application and assessment processes that provide up to four times the information, and a better experience for both the applicant and the hiring team.

Before you lament the demise of the resume, consider these reasons why resumes are becoming obsolete in the first place.

1. They Value Experience, Not Skills

By virtue of their design, resumes focus on a person’s work experience, not necessarily their skill set. Is this such a bad thing? In today’s talent economy, yes. A candidate is, and should be, offered employment based on their ability to fulfill a job description and perform essential job duties.

Focusing on the potential results that a person can generate requires a full understanding of their capabilities, which doesn’t necessarily translate on a resume.

2. They’re Static Documents

In a technology-driven age, workers must continually acquire new skills to stay current and provide value to employers. Since technology – and how we use it – is always changing, job seekers across industries must frequently update their resumes to reflect new skills in new formats.

Resumes become outdated quickly and become too cumbersome to continually update.

3. Resumes Are Too Much Work

A close friend recently took a day off of work to create a new resume for her dream job. While she may be more of a perfectionist than most, consider the time people spend (waste!) making a document perfectly reflect an image that may or may not be accurate.

New hires who have gone through the HireScore (no resume required) process often say, “I was happily employed elsewhere and I wouldn’t have applied for this job if I was required to make a resume.” In essence, resumes are asking for too much, too soon in the hiring relationship.

4. Resume Sorters Miss Out on Valuable Talent

The act of requiring a resume also screens out a portion of the workforce that could provide talent to your organization. For example, many people have valuable work skills, but they lack the knowledge of how to write a resume, let alone optimize it for hiring managers.

This approach naturally caters to people who have a talent for writing resumes, not necessarily to those people who have the necessary skills to efficiently execute their work duties.

5. Resumes Invite Unintentional Bias

Lastly, the resume has the unintended consequence of inviting bias into the workplace. Research from Harvard Business School showed that minorities who “whitened” their names got more callbacks and interviews, despite no changes in skill sets or experience. The legal consequences to these research findings have yet to play out but resume defenders are unlikely to be happy with the final outcome.

Resumes may be on their way out, but what’s a job candidate or hiring manager to do in the meantime? Even LinkedIn sorts applicants by their job experience.

The bottom line is that you need to use tools that are customized exactly to your jobs and diligently collect assessment data you need to best predict future job performance. Combined with broad recruiting and intelligent algorithms, there is no better way to rank a world of potential candidates.

Most importantly, employers would do well to leverage technology and tools to find the right candidate for the job – not the candidate capable of producing the best resume.

By |2019-12-02T10:34:31-05:00December 2nd, 2019|Careers, Research|0 Comments

Are your employees in FLOW… or are they ready to FLY THE COOP?

FLOW. Another stressful HR trend to worry about? Not really. If reading this blog title caused you anxiety, then you could increase your skill (knowledge) about flow just enough to meet the level of challenge to apply what you know to your workplace. A little exercise within a blog.

If you are familiar with flow, skip to the conclusion or swipe/click away this blog. But if you haven’t heard or read about flow, or haven’t watched the TED talk by the guy who wrote the original book, you can learn about the concept fairly easily. It’s the challenge of applying what we learn that’s usually the trick…or the treat.

People in flow are said to be optimally creative, productive, and “time flies” when they’re having fun. They feel rewarded, energized, and yes, sometimes a bit drained from all of that focus…but flow, caused by the ideal intersection of the relevant skills to meet the appropriate level of challenge, causes growth, and increases the person’s desire to continue to grow. It’s a nice cycle.

How does this apply to your workplace? We’d be curious to hear your thoughts in comments on this blog. At Stang Decision Systems, when we’re assessing for skill gaps for our clients, we uncover areas where people are under-skilled for their jobs to help the company plan for efficient training and development. If we consider this through the lens of the flow diagram, we see that these employees are likely experiencing anxiety and are not in their optimal flow zone, where creativity and productivity are at their highest. Would the training investment, if appropriately scaled, pay off more than you imagine?

We hear more and more about how younger generations are asking for training and mentoring in the workplace, often ranking that higher than other benefits companies are investing in for their workers. Could it be that these employees know what it feels like to have the appropriate skill level/support to meet the appropriate levels of challenge in their daily activities, and they are eager to continue to grow? When thinking about retention, how do we feel about the fact that many employees leave their jobs for new workplaces where they receive more training, and, we might suggest, they feel more “in flow?”

In future posts, we’ll discuss how flow affects workplaces, including the research on the flow of successful events, teams, and organizations as a whole. We’ll also address questions left in the comments section and share your successful applications of flow in the workplace.

By |2018-03-07T16:37:20-05:00November 27th, 2017|Research|0 Comments

Job Descriptions – how do they fit in the changing talent picture?

“Bill D. is retiring, finally. He kept talking about it but we never thought he’d make the decision. Such a great department manager, he will be missed! Oh…right…I guess we need to look for a replacement! Can you ask Sally in HR to give me a copy of the job description?”

This may be simplified, and yes, widget company leader should have had a succession plan in place. That’s for another blog post. However, this scene plays out in companies all over the country, and all over the world, on a daily basis. Whether it’s a retirement, unfortunate illness, poor performance, or resignation (gasp!) for another job…we all know that moment where we have to think about filling a vacancy. If it’s been held by the incumbent for any length of time, we probably haven’t updated the job description. If we have annual reviews, they may be tied to the job description, but that is not a given.

How does the job description translate to the job posting? The search criteria? If handled properly, a search will include assessing for skills, knowledge, and experience as well as personality, behaviors and aptitude. Simply listing a set of “required” and “minimum” qualifications does not ensure a well-matched applicant pool. What if there were science behind the job description? Science that helped your company not only recruit for a great fit, but measure performance and offer training gap analysis on a regular basis?

There is hard evidence based on long-standing research on which facets of personality and behavior traits best fit certain types of jobs. When you customize for work environment and industry, as well as variances in each job’s responsibilities and duties, you make a big difference in being able to be more specific up front (in recruiting and onboarding) and being better able to communicate and coach more clearly all along the way.

Hmmm… coaching, communication, training – have you heard those words thrown around lately regarding “what matters to the next generations of employees”? Your employees are tired of standard issue tools and performance evaluations of times past. They want someone to see them. To really notice them as individuals. To want them for the job for who they really are, and to help them develop their strengths and overcome their challenges to make a difference in their job and their career.

Still want to photocopy the old job description, send it to HR, and then hand it to the new hire? Be prepared to keep it handy, you might have a vacancy again fairly soon!

To try a new idea, which is actually even simpler, work with a firm that has done the research and can lead you through to customized job searches and descriptions. We’d be happy to talk with you in a confidential consultation, free of charge. We enjoy seeing the relief in using a more accurate process lead to happy companies and employees!

By |2018-03-07T16:37:20-05:00June 6th, 2017|Careers, News, Research|0 Comments
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